MovieChat Forums > Trilogia: To livadi pou dakryzei (2004) Discussion > The Railway Train + Angelopoulos breakth...

The Railway Train + Angelopoulos breakthrough


The annoying thing here was - it was always the SAME railway train - fine, if symolic of the Train which brings you here and takes you away - BUT why did the train have to be so short? Three carriages and a truck? It looked like they couldn't get a longer train and it grated every time it appeared, passing the sheets, taking Eleni to the battlefield, etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the train, or think that actually it was short for a reason?

ALSO,

Did anyone else think this was a breakthrough for Angelopoulos? That here, he dispenses with the overt time-collapsing structures and Brecht-ian revealing-the-art (with film makers called A in the film etc) and simply goes for a truly classical tragedy, yet one which seems wholly at home in the 20th c? I thought it was extraordinary - and a great film-maker who has already made so many brilliant films and won the palm d'or for Eternity, suddenly going one better.

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I am not sure if was a breakthrough, but it was something different than from Ulysses Gaze, The Travelling Players or O Megaleksandros. It was more straight forward for sure, though a second viewing suggested there were indeed some self-reflexive gestures about art and representation involved, such as with the pre-title sequence (the voice-over about it being a film scene), the refuge haven in the theater, the slip between diagetic and nondiagetic music, and I think the strange play between foreground and background in many scenes, such as the ones were the trains (or the same train) always goes by.
I was also enthralled by the film's last 45minutes, especially the jumps in time as history (and the Greek Civil War) collapses in on Eleni in a way she doesn't seem to understand. (The guards are all the same to her)

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Okay, maybe, Yet another breakthrough, would be a better way of putting it. Yes, I think the film becomes more and more stylized - each of the deaths, for example. The chorus of refugees in the extraordinary first shot walk towards us like a chorus from an opera - and the voice asking, Who are you? immediately puts the film "in the round" as it were. [Incidentally, this shot reminded me of a shot from Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' where we see the characters from across a puddle, the camera - and us, the audience - inside 'the room' watching the action which is happening 'over the water'.] The film seemed to draw on classical theatre staging more directly than previous films - without the in-formed worrying that this is cinema and must be seen as such - whereas here we are drawn in more, or I felt that I was, so that in the last 45 minutes, as history seems to collapse in, there was a kind of staggering - until that final wrenching scream of grief just pierces through everything.

As well as foreground-background, there were a great many places where the screen was filled with spiky black things - a tower of stacked chairs in the public hall, the makeshift rafts and their oars... And Sinanos' cinematography has a kind of clear-eyed beauty here, so different to the technicolour-style of Eternity and a Day, or the deeper colours of Ulysses' Gaze, perhaps closer to Landscape in the mist. Also, I wonder what the contribution from Tonino Guerra was - the different scripts he's been involved with seems outstanding as a body of work on their own - from Tarkovsky's Nostalghia to Antonioni's Deserto Rosso etc.

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It was the same train, the only old train they could find. I guess it was used in all scenes. I suppose it didn't have many carriages because it had to make short circles for the next take. I never thought anyone would notice! I don't think it matters anyway.

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