Routine Pleasures

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Documentary

Perhaps quirky to some but still intriguing, this documentary compares the tiny world created by model train buffs as a setting for their tracks and locomotives to paintings by Manny Farber, and features excerpts from his writings. The model train system is complex and large enough to occupy a part of an airplane hangar in Del Mar, California.

Small cities and villages, hills and valleys and bridges, an entire rural and urban landscape in miniature provide the setting for a railway system built by a group of aficionados.

But what the model train enthusiasts see as essential to a realistic and ideal landscape may or may not coincide with what Farber sees in an American view of both landscape and culture.