Like Koyaanisqatsi with an Interrail pass, this often-fascinating documentary – constructed entirely of archival footage, with no voiceover – surveys the sweeping 20th-century changes ushered in by steam trains: a great acceleration of modern society that transformed logistics and leisure, from travel for the masses to war mobilisation, introducing new consumer opportunities and abrupt psychocultural disruptions.
As per the 1920s flappers gazing brightly out of the window early on, director Maciej Drygas acknowledges the liberation and optimism offered by the locomotive. But prefaced by a Kafka quote – “There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope … But not for us” – his proposition seems to be that the technology led us quickly off the rails. The glowering initial sequence, of a steam engine being assembled, is like watching ancient cultists assemble a great Molochian idol. All too soon, newly forged shell casings, to be fired from railroad howitzers, give off unholy light in the black-and-white footage. Full speed to hell.
Drygas gives heavy play to the role of the railway in both world wars. The munitions supply lines segue into shots of convulsing shellshocked soldiers, effectively now themselves reduced to broken-down machines. Charlie Chaplin is borne aloft from a passenger carriage by a crowd at the dawn of the age of mass stardom; but then the same adulation immediately applies to his dark doppelganger, Adolf Hitler, saluting the volk from first class. Where trains are concerned, we all know where the next stop is.
Thankfully, the film loosens up in the postwar stretch. Individual faces – dreaming on escalators, expectant in front of timetables – linger more. But hurtling headlong into Saulius Urbanavicius’s cavernous sound design, ending on airy abstraction and intersecting and diverging tracks, modernity still has no fixed destination. The passengers’ occasional smiles to the fourth wall, a group of Nazi officers mugging for an early handheld camera, as well as Drygas’s film itself, remind us that this magnetic cine-essay is also a hidden tribute to that second voyager in space and time: the train’s contemporary, the movie camera.