From Bakersfield to Mojave (James Benning, 2021)

Between here and there is better than either here or there! (Pavement, "Conduit for Sale!")

Benning's latest feature film may not exactly form a trilogy with his two earlier films, RR (2007) and BNSF (2013), but in a lot of ways it does seem like a very precise amalgamation of those two previous works. RR depicted dozens of trains slicing through the American landscape, often moving so quickly as to reconfigure our basic relationship to filmic space. BNSF, meanwhile, is a three-hour film that is nearly static, showing sequential trains on a single length of track. A train crosses the frame once every fifteen minutes or so, as minor events (dust, wind, cloud movement) organize the wait time.

From Bakersfield to Mojave consists of nine individual shots, taken with an unmoving camera and meticulously framed. Each shot is around ten minutes long, and a length of railroad track appears in some place in the image. Sometimes it bisects the landscape; other times it hugs the horizon line and is barely visible. But each of the nine shots implies potential movement that we are prompted to wait for. We know that a train is coming, in much the same way that we can watch a narrative film and anticipate certain actions based on our previous experience and cognitive faculties. From Bakersfield is a film about waiting, and an eventual arrival.

Also, unlike the two previous train films, From Bakersfield is fundamentally an exercise in imagemaking, the very process of framing and organizing a motion event. Benning has very little control over his "actors," aside from learning their schedules so he is ready for their appearance. But when he knows that a train will be coming through a particular stretch of land, he can then employ the edges of the frame, his distance from and perspective on the train, to turn this moving-through-the-world into a specific kind of action, one that signifies. In the opening and closing shots, for example, Benning stations his camera at 45º to the track, recreating the Lumiere brother's Train Arriving at the Station in La Ciotat. By both observing and composing, Benning reenacts cinema's Primal Scene.

Likewise, the other shots are incredibly complex and laden with activity. That first shot, showing a railroad crossing in Bakersfield, is traversed by cars, pedestrians, bikers, and a highway in the far background. The longer we stay with this shot, waiting for "our" train, the more Benning reveals, making the activity of the train almost superfluous. Or in the scene above, which shows a long train wending its way through the famous Tehachapi Loop (also featured in RR), Benning finds a highly rigorous way to organize this space, suggesting that the landscape itself has its own complex figure / ground relationships even apart from the Loop. That loop, that forces trains to cross over themselves, practically becomes a metaphor for cinematic time, since the background of the shot contains "the past" of the foreground, with our earlier perceptions fading into the distance.

The composition of the Tehachapi shot vaguely resembles certain works by Cézanne, particularly his paintings of Mt. Saint Victoire. Like Cézanne, Benning is interested in ambiguous spatial relationships, the actual flatness of the image versus our understanding of the depth it means to represent. But like all of Benning's work, From Bakersfield to Mojave has things on its mind beyond pure formalism. By isolating a particular segment of railway, Benning asks us to consider this route and the purposes it serves. It's a conduit for commerce, a primary artery for the movement of goods through California.

Much like Benning's 1999 film El Valley Centro, From Bakersfield to Mojave demands that the viewer spend a significant amount of time in a part of the state that is sometimes misperceived as a non-place, a line between more significant points, such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. But this attitude not only gives short shrift to the many people who live and work along this path. Our inculcated tendency to simply ignore these pathways of business and industry is a fundamental component of our inability to challenge neoliberal or "late" capitalism. You cannot critique what you refuse to see.