Back in
the day, I taught a class on Film Studies. It was a year-long course, the first
semester covering the dawn of cinema to 1970, the second semester 1970 to
present. (Roughly 50 years each, since our first feature film was 1924’s Sherlock Jr.)
As time
went on, I realized, during the course, that a great number of the essential
movies I’d picked dealt with trains.
We
watched the influential American short, The
Great Train Robbery, from 1908, while talking about early film development.
1924’s Sherlock Jr. also had a famous train stunt.
Sherlock Jr.
We then watched
Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera, from 1929, which has a famous train
sequence, placing the camera on the tracks.
Man with a Movie Camera
The 30s
and 40s were devoid of trains, and the shortest units (King Kong and Modern
Times, followed by Fantasia, Casablanca, and The Third Man).
For the
1950s, the trains returned: we watched Pather
Panchali, from India’s Satyajit Ray, which has a famous train sequence, as
well as David Lean’s Bridge on the River
Kwai – a film that revolves largely around the construction of a railroad
during wartime.
Pather Panchali.
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The Italian film from the 50s that we watched, Umberto D, ends with a climactic,
suspenseful train sequence.
Umberto D.
For
short films we watched Resnais’ classic documentary Night and Fog, which
deals, in part, with the trains of the Holocaust. No other short films dealt
with trains, though.
Into
the 1960s the trains keep coming: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, has, like Lean’s epic, the building
of a railroad as the nominal subject matter that drives the plot. A Hard Day’s
Night begins with a train journey and a musical number on the train.
Once Upon a Time in the West.
A Hard Day's Night.
The
films of the 70s and 80s were train-less. From the 70s: A Touch of Zen, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Monty Python and
the Holy Grail, and Apocalypse Now were watched. From the 80s: Mon Oncle D’Amerique, Blade Runner, Who
Framed Roger Rabbit, and Wings of
Desire.
Probably
each would’ve been improved with the inclusion of trains.
But just
when the second semester seemed safe, we enter the 1990s, where we took a look
at India again, this time Bollywood, with Mani Ratnam’s classic, Dil Se, in which a chance encounter at a
train station sets the entire plot in motion – and which includes a famous
train-themed dance sequence.
Dil Se.
For the
2000s we went to Japan, and watched Miyazaki’s classic, Spirited Away, in which the spirit worlds are linked by what? A
train. The sequence of the protagonist sitting on a train next to a ghost is
one of the most iconic images of the film.
Spirited Away.
In
total, out of 34 feature films, 9 had important train sequences: nearly 30%.
What can I say?
