Bruno Dumont's L'Humanite (France, circa 1999)features a brutal child murder that is not seen properly by people on a high speed train (the TGV). In a film where much revolves around going too fast to see or to take note of others, the train is not so much akin to the film as its Other - while the film itself is deliberately, desperately slow, the train is part of the network of high-speed connectivity functional to today's globalised economy. Is (some) film now shifting towards a self-definition as the medium which takes its time, which stays in the same place long enough to see and hear?
A separate thought is that, with trains and films, it all depends on where the camera is. Heroically at the front and looking forward in a way that foregrounds technology and power.
Or looking out the window at a landscape which one consumes as it goes by.
Martin O'Shaughnessy (Nottingham Trent, UK)
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