James Benning has been making experimental films since the 1970s, including projections and computer installations. He is also a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, and there’s something of his pedagogical side that is imbued in this film. In little boy we see both the painting that precedes the meticulous construction of a scale model of several buildings and its final form. The painting is done to the sound of music, the final presentation to the sound of historical speeches. A movie that uses the past as a herald for the future.
little boy is the name of the first atomic bomb used in warfare, dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In the hands of James Benning, however, the term becomes a delicate yet incisive essay on historical violence. Through simple tableaux documenting the construction of miniature American scenes—interwoven with popular songs and political speeches—Benning returns to his landscapes to reshape the foundations of U.S. history with his signature formal precision. Between a million-year-old dinosaur fossil and the looming repetition of past mistakes—marked by the rise of the far-right—little boy reconfigures the Yankee lexicon, proposing a play of affects between political and poetic discourses and their many forms of power. Here, the landscape is not merely backdrop, but language itself.
Lucas Camargo de Barros
