James Benning took the founding of the New York Times in 1851 as a departure point for his latest film, Deseret. In the best Benning tradition, Deseret unfolds magnificent landscapes captured with a stationary camera during a dozen-odd trips throughout the calendar year - deserts, plains of snow, lonely trails, trees in bloom, cemeteries, ruins, unfriendly rocks, empty settlers' houses, roads that seem to be leading nowhere, a few isolated human figures. Deseret's starkly composed images suggest a space haunted by the official history written back East in the Times. Benning collected 93 stories about Utah, boiled them down to a few lines and used a different shot to 'illustrate' each sentence. As we reach 1900, his black and white footage spectacularly turns to color. The stories told recount the loss of American innocence: from the woes and persecution of the Mormons, the fights with the Indians...
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Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence.

In 1895, the first film audience ever reportedly ran screaming from the theater during the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train. The audience thought that an actual oncoming train was hurtling towards them, unfamiliar as they were with the screen and projector that produced the moving image. Although today’s moviegoers may be more comfortable with train footage, James Benning’s RR promises a unique kind of cinematic experience for audiences. Structured around the deceptively simple visual motif of a train crossing a series of static shots, it presents a visually stunning portrait of the role of railroads in American history and culture.
“Benning has an incredible formal eye, able to place his 16mm camera in the absolute perfect spot and capture the landscape.” —Daily Plastic