I
Peter Tscherkassky’s 20-minute film Train Again unearths some new materialist marvels while expanding on those typically Tscherkasskian sensations the Austrian filmmaker achieves through the technique of contact printing, in which found footage is copied by hand, frame by frame, onto unexposed film stock. His announcement reads as follows: “18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film, 3/60 Bäume im Herbst (3/60 Trees in Autumn), he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. 18 years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (an homage to the Lumiere brothers and their 1895 L’arrivé d’un train), I embarked on Train Again. This film is an homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All aboard!”
II
Before quickly shifting into high gear, Train Again begins with two static shots of people waiting, both presented as negative images and lasting 15 to 20 seconds. The first shows two people with their suitcases on a deserted stretch of railroad. One is standing in the middle of the track, back to the viewer, presumably gazing into the distance along the vanishing lines suggested by the two rails converging toward the horizon. The other is lying on the right side of the track, head on the rail, as if listening for an approaching train. The second shot sets up a makeshift cinema situation: people are gathering in front of a screen, bringing their own chairs and sitting down, glancing forward, waiting for the show to start, although one lady at the right repeatedly looks back toward the camera, and, by implication, at the audience. What are we waiting for?
III
The auspicious connection of cinema and trains harks back to the official beginning of the seventh art. Although L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat was, contrary to myth, not part of the program of ten films that Auguste and Louis Lumiere presented as the first exhibited motion-picture screening on December 28, 1895, it would be shown to an audience in January 1896. Famously, it inaugurated an even more powerful myth: that the 50-second shot of a mighty steam locomotive rolling into the station and toward the camera caused an uproar in the audience, with some viewers fleeing in a screaming fit, afraid the train might hit them. While this story is considered an urban legend and/or a clever marketing ploy, its poetic appeal remains understandably irresistible: could there be a better illustration of the powerful impact made by the new technology of cinema?
For while the movies are roughly contemporaneous with the automobile and the aeroplane rather than the railroad (the first locomotives were built at the beginning of the 19th
