Maciej Drygas: Trains
“Trains” got the first prize at IDFA 2024.
I got a screener from Lithuanian co-producer of the film Rasa Miskinyte, Era Film.
I know of Drygas from the Balticum Film&TV Festival on Bornholm. Two of his films were shown there, both of them were awarded: “Hear My Cry” (1991, shown on Bornholm 1992) and “State of Weightlesness” (1994, shown 1995). The former is a film I have seen several times and used in film school teaching (Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne has published a fine dvd box with 4 of Drygas films) – it is a masterpiece about Ryszard Siwiec, who set fire to himself at a stadium in Warsaw in September 1968. As it is said in a text from the dvd box: The film contains a terribly long seven second (!) report of the tragedy captured by a camera operator of the Polish Newsreel Agency.
Drygas builds the film around family of Siwiec and witnesses, people who were at the stadium, where a yearly Harvest Festival were performed. How come that this protest was not heard – against communism in the year 1968, where soldiers from the Warsaw Pact countries in August invaded Czechoslovakia to stop Alexander Dubček‘s Prague Spring reforms. People were dancing on the stadium while a man immolated himself. From a film point of view it was amazing, what Drygas did with the material.
The same goes for “Trains” that can be seen as a film on the 20th century. Joy and sorrow, war and peace, based on archive material that Drygas and his collaborators have been collected from sources all over the world. For years of course. A film that is more than actual of today with the wars and conflicts, we experience.
A film like that with no words demand a musicality, a sense of rythm and dramaturgy that in this case is demonstrated fully. Drygas knows his métier.
In an interview with Business Doc Europe (Geoffrey Macnab), Drygas says, ““The train is a very peculiar and weird place for me. When you step in a train, you have the desire for something to change,” he reflects, “Trains were built because of the joy of traveling. The joy was the spark to begin this project. But very quickly they [the trains] became the curse of humanity…”
For someone of my age it is easy to follow the film – the building of the trains till they are worn out, First WW, soldiers going, soldiers coming home, the luxurious dining cars, fashion shows, Hitler greeting people from the train, Chaplin being warmly welcomed, Eisenstein discovered and pro-Stalin demonstrations (Drygas says in the interview mentioned that he refrained from using Russian archives), and of course trains going to the death camps at WW2 are there, as well as trains bringing the corpses away and those who survived.
I was waiting for clips from “Night Mail”, the British classic about the train going from London to Glasgow. They came and I was quoting for myself “…who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”.
The IDFA jury that awarded Drygas said: ““The jury was unanimous. This is a bold and inventive use of archive. The film shows us routes to the positive and negative consequences of modern industrial innovation. It harnesses the magic of cinema and as an audience we are haunted by our present historical time, even while we bear witness to the past”.
The ending of the film is fabulous, train tracks intertwine, they go here and there, to nowhere and everywhere, to beauty, to the future, to a better world?
Trains, Poland & Lithuania, 2024, 81 mins.
