little boy

Veteran avant-garde director James Benning takes a tour through half a century of US history, as experienced through one man’s eyes, ears and hands. Methodically painting and piecing together various model items – a silo, a power plant, a train station and more – a pair of hands grows progressively older, as songs from the likes of Pete Seeger, Nat King Cole, Cat Power, Sinéad O’Connor and Tracy Chapman fill the soundtrack. As the models are completed, the music makes way for impassioned speeches marking various potential turning points in American history, from President Dwight D. Eisenhower warning about the emergence of the military-industrial complex to pre-teen environmental activist Severn Cullis-Suzuki entreating world leaders to stave off the global climate crisis: calls for change that, for the most part, have gone unheeded. James Benning’s American Dreams (MIFF 1984) famously depicted mid-century US history and politics as a collage of images, text and era-appropriate pop songs. Four decades on, the experimental filmmaker offers a belated companion piece to that film, this time charting American history from the 1960s to 2016 via a prehistoric introduction. The effect is a sort of Benning bildungsroman – or, in his own words, “a film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy’s point of view”. “A rarity in the oeuvre of the master of contemplative documentary filmmaking … Holds the meat on the bone that Benning seemingly has to pick with his country and especially the people who run it.” – International Cinephile Society