Kinetic Therapy in the Age of the Capitalocene: Finding a Horizon of Possibility in James Benning’s Pig Iron (2010)

James Benning’s Pig Iron (2010) can be read as a critical allegory of the Capitalocene and as an exercise in “kinetic therapy.” In a single thirty-minute static shot, Benning films the smelting of pig iron and its transportation by industrial wagons, transforming a repetitive technical process into a rhythmic and perceptual laboratory. Drawing on Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s concept of futurability, Frédéric Neyrat’s reflections on the “kinetic dilemma,” and Mary Ann Doane’s approach to the temporal contingency of cinema, this article argues that Pig Iron dramatizes the exhaustion of industrial capitalism while opening a horizon of possibility. Through a rhythmanalysis grounded in close reading, the article proposes four analytical categories—volume, juxtaposition, interconnection, and in-tensionality—derived from the film’s formal organization and its micro-events. These categories help to elucidate how the film educates attention, displaces the gaze beyond the machinic centre, and reinscribes cinematic experience within an ecological-political horizon. The article concludes by showing that Benning’s gesture, at once minimalist and radical, is premonitory: it renders visible machinic saturation while intimating the possibility of other human and more-than-human rhythms emerging at the margins of the image.