RR

The film is made of forty-three shots, and in each one a train goes by. The camera never moves. Every shot begins as the train enters the frame and ends as it leaves; the length of the train sets the length of the shot. There are landscapes from all over America: desert, forest, industrial zone, a town crossing. No speech, no narrator. Only the sound of the rails, the engines, and now and then a horn from far off. James Benning travelled for two and a half years to gather these shots and filmed two hundred and sixteen trains; forty-three made it into the film. On the surface it is a film about trains, but its subject is America itself: the railways built this country and then became the artery of a consumption economy. In one sequence Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex is heard while a very long coal train passes through the frame. Benning said this would be his last work on 16mm.