Little Boy

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James Benning’s mesmerizing new film spans decades of U.S. history with simple and seemingly minor gestures. Foregrounding its own structural form, Little Boy shows us a series of prefabricated toy models being painted in close-up, accompanied by the rallying cries of folk and pop standards, followed by images of the models’ final construction overlaid with passages of political oratory, from voices inspiring or nefarious. The cumulative image is one of a society doomed to cycles of domestic decline and implicated in international terror in the name of “peace-making” interventionism. A companion piece to American Dreams: Lost and Found, Benning’s 1984 film composed entirely of baseball card memorabilia, Little Boy—its title recalling the lyrics from Pete Seeger’s “What Did You Learn in School Today?”—is an American epic in miniature.