little boy

Listening to the past to warn about the future… from a little boy’s point of view.

“Maybe I’m still a little boy”, replied the then 67-year-old James Benning to a Parisian viewer who asked him what was behind the railway obsession we see in RR, his film comprising dozens of shots of trains crossing North American landscapes. At 84 years old, he is still that little boy even if this new film shows neither wagon nor locomotive. Most of the ten affordable off-the-shelf models making up the film are pieces of scenery used to embellish model train circuits. In the way it echoes childhood hobbies, little boy is the companion of American Dreams (lost and found) (1984), which had used a two-sided structure involving baseball card memorabilia. Here we first see a piece of scenery being built, then a still image of the finished object – as always, the structure comes before the image. On the front, hands busy with their meticulous task are working to music; on the reverse, a historical speech accompanies the presentation of the scale model. Everything is organised chronologically, evoking not only the apocryphal autobiographical work the author has engaged in, but also the political questions that have always galvanised him. As all these pieces of scenery reveal the chambers and antechambers that produce them. By making the production conditions visible, Benning plays on the idea of war as both commerce and hobby. In the two models that encompass this series, we are hardly surprised to recognise another little boy, dumped shortly after the filmmaker’s birth with the consequences we know.

Antoine Thirion