Dear friends - It seems to me there was a flurry of ideas about 20 years ago
concerning the relation of film and trains. In Deleuze's MOVEMENT-IMAGE for
instance we read of Wenders: "In his work there is often an active series
where the movements of translation are converted and interchanged - train,
car, metro, aeroplane, boat - and constantly interfering, constantly
intermingled, an affective series where one looks for and meets expressive
phantoms, or one summons them up with printing, photography and cinema". (p.
100).

Gilles was doubtless thinking here of the wonderful train ending of enders'
KINGS OF THE ROAD. What he writes could equally apply to some of Akerman's
earlier films like RENDZVOUS D'ANNA and NEWS FROM HOME.

Trains in their movement, their flickering of lights in windows, etc, often
evoke the cinematic apparatus. There are stunning examples in Argento's
SLEEPLESS and several De Palma films including DRESSED TO KILL. Trains have
been even more important to the avant-garde on this level: James Benning's
work based on the framed-landscapes through train windows; or the early and
little-seen PERMANENT VACATION by Jarmusch which has minimalist long-takes
inside a moving train. Claire Denis recently put philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
on a train heading towards, you guessed it, Nancy, in a short film.

Mike points to an important suspicion as to whether any old film which
features a train is really a 'reflection of modernity', or just an index of
that inevitable change in the industrialised landscape. But there are
certainly films which make a lot of the train as a pointed symbol of
modernity, from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE to (as several people have
said here) DEAD MAN. One film which uses trains brilliantly - and with a
highly 'graphic' sense worthy of Eisenstein or Vertov - is Ghatak's
CLOUD-CAPPED STAR, where trains both 'tear' people (and the image) apart in
a mise-en-scene sense, and usher in modernisation. A great film.

Let's not forget an old-fashioned but extremely poignant dramatic symbolism
of trains: it's what you need to board to escape stultifying and imprisoning
small-town life! One of the ultimate uses of this (also a reflection on
modernisation) is Jia Zhang-ke's PLATFORM: breathtaking and heartbreaking
long takes of th passing train and local kids watching it leave ...
CLOUD-CAPPED STAR also clocks in with this poetic of (as Jacques Brel sang
in 'The Far West') "the train I have never caught".

still waiting for the train Adrian

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