Film critic Mark Peranson has noted that movies and trains have a lot in common: “A short stretch of celluloid is a representation of a train, one image following the other in rapid succession, connected by essential blocks of black, moving forward in time and space, and, when projected, rotating on a wheel” (CinemaScope Magazine, issue 34, 2008). Trains and movies have always been interrelated, and Peranson has also pointed out that the first significant piece of traditional cinema to have an impact was the Lumière brothers’ Arrivée d’un train à Perrache with its direct fixed camera shot of a train arriving at a station and toward the audience.
Perhaps it’s the idea of a train as a moving transporter that makes them so inherently cinematic. Every movie is, in a sense, a “mystery train.” We don’t know where it will take us or how it will make us feel, and hopefully, there are other surprises before we reach the end of the journey. Maybe it’s for these reasons that scenes on trains have become such a hallmark of the suspense and action picture and a dream sequence cliché. Alfred Hitchcock, to name just one director, set a significant number of his masterworks at least partly aboard trains.
But while there are an almost infinite number of films with great moments set on trains, the majority of the films compiled for this series have stories that take place almost entirely on trains or are set in the world of railroads and railyards. Some feature heroes who are train-obsessed, and others focus on traveling protagonists caught up in a vehicle barreling beyond their control.
O. Winston Link, the great nighttime train photographer whose work is currently on view at George Eastman House, would certainly qualify as a bona-fide “trainspotter.” The somewhat sordid story of Link’s marriage to Conchita Mendoza during his final years is the basis for the documentary that opens the series on November 5, The Photographer, His Wife, and Her Lover. In the weeks to follow, you’ll be able to see Hitchcockian thrillers (The Sleeping Car Murder, Silver Streak, La Bête Humaine); a European omnibus production (Tickets); fact-based dramas (The Train); a whodunit (Murder on the Orient Express); an avant-garde study (RR); a Civil War-era comedy (The General); animated classics (Dumbo, The Polar Express); and much more. Chugging across the screen will be steam locomotives, circus trains, freights carrying fuel and supplies, luxury passenger liners, and even New York City’s legendary subway system in the action classic The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
If traveling by train, like going to the movies, isn’t as much a part of our daily lives as it once was, then these “Locomotion Pictures” screening in the Dryden during November and December can be seen as an invitation to dream or return to the past. All aboard the mystery trains of cinema, destination unknown.
Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Screenings: All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise listed.
Wednesday, November 5 | Rochester Premiere
THE PHOTOGRAPHER, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER (Paul Yule, UK/US 2005, 78 min.)
Thursday, November 6
THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER (COMPARTIMENT TEURS, Costa-Gavras, France 1964, 95 min., French/subtitles)
Wednesday, November 12
THE TRAIN (John Frankenheimer, US 1964, 133 min.)
Thursday, November 13
TICKETS (Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, Italy/UK 2005, 115 min., Digital Projection)
Wednesday, November 19 | Rochester Premiere | Members’
Movie Night
RR (James Benning, US 2007, 111 min., 16mm) Members admitted free.
Thursday, November 20
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Sidney Lumet, US 1974, 127 min.) Presented through the support of the Cornell/Weinstein Family
Foundation, in loving memory of Regina Cornell.
Sunday, November 23 | 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. | Disney Classics
DUMBO (Ben Sharpsteen, US 1941, 64 min.)
Wednesday, November 26
THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Joseph Sargent, US 1974, 104 min.)
Tuesday, December 2 | Silent Cinema
THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, US 1927, 74 min.) preceded by THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (Edwin S. Porter, US 1903, 12 min.) and ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN À PERRACHE (Auguste & Louis Lumière, France 1896, 1 min. ). Live piano by Philip C. Carli.
Wednesday, December 3
RUNAWAY TRAIN (Andrei Konchalovsky, US 1985, 111 min.)
Tuesday, December 9
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (OSTRE SLEDOVANÉ VLAKY, Jirí Menzel, Czechoslovakia 1966, 93 min., Czech/subtitles, 16mm) preceded by
TERMINUS (John Schlesinger, UK 1961, 33 min.)
Wednesday, December 10
SILVER STREAK (Arthur Hiller, US 1976, 113 min.)
Wednesday, December 17 | Double Feature
Two films for one admission price.
7 p.m. THE TALL TARGET (Anthony Mann, US 1951, 78 min.) &
8:30 p.m. TERROR ON A TRAIN (TIME BOMB, Ted Tetzlaff, UK 1953, 72 min.)
Tuesday, December 23 | Holiday Movies
THE POLAR EXPRESS (Robert Zemeckis, US 2004, 99 min.)
