Notes:
My Memory of Trains
Night Mail, 1936, Basil Wright and Harry Watt. Night Train, 1959, Jerzy Kawalerowicz. The train ride in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt in which creepy Uncle Charley tries to kill his on-to-him niece. Teresa Wright lets Joseph Cotten die by falling (or pushing him?) into the path of another train. North by Northwest’s train into a tunnel. Strangers on a Train. Just a private place for people to meet with no one the wiser. The spinning, unhinged carousel is really the central mechanical object in that one. Okay, no more Hitchcock. What else?
The Lumière Brothers. The forty-second film of a train arriving at La Ciotat Station. Entitled The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, 1895. People screamed and ran out of the theater because film was not understood yet, and the conventions of cinema were not yet invented. The technology was a stunning shriek of the new. Pacific 231, the short film that used Arthur Honegger’s steam locomotive symphony, which itself was inspired by the train in Abel Gance’s film La Roue (which makes it a memory of someone else’s remembering). La Bête Humaine, of course. The Tall Target, 1951, Anthony Mann. All steam gusts, night whistles, and steady clicks. The train chugging across the desert, blown up and raided, that a glorious Peter O’Toole climbs atop in Lawrence of Arabia, his white cloak billowing in the wind as he starts to walk and play for the camera. Lean shoots his film level to O’Toole’s suede boots, defiant and above it all, as they walk. There were trains in other Lean films: Brief Encounter, The Bridge on the River Kwai. There is the train in The Wild Bunch. Or in Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968. Dozens of Westerns. Jean-Louis Trintignant having sex on a train in The Conformist, psychedelic trains in Vera Chytilová’s Daisies. What else?
Oh! The great train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s film of poor children in 1950s India. The girl and her little brother are in a vast field of wheat or rice. No one in any direction but these little people. The far horizon is a blank except for the interruption of telephone wires, the only industrial thing in the landscape. They walk. No music. We hear only the wind in the grass. They are made tiny by the growth, lost in it. First the sister hears it. She stops. Then we hear it. The distant train. We see the locomotive in the far corner of the horizon, black steam pouring out of the smokestack. It is approaching. The children start to run toward the train, through the high grass. The girl trips, gets up. They run and run and make it to the train as it passes. The train is loud and Ray cuts to a wheel-level view of the children. We are on the other side of the train — it passes between us and the children, and we glimpse them through the gaps in the train’s drive pistons and wheels. It is huge, and we see it as the children see it: massive, loud, fast. And then it is gone. The children have been passed by. We watch them watch it disappear.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION II
Meadow woke up at five, drank coffee, and looked at the films she had made in the past two months. Hours upon hours of editing and here was how it read: nature dominated by industry. For Christ’s sake, really? That’s what it came to? Nature good, technology bad? The original cinema train cliché. She wanted to throw it all away and just watch how Satyajit Ray or Sam Peckinpah filmed trains. But she knew, somewhere, that where you arrived wasn’t as important as how you got there. If it was hard earned, that mattered. She just had to show her work, put it together. Let it be organic. Take your time, let the weirdness come through. Maybe she can have that cliché and eat it too. Maybe.
JELLY AND JACK
1986
“Hey, babe,” Jack said when he answered the phone.
“Hi, Jack,” Jelly said. She was sitting on her couch. She had the trade papers—Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—on the coffee table in front of her. Next to the papers were a large magnifying glass and a bold marker. The rain was coming down hard and almost freezing. Later it would turn into wet, sticky snow. The news called it a “wintry mix,” and it would freeze up and make the sidewalks ice sheets by morning. The weather was hard on her: if the sun wasn’t out, it was low-lit, low-contrast gray with hidden ice. If she was lucky she would hear and feel the ice cracking under her feet as she stepped, but mostly it was unmoving slick surfaces that made walking frightening. Or if the sun did come out, it was high-glare, every surface a beautiful-but-painful shimmer of reflected brightness. Gleams that exploded in waves of white. The winter was different every day, and you had to plan and react and accommodate it. There were easier places for someone like her. For anyone, really.
“Congratulations on the Grammy nomination,” she said.
“Thank you. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t mean that much. Barely five people qualify in that category. Some of these things, if you submit and your name is known, you are automatically nominated,” he said.
“But you have won before, and surely there is nothing automatic in that?” Jelly pulled her thick chenille robe around her. She had a cold, and she’d spent the morning sipping tea with lemon and honey. Her throat felt swollen and even to swallow her saliva caused a sharp pain, but it hadn’t affected her voice yet. She held an ice pack wrapped in a dishtowel. As she listened to Jack, she pressed the cold compress to her throat.
“True,” he said.
“And it is such a perfectly realized recording. The production is outstanding, anyone will recognize that,” she said. She heard him light a cigarette.
“I watched A Woman Under the Influence yesterday,” Jelly said. Jack loved John Cassavetes films, and he had sent her a private video copy, impossible to find.
“Yeah? What did you think?”