A PAN review by Steve Bergson. View all Steve’s reviews on PAN
Film: Trains / Pociagi
Director: Maciej J. Drygas
Ticket to Ride: a locomotion picture epic
There is of course an innate connection between trains and movies. The list of feature films that have key scenes staged on this mode of transport is exhaustive – from classics like Buster Keaton’s The General or Burt Lancaster’s The Train through High Noon, Strangers on a Train, Brief Encounter, Murder on the Orient Express or even Bullet Train. What is it about train journeys that echoes and propels the stories which rattle through celluloid history?
This documentary takes the backdrop for granted; the audience knows the place trains hold in our culture. Here the editorial steering of the story engine is largely managed by the clever juxtaposition of the shots and very notably, the sound design. There’s a cryptic caption at the outset which quotes Kafka’s line: “There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope … But not for us”. It hints at this being no excursion; beyond this stop, the points are all handled by the imagery which moves from flappers enjoying the delights of the buffet car to the freight of munitions, leading to rail-borne bunker busting howitzers with their huge recoil action.
The film selects its effects and graphics very carefully. It opens imaginatively with glimpses of a train passing behind the lettering of the title which leads into a sequence showing the building of a steam engine in a factory at Maidenhead in England. Here the immense scale and mechanistic dominance over humans, the construction workers, conveys the awesome power of this beast, something it would only fully realise in action later out on the rails. The twin aspects of this tech are ever present, so the narrative can move from trains which convey troops onto the frontline to PTSD-affected soldiers under treatment but also exhibited to the camera. Likewise just as Charlie Chaplin in The Idle Class (1921) can climb out from a boxcar beneath a Pullman waggon – and then in real life be mobbed at a station – so Hitler can return in triumph from Paris after the fall of France. The train is a potent symbol as well as a mode of transport, its role in life recorded by a parallel technology that moves over sprockets instead of sleepers. The train and movies closely linked, both practical mechanisms that are also vehicles for the imagination.
It hardly takes an expert knowledge of railways or any degree of film scholarship to reference the movie history forming a backdrop to this film. After all, one of the earliest examples of actuality or documentary film is The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896). The Czech classic, Closely Observed Trains (Jiří Menzel, 1966) also seems to be an influence along with Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). There is undoubtedly a strong tradition of both documentary and fiction film to draw on here, so this largely wordless narrative never becomes tedious, repetitive or lacking in “colour”.
A visual essay like this is quite a difficult project to shape because so many archives from all over Europe, notably France, Germany and Poland contribute disparate footage which here is beautifully scanned and presented in its original square aspect ratio. In choosing to show this material without a narration, Drygas is making the weight of the journey be carried by the soundtrack. Here fortunately it is exceptional and adventurous. Saulius Urbanavicius’s sound design makes no attempt to reproduce the original audio of the engines, where it was missing or only available in a mix combined with the commentary from the day it was produced. This could have been a vast undertaking to match authentic sound to the footage which would in many instances have been silent. Instead, he adds often apparently random sound effects that are deliberately not always in sync with the visuals, lending a more surreal air to the narrative. It also possibly is intended to keep the audience reminded that this is a film created from fragments of archive. When this subtle meta approach is mixed into the powerful minimalist and electronica music score by Paweł Szymański, the overall effect conveyed is that of machine barely in human control. It chimes with the kinds of soundtracks we know from sequences showing the robotic workings of the factory in films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It also has echoes of other minimalist music like Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet’s Different Trains.It is appropriate and very well judged.
This film never indulges in nostalgia even while it displays some remarkable footage like the shot of a huge station canopy being demolished or the view from the nose of a locomotive as it moves down the track towards a station. The comparison with film in a gate is inescapable and almost certainly intended. There is something about a vehicle sliding inexorably down a predetermined line that captures the human imagination in a way that cars, ships or rockets do not. That sense of predestination has resonated with us down the years; this thing takes us forward in a variety of ways, though the final destination remains bewilderingly unclear, particularly for the unwary traveller. This film is certainly worth a ticket even if it ends up punched.
Showing at the Curzon Bertha DocHouse, London, from 20 March – Runtime: 1h 21m