No Data Plan
In The United States of America (1975), James Benning and Bette Gordon take a trip across the country, from east to west. Structural film meets the road movie, as a 16mm camera is mounted in the backseat of their car, facing forward, taking in the passing terrain as it’s framed by the windshield. The couple sits in the front, their bodies positioned solidly between the lens and the land, ever visible in the frame but yielding no personal information. In the car, with the radio on, they speed together through the expanses of America, the land of the free.
Over 40 years later, Miko Revereza’s first feature film makes a similar journey, albeit in reverse, beginning in Los Angeles and ending in New York. Or, the artist-traveller looks to Instagram rather than the radio for companionship, and captures his journey on a small digital camera rather than on film. Benning and Gordon’s rigorous conceptualism softens, as Revereza adopts a mixed formal vocabulary and introduces both familial narrative and snippets of strangers’ conversations, using voiceless subtitles and voiceover. His body all but vanishes from the frame. And most importantly, Revereza moves across the country not in the private enclosure of the automobile—that powerful symbol of independence, freedom, and individualism—but aboard Amtrak. The film consists almost entirely of shots of the train and its environs: platforms, waiting rooms, carriages, landscapes framed through dirty windowpanes.
