RR by James Benning, which played on Wednesday night at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, on one hand is simply a movie that takes 43 static shots of trains and puts them together into a 111 minute movie. On the other hand, it’s a study of landscape and consumption – our “need” to have so many things shipped across the continent. Though mostly, it’s about trains.

I had never been to the Forum before and I was (prejudicially) expecting an artsy, stuffy crowd. I was a little wrong here, though maybe not at first. The crowd numbered roughly 100 and seemed to have a mix of normals (probably here for the trains), stuffy artsy types and filmmakers. There was also one fairly obnoxious guy wearing a safety vest. He asked if this was where the 8 o’clock showing of a train movie was. I figured he was ironically asking. He made another comment about hobby shops.

After a very short introduction by a nice filmfan fellow, RR started. Like any good movie, the credits were short. A simply black screen with the letters: RR and then we began. A shot set up on a bit of grass buffering a street from the tracks. A train heads towards us and we watch, with the camera untouched, unmoving, as the train passes. Before the sound fades, we hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

This is our movie. Most shots start before you can see the train. Most end after the train leaves the frame, but before the natural sound is allowed to return. Each episode is separated by a silent black screen lasting three or four seconds.

Our second shot is from Bagdad, California, a place that I’ve been to several times. The train now moves away from us. The third very slowly crosses a bridge in Tennessee. A fish pops its head out of the water towards the end of the train. The forth is at a crossing in Minnesota. A car comes into frame.

By the fifth episode, six or seven people had left.

Even for a railfan, this isn’t a very easy movie to watch. Most railfan movies have a few shots of the same train, and while the edits aren’t really what you’d call quick, they cover it from several angles. Narration often explains where the train in, the percent of the grade, what kind of engine is pulling the load and often what contents make up the consist. Each scene fades to the next and sometimes has goofy swipes and silly transitions. Also, too often really amazingly bad synthesizer music complete with fake drums and guitar provide the always unwanted soundtrack.

While that doesn’t make good art, it makes up your typical railfan documentary. RR is in many ways the opposite of that. Benning’s movie simply watches the trains go by, just like you did when you were a kid, just like I do now. I have no idea what the train is pulling or which engine is being used and thankfully that crappy synth music isn’t stuck in my head.

By the time the 10th episode, a shot of a cement coal tower in West Virginia, rolled around 15 people had left.

What caught my eye was just how varied the shots of trains could be. Each shot began before you could even hear the diesel engines. In some, you couldn’t even see the tracks. The shots were always beautifully composed. Benning, like any good photographer, has an eye for such things. The camera angles were not “weird,” but interesting. The trains themselves varied widely from shot to shot, but his choice of distance from the tracks, angles and seasons (he shot year-round) made each episode very different from the last.

His use of added sound was also interesting. I mentioned the Mormon choir, but he also added a baseball game (Nolan Ryan’s no hitter vs. Toronto in 1991), a Huey helicopter from Vietnam, Gregory Peck reading from Revelations, Karen Carpenter singing a very sad Coke commercial and Eisenhower’s farewell address. All of them are added in post-production, but done so in a way that makes them feel natural, like the trainspotter is somehow listening to them on the radio in his truck. For the most part, it worked.

The Tehachapi Loop shot where the train is moving away from you into a tunnel only to appear crossing over itself was beautiful. I saw a still image of this scene before watching the movie and thought that he could have found a much better angle to shoot from. But I stand very corrected. This shot was brilliant. By the time it ended a few more people had left.

Filming and watching RR can be neatly summed up into one shot. It is a desert scene in Amboy, California (again, a place I’ve visited several times). The shot starts with three empty tracks. Before long, a train carrying cars speeds past and away from us. We watch as it passes. Just as the rear of the train enters the shot, we see a black and orange BNSF engine appear and speed towards us on the tracks farthest from the camera. It is a tanker train carrying oil. This seems beautifully choreographed and timed perfectly. But, of course, it’s not. It’s just luck. This is a very rare shot. Benning explains:

The one that’s in the film where they actually passed is in Amboy, California. That was a very hot day, and I didn’t want to sit and wait for a train, so I drove down the line until I met a train, and then I drove like 90 miles an hour back down Route 66 to Amboy, and I set up. But the train I was waiting for that I was racing to catch got caught by a red light. All of a sudden a train started coming from another side. So I thought, okay, maybe I should start shooting that train, or should I wait for the first one, and then I got real anxious not knowing what to do so I just turned the camera on. And that train turned out to be the one hauling automobiles with these Auto-Max cars that are made especially for SUVs—the huge white cars—and it went flying by, and just as it’s ending, the other one showed up.

The perfect alignment of two trains, one carrying cars away from us, the other carrying oil towards us is not only fun to watch, but say something about our culture – shipping cars east and oil west. This shot was intruded upon by a van carrying a railroad worker. The van drives towards and then past us. A minute later, unseen, a worker gets out and passes between the train and the camera. For a second we (and probably Benning) figured that this amazing shot would be ruined by this guy telling us to get out of there, we’re trespassing. But he just walks on buy and waits for the train to leave so he can cross the tracks.

That, in a neat little nutshell is our film. Trains coming and going carrying things that we really don’t need across a gorgeous landscape. Like the railroad employee, we have to stop and wait for these trains to go by. While we’re waiting there’s not much else to do but watch.

By the end of this shot, 22 people had left the theater. That’s nearly a quarter.

A movie such as RR, just a succession of 43 shots of trains, must end somehow. Our last shot is in Palm Springs. Large white wind turbines share the background with a brown desert mountain. The foreground is dotted with old, thrown away tires. A train enters slowly from the right and grinds even slower through the frame until it comes to a complete halt. The camera holds us there for another very long minute, leaving us to wait for something, even the sound of the train’s brakes releasing, that never comes.

The film ends with a black screen and the initials JB. That is all.

There was a discussion after the movie moderated by the same gentleman that introduced it. The folks who stayed were mostly filmmakers. A railfan or two stayed and then obnoxious guy in the safety vest was there too. He wasn’t being ironic as I had previously thought, he was just a little crazy. Nice guy though. He knew a lot about trains and railfanning. I was very pleasantly surprised.

The discussion bordered on “too artsy” for me, but thankfully stayed enough in the practical area. I even added a few comments (mostly about the shooting and locations and about the added sounds – I had done my research before watching). Of course, a few of the comments offered some lofty interpretations that seemed to want to see more than was there – and when those comments became the norm, we left with a great impression of the film and a pretty good impression of the discussion before it headed too far south.

For me, the most important thing about this movie, or about any work of art, is how it makes you feel. The best art makes you want to create art yourself. James Benning’s RR makes me want to hop on my Vespa with a good camera and film trains. There are some things I’d do differently, of course. I’m no James Benning. But the experience would be amazing.

When art makes you want to experience what is on the screen or canvas, etc., that is good art (maybe the only art). RR isn’t something to just look at. It isn’t even something to look at think about. It’s a catalyst. If only I had a year of freedom and a camera! I already have the love of train and a mental list of locations where I’d shoot.

Benning does not release his movies on DVD. RR will never be able to be seen outside of a theater. If I have one critique, it is that. Not that this should be mass distributed all over the globe or even to railfans reading Trains Magazine. But it should be seen. I count myself as extremely fortunate to have seen it. And I wish you could too.

Maybe, in a few years, that’s where I’ll come in.

For more reading on this, there’s a great interview with him here. Also, a location list, written by Benning, is here. That is where I got the pictures for this post.

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2. Thoughts on doing a zine.
3. My closing thoughts on the “retirement” issue
4. Thoughts on blogging and Ratha-yatras and parents…
5. Watching The West – I told her to go to hell.