Little Boy — James Benning [Cinéma du Réel '25 Review]

Little Boy — James Benning [Cinéma du Réel '25 Review]

In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to play with trains.” Trains are a holy symbol for early cinephiles, not just because of the connection to cinema’s first notable hit, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by the brothers Lumière, but because of the rush from similarly early films that placed the camera just above the coup…