Trains Review – A sobering documentary exploring the liberation of the locomotive | film

toLike Interrail Pass’s Koyaanisqatsi, this often fascinating documentary — created entirely from archival footage, without voiceover — surveys the sweeping twentieth-century changes ushered in by steam trains: a dramatic acceleration of modern society that transformed logistics and entertainment, from mass travel to war mobilization, introducing new opportunities for consumers and sudden cultural psyches.

As was the case in the early 1920s, staring brightly out the window, director Maciej Drygas acknowledges the liberation and optimism offered by the locomotive. But in his introduction with a quote by Kafka – “There is so much hope, an infinite amount of hope…but not for us” – his suggestion seems to be that technology has led us rapidly off track. The initial glowing sequence of the steam engine being assembled is like watching ancient cultists assembling a great Molochian idol. All too soon, newly manufactured shell casings from the railway’s howitzers cast an unholy light into the black-and-white footage. Full speed to hell.

Dry gas gives a major role to the role of railways in both world wars. Ammunition supply lines intersect with shots of convulsing, shell-shocked soldiers, now effectively reduced to broken-down machines. Charlie Chaplin is carried aloft from a passenger carriage into a crowd at the dawn of the era of mass stardom; But then the same adulation is immediately applied to his dark doppelgänger, Adolf Hitler, as he salutes Folk classy. When it comes to trains, we all know where the next stop is.

Fortunately, the film tones down its post-war setting. Individual faces – dreaming on escalators, waiting in front of timetables – linger still longer. But Modernism quickly rushes into the cavernous sound design of Saulius Urbanavicius, ending in airy abstraction and intersecting and disparate paths, and still has no definite destination. The passengers’ occasional smiles toward the fourth wall, a group of Nazi officers reaching for a hand-held camera, as well as Drygaz’s film itself, remind us that this magnetic cinematic essay is also a subtle homage to that second traveler in space and time: the contemporary train’s cinematic camera.