Travelling Light

Thoughts on a film by Gina Telaroli

Three quotes preface the presentation of the film on its director's Vimeo profile. One attributed to a fellow filmmaker, one to an author, and one that remains unsigned but is possibly from Telaroli herself.

"Ten properties of a subject, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness." - Robert Bresson

"They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches, peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light…" - from Henry James' "Daisy Miller: A Study"

An Amtrak train pulls out of Penn Station in New York City on a cold, sunny February morning. The train moves forward as the landscape changes—the East Coast giving way to the Midwest. Passengers fill their roles, the snow begins to fall and the next train station is announced, all while the light continues shifting, bouncing, swelling and slouching into eventual darkness.

The third quote functions as an obvious synopsis/description of the work itself, defining, in clear-terms, the practicalities of the film's recorded journey, from station-to-station, and place to place. But on a certain level, so too do the quotes from James and Bresson. These quotations speak of the subconscious layer of the film; of what it's depicting beneath the surface of the recording. The significance of the train, its passage through the landscape, the changing topography, the contrast between light and dark, and the transient nature of public transportation, with its journey, both physical and emotional, as a mirror to the journey of a life itself, is expressed between the passages of these words.

The film, in a way, adapts these quotations into images that on one level seem staggeringly mundane and even banal in their presentation of the ordinary, or the everyday, or it applies the quotations to give form to what a first appears formless, but either way, it gets at something inherently mysterious, even monumental, that is felt in the journey (or journeys) depicted in Telaroli's film.

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Whether intentionally or not, Telaroli, in filming the passing landscape from the train's window, creates an iris effect, wherein the edges of the window intrude upon the image, creating a frame within a frame. This, on one level, establishes the subjective relationship between the presence of the filmmaker, recording the journey as it unfolds, but also the notion of the camera as the eye of the audience. It doesn't simply record, it observes, active and attentive, the way a human eye might respond when gazing as a passenger from the window of this moving vehicle.

It also has broader connotations, reminding us of the iris effect of old movies, from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood, and on an even more vague and obscure level, suggesting the perspective of an astronaut gazing through the visor of their space helmet; exaggerating the almost alien sense of the journey as Telaroli records it, and connecting, again, albeit vaguely, the subjective journey of the film through geographical space with the journey of a character like Dr. Dave Bowman as he travels through the stargate in Stanley Kubrick's enduring masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Grandma's Reading Glass [George Albert Smith, 1900]:

2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968]:

This may seem like an odd connection to make – and in many ways it is – however, in both films we have the presentation of a journey that functions on both a literal and subconscious level. There is the actual, physical journey, with its departures and arrivals, and then there is the metaphysical journey, the one that transforms rather than transports.

From the very first images, Telaroli's film establishes a connection between the idea of travel, the journey, a train on a track, with the notion of the narrative journey, the progression of a story from beginning to end, from its point of departure to its inevitable arrival.

The train is one of the great symbols of the cinema, having played a key role in its formation from the very beginning of its history. It was a train that thrilled audiences in the silent marvel of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière – investing the cinema was a sense of the sensational – and it was a train that gave way to the notion of narrative cutting, of the edit between interior and exterior spaces, in George Albert Smith's groundbreaking A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899).

Since that time, trains have been a defining narrative and visual presence in cinema, from The Iron Horse (1924) to The General (1926) and beyond, to Shanghai Express (1932), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), Pather Panchali (1955), Night Train (1959), The Train (1964), The Hero (1966), Trans-Europe-Express (1966), La Chionoise (1967), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The American Friend (1977), Runaway Train (1985), Europa (1991), Sleepless (2000), Unstoppable (2010), Snowpiercer (2013) and The Image Book (2018), among others.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station [Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896]:

A Kiss in the Tunnel [George Albert Smith, 1899]:

Pather Panchali [Satyajit Ray, 1955]:

Trans-Europe-Express [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966]:

The Image Book [Jean-Luc Godard, 2018]:

From the beginning of cinema, the train has moved through its narrative, like a leitmotif; the progression of it, as a collective journey, and the experience of that of the passenger, seated, passive, staring through a rectangular window of light at the changing scenes and dramas that pass before our eyes, is like a mirror reflecting back on itself. In many films, the train is a symbol of discovery, suggesting the encroachment of the "modern" world onto that of the "primitive" or outdated, suggesting an escape, a movement, or the journey between worlds (both real or imagined.)

Telaroli's film fits into this tradition. It represents a recorded journey, both pictorially and, on some level, psychologically, presenting a movement between worlds, but it's also a narrative, where the beginning of the train journey and its conclusion mirrors the beginning and ending of the film.

Travelling Light [Gina Telaroli, 2011]:

Here, the intricacies of the title work on two separate levels. There's "travelling light", in the sense of moving without baggage. As in taking a short journey without the need for heavy luggage, but also baggage in the figurative sense, as in not being burdened by thoughts, fears, and responsibilities. "Travelling light" also refers to the progression of light itself, both in the movement from dawn to dusk, or light into dark, but also the journey of light as it moves through the frames of the film.

Here, sunlight on a passing mountain, or daylight streaking through the windows of the train, or artificial light refracted by rain or frost on the glass, becomes as much of a journey as the one being taken in tandem by the filmmaker and audiences as the train moves along the track. Finally, the connection is made clear, with the closing shot, detailed in the final screenshot above, a train retreating along the platform, slowly disappearing into a bank of fog, with only the light on the front of the locomotive left appearing like a ghostly orb shining in the middle-distance. In this moment, the eye of the camera as surrogate for that of the protagonist/audience, is now liberated from the confines of the train. We're outside, emerged, as if from the womb, and faced with something approaching reality.

As a closing shot, it connects back to the beginning of the film, the movement of the train, departing or progressing through the wintry landscape, but also to the notion of the journey, emotional, psychological, or geographical. The notion that we've arrived, marooned upon the platform, rigid and unmoving, but that another journey is already beginning for someone else. Here, in retrospect, the connection to the three quotes highlighted by Telaroli as a preface to her film, make perfect sense.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Shanghai Express [29 February 2020], The Phantom Ride [09 September 2011]

Shanghai Express

Thoughts on the film by Josef von Sternberg

The history of the cinema is defined by two icons of industrial engineering: the train and the bridge. In the oldest surviving fragment of film, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888), photographed by the mysterious and enigmatic French film pioneer Louis Le Prince, the bridge itself becomes a symbol. Not just a geographical setting chosen for narrative purposes, but something more significant.

Conventionally, the bridge is a link between places and people, allowing individuals to travel outside of their own location, and to experience something different and new. However, a bridge can also provide a theoretical link between psychological and sociological states, such as the before and after. For Le Prince, his bridge linked the pre-cinema to the post-cinema worlds, marking the point at which this new medium, as then still in its infancy, connected us to new cultures, ideas and expressions.

After the bridge came the train and with it the journey; this vessel that transports ideas, characters and emotions, moving like a narrative from a beginning to an end. The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière would film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896); the first blockbuster. The arrival of the train was like a heralding for the coming of cinema; or more specifically, the becoming of cinema; this medium that had the potential to show us the world as we'd never seen it before; to instil feelings of shock and awe; to transform and transport us through a succession of moving pictures.

A few years later, the English filmmaker George Albert Smith would direct A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). Here, the phantom ride of a camera attached to the front of a train prowling along the tracks on its journey to somewhere, is intercut with a scene of a heterosexual couple inside a carriage, stealing a chaste kiss as the train enters the titular void. In figurative terms, the tunnel itself is like a stand-in for the cinema; a darkened space with a light at the end. The light glows bright as we approach it, like the light of the screen. However, it's the innovation of the film and its early use of narrative cutting that makes Smith's work significant.

A Kiss in the Tunnel [George Albert Smith, 1899]:

From here, trains would be a significant feature of the early cinema. From John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) to Buster Keaton's The General (1926), and beyond, the two innovations would reflect one another, becoming mirror twins. Both trains and the cinema are communal activities; we share these journeys with other people. Both are passive; we remain in our seat and watch the world turn. Both can create a feeling of anxiety, discomfort or inertia, and both can offer a room to dream.

In Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), this relationship between trains, the cinema and the experience of dreams, finds the perfect expression. Set mostly aboard the titular locomotive as it attempts its journey from Peking to Shanghai, the narrative of the film mirrors the progression of a train along the tracks. As the journey is diverted or draws to a halt, so too does the film. When the train reaches its conclusion, the film ends.

If the narrative is a mirror to the journey of the train, then the train is a mirror to society. Its passengers, representing a broadchurch, become a microcosm of one faction of society. Among them we find different social classes, hinting at the layers of this culture, the hierarchy and the inequality of wealth. We have soldiers and entertainers, staff and travellers, the frail and even religion. In this context, they become merely representative. Rather than depict conventional character traits, their roles within the film exist to embody certain principles or political characteristics, stating their position and ideologies through dialog, the way protagonists in theatrical plays often do.

Thrown together, these characters will be tested by a subsequent turn of events, which works to upend and debase the social order that the earlier scenes dictate.

Shanghai Express [Josef von Sternberg, 1932]:

As a work of narrative cinema, Shanghai Express is more than adequate. The story is well paced and well developed, introducing relationships, back-stories and characteristics that are each carried through and "paid off" in the final act. The twists in the plot are surprising and help introduce political themes, intrigue and a moral complexity that it might otherwise have lacked. In short, it's engaging, balancing serious themes, hints of violence and contrasting witty banter in a way that feels cohesive.

However, where Sternberg's film is more remarkable is in its iconography, its aesthetics, and in the symbolic or metatextual elements of its construction. To this, Shanghai Express is a film of symbols; a narrative wherein each development of the plot expresses not just a narrative function but a projection of the characters' psychological states. The film is almost specifically constructed around these elements; every facet of its story, from the setting, to the backdrop, to the train itself, facilitating a means for these characters to make sense of their own emotions, turning the film into a genuine psychodrama.

That the film is set during the period of the Chinese Civil War connects less with history than it does with the idea of a divided territory; not just geographical, but psychological. The China as depicted in the film is an occupied territory, but occupied not just by the political rebels, colonialist agitators or the decadent and the damned passengers that define its narrative, but occupied in the same sense that thoughts, fears and desires might occupy our daily existence. These characters are in a state of conflict, and as such, "occupy" a state in conflict; making the catastrophes and the debasements that occur along the way not just literal but figurative as well.

Like The Silence (1963) directed by Ingmar Bergman, Shanghai Express is a dream play. The characters, both here and there, are trapped in a physical space that becomes a kind of psychological limbo. Fittingly, The Silence begins with a train journey through a heightened, almost surrealist landscape of war and devastation; another occupied territory. Is the war real or metaphorical? Is it something that occurs outside the perspective of these characters or within? Is it a projection of their own fear, their trauma or the state of anxiety that holds them captive, or is it simply a dream; a conjuring of the unconscious mind?

The Silence [Ingmar Bergman, 1963]:

Shanghai Express [Josef von Sternberg, 1932]:

Unlike Bergman's film, the backdrop of civil war in Shanghai Express has a historical context. It relates to actual events, but its function within the unfolding melodrama of its characters is no less vague and enigmatic than the fictional wars that Bergman depicts, both in The Silence and in his later film Shame (1968). It is still, to some extent, a vague projection unfolding through the windows of a train. The characters react to it, but mechanically, as if function compels it. They exist always as if sleepwalking through another person's existence.

It's here that I'm reminded of a later film that took great influence from Sternberg's work; Lars von Trier's post-war allegory Europa (1991). Like Shanghai Express, Europa's drama is connected to a train that becomes both an embodiment of the structured narrative and a microcosm of the world in miniature. Its characters are political or philosophical representations that exist to present sides of a specific argument relating to the Second World War, culpability, innocence and the state of post-war Europe. Both films treat historical conflict as psychological conditions; their respective destinations less geographical realities than a state of mind. Both films are coded, stylised and have a dreamlike feeling where characters are robbed of personal agency.

Europa [Lars von Trier, 1991]:

Trier and his co-writer Niels Vørsel make their intentions explicit by creating a framing device around hypnosis. Their film physically takes place while in a state of trance. Sternberg and his screenwriter Jules Furthman are less literal, but the results are nonetheless the same. The atmosphere of the film is stilted, deep and thick; its characters like sleepwalkers moving without recourse; somnambulists lost in some nigh time enchantment that plays out through the window/screen.

In keeping with this, Sternberg's film has the feeling of an endless night. It isn't; bookending sequences are set during the daytime. But it's the impression of the film as something existing within the twilight between sleep and waking, the dreamlike artificiality of the performances, the expressionist gestures of the cinematography and the psychodramatic aspects of the narrative as some internal conflict that the central characters must overcome in order to find a kind of peace, that leave the greatest impression.

Viewed through the prism of Europa, it's much easier to read Shanghai Express on a similar, more expressionist or psychological level. Trier's cynicism means that he ultimately desires to destroy his train, and to destroy the bridge that allows it to travel between two worlds. Sternberg is less cynical. His film reaches a conclusion befitting the films of this period; reaffirming the intentions of characters and moving towards a kind of happiness or hope. Even though the war is still raging, and lives are being lost, it doesn't matter; the war, in this context, always existed as a projection of the inner conflicts within the lives of these characters.

Just as the tunnel in Smith's film provided a necessary function in allowing its two protagonists to share a romantic moment, so too does the civil war of Shanghai Express. Does this make the film weaker, or more exploitative? I couldn't say. However, I found the experience of the film more fascinating, emotionally engaging and beautiful in its design and direction for the way it unfolds in this world of night time shadows; this nocturnal suspension of actual time, wherein characters are trapped, forced to engage with a projected narrative that facilitates a form of emotional transcendence.

Close-Up

For the first few moments of its short duration, this early piece of genuine cinema history is no more adventurous or remarkable than the early experiments of the French-born pioneer Louis Le Prince. What we are seeing, in all actuality, is a basic one-take tableau vivant observation of a single scene, devised as a work of fiction, but no less indebted to the presentational - or, what would eventually be termed 'cinematic' - approach established by Le Prince in the films Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888).

In wide-shot, a little girl feeds her ailing kitty cat some medicine from a spoon. As an action, this is adorable, but alone, the presentation suggests only the intention to record, on film, for commercial purposes, an action to melt the heart's of the kindest old ladies. So far so-so... Then something extraordinary happens. A connection is created between two images. A jump, literally, from far-away to close-up.

The Sick Kitten directed by G.A. Smith, 1903:

The English filmmaker George Albert Smith had pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his previous films, As Seen Through a Telescope (1900) and Grandma's Reading Glass (1900). There the technique was more of a novelty; a way of presenting a new perspective: one of exaggeration. However, in this film, it is practicality that dictates the use of this new technique. The director wants to emphasise a moment that would have been missed had the camera remained at a distance. The kitten's face as it gladly laps up the medicine can now be seen by the audience, allowing us to follow the action more directly.

At this precise moment, cinema finally breaks free from the influence of the stage and establishes something that is unique to the language of film. From this point on, the camera would be able to offer the audience new perspectives; emphasising details and showing the emotion of actors in a way that would have been unfeasible without the benefit of this new innovation. It was now possible for the audience to go from this...



...to this...

...without having to physically bring ourselves closer to the work. A revolutionary moment in the development of the medium and one that indirectly makes possible the extraordinary montages in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, or the expressive, detailed shots of eyes, mouths, hands and iconography in the films of Sergio Leone. This single moment would change the way future film were produced; opening up a new world of creative possibilities, as well as bringing with it the potential for a more intimate form of cinema. Less broad, less theatrical; a cinema of small gestures.

The Phantom Ride

The camera shunts along the tracks, headlong into darkness, into the unknown. This is innovation, the movement of the camera giving the audience the feeling of a journey. As an event in the development of cinema's history, this film is as important as Auguste and Louis Lumière's The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1895), which suggested, through a single moment, the possibility of cinema as spectacle. In George Albert Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), the opening and closing shots represent the reverse-angle to the Lumière's remarkable film. Now the audience could experience not only the arrival, but the journey as well.

All of a sudden the cinema was no longer a medium for static observations, but something that could move between worlds.

The Kiss in the Tunnel directed by G.A. Smith, 1899:

The kiss that occurs in-between represents the embrace of the new, this kingdom of shadows called cinema. An artistic medium somewhere beyond the influence of literature, theatre or still photography; instead, a magic act of movement and emotion, where the light at the end of the tunnel becomes a premonition to the light from a film projector as it burns against the darkness of the screen. As the camera continues along the track, out of the darkness, into the bright future of this new world of artistic expression, the movement, eloquently described by Mark Cousins as a "phantom ride", suggests the possibility for future films to transport the audience, both figuratively and literally, into the unfamiliar territories of the heart and mind.