Documentary
Venue:
Bradford International Film Festival
Watched:
5th April 2014
Director:
James Benning
The final film of Bradford International Film Festival’s Uncharted States of America: James Benning Tribute sees the world theatrical premiere of the director’s latest documentary BNSF, previously only shown in installation form. The film consists of one single shot, Benning’s fixed camera capturing three hours and fifteen minutes worth of activity on a stretch of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway. The frame is ostensibly empty, only occasionally punctuated by the appearance of freight trains that snake their way through. The trains with their sheer length, the longest having close to two hundred trailers each containing at least one shipping container, arriving frequently in what is an otherwise empty landscape exemplify our over consumption of material goods. But, this being a Benning film, the film’s concept is that of duration. The way we perceive time. The most fascinating aspect of the film is the way in which we pay attention to time differently within varying contexts. If you think about the way we, the audience, sit there in a darkened cinema room watching an unchanging landscape, maybe waiting eagerly for the next freight train to make an appearance, our perception of time does change, we become less aware of its duration, the length of time we have been sat there becoming increasingly harder to fathom. Benning is right when he says we would not have the discipline to do this in reality, away from the cinema screen. This is what makes BNSF a landmark of digital cinema, it affords us the time and the space to properly observe and contemplate.
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