Shortfilms

A Train Arrives at the Station

Thom Andersen
USA 2016
15 min
V'16

There was a shot in THE THOUGHTS THAT ONCE WE HAD we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s THE ONLY SON (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 shots from movies, 1904–2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot, the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film. (Thom Andersen)

Credits
  • Thom Andersen
  • Andrew Kim
  • Andrew Kim
  • Thom Andersen
Thom Andersen

Grasshopper Film

DCP
bwcol
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