RR

RR (a.k.a. Railroad) is a 2007 film by American filmmaker James Benning. Shot in 16 mm film, as most of Benning's films are, RR is another in Benning's series of American experimental landscape films; this one focusing on trains and their surrounding environs. In Railroad, Benning explores themes of American consumerism and overconsumption in what Benning calls a "collaboration" with the trains themselves. The film is an exercise in minimalist restraint. Basically it is a series of static shots of trains. There is an empty frame, the train enters, then it passes and leaves. The obsessive gaze of Benning's fixed static frame causes the viewer to wait and watch, obsessing like train fanatic Benning does, on the imagery of the locomotive and the exploration of the random colors of its cars, the machinery and the various American landscapes the trains are surrounded by.