https://www.sabzian.be/text/the-train-stop-by-sergei-loznitsa

The Train Stop by Sergei Loznitsa

VERTAALD DOOR TRANSLATED BY TRADUIT PAR Mary Kitroeff


When our sleep is nothing but an eye / no – sleep-actor acting/... 

Gennady Aigui1

During an interview at the Cinéma du Réel film festival in March 2004, Sergei told me of a childhood memory that gave him the idea for his short film The Train Stop. On his way to visit his grandmother on a night train together with his parents, they found themselves having to get off at an isolated station in the countryside and wait there for a connecting train. When they arrived at the station, everyone was already asleep. The family left the waiting room before daybreak, half asleep. “We felt as if we were living in another reality, in a state between wakefulness and sleep. There was an abyss between these two states,” the filmmaker recalled.

How does one film sleep? Sleeping bodies surrender to the gaze in a state of vulnerability and, often, suffering. Contemplating them provokes in the viewer a feeling of annoyance, as if it were an indecent act, something done out of morbid curiosity. Even more so when those sleepers have been brought together by a chance journey within the closed doors of a waiting room. The lack of privacy of the location obliges them to take on uncomfortable, tortuous poses.

After all, doesn’t this place represent the antechamber of death? A community of bodies tormented by their departure?

Certain artists knew how to translate similar situations by avoiding the consequent traps and by arousing in the reader or the viewer the emotion evoked by looking upon mortal beauty, in the words of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sculptor Henry Moore comes to mind who drew, in 1940, Londoners sleeping in the Tube during the air raids. The Armenian film director Artavazd Pelechian lucidly and lovingly filmed the sleeping faces of passengers on a train to the country (The End, 1982).

In his first short film, The Train Stop, Sergei Loznitsa explores a state/limit through sumptuous images in which darkness and light harmonize with each other. As he will do in subsequent films, the director chose to film a single location, the waiting room at a train station, gathering together a community in passage – the sleepers – as they wait for dawn and the arrival of their train.

He shoots long takes of sleepers, alone or in small groups; of their faces or their bodies; of movements that sometimes animate their immobility.

Sound is equally important as the image, if not more so. Whether it be the whistling of the train and the roaring of the wheels; the grating of the doors; the howling of the wind; or the sound of breathing, sighing or wheezing. The heavy darkness is broken by noises and the night stirs, coming alive.

It is in the same way, but by using light, that the film director evokes, for the perceptive listener, the passing of the seasons and the insular eternity in which the waiting room and its sleepers are immersed. In the beginning of the film, we hear the stridulation of the cicadas and the drone of an insect in the darkness. This evolves into a musical symphony of sounds evoking autumn and winter, rain or the force of the wind.

Most of the travelers are sleeping folded in on themselves. They’re trying to protect themselves from the lack of privacy by extremely tense movements. At times it is as if they’re being tortured. A young militiaman sleeps with his head between his knees. The bodies of sleepers topple into the void. A man braces himself against a wooden bench.

Whenever a sleeper brushes against his neighbor in his sleep, he immediately sits up straight with a jolt.

The waiting room is a place of solitude, but suddenly the filmmaker captures the flash of the anonymous hands of a group of sleepers like the foam of a whirlpool.

The gaze concentrates on the heads of the sleepers. An old man, his baldness crowned with a halo of wispy white hair, hides his face in his hands which have been ravaged by working the land, his fingers severely gnarled.

A child sleeps with its head thrown back, its mouth slightly agape. Its hair sticks to its brow with perspiration. The camera slowly leaves the child’s face and moves down, focusing on its body wedged between its mother’s knees.

A man with a sparse beard sleeps with his hand on his brow. He’s having difficulty breathing and emits a slight rattle. A peasant woman awakens, passes her hand over her face, readjusts her scarf and goes straight back to sleep.

The succession of these portraits of sleepers arouses in us a feeling that the night has entered our gaze, as if we have been suddenly physically transported to this second life which is our dreams, its gates separating us from the invisible world, as Gérard de Nerval believed.

  • 1Festivités d’hiver, translated from Russian by Léon Robel; Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1978.

Images from Polustanok [The Train Stop] (Sergei Loznitsa, 2000)

This translation was originally published in Sergei Loznitsa (2011), a booklet made for the 13th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

Many thanks to Dimitris Kerkinos and the family of Serge Meurant

ARTICLE
04.12.2024
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In Passage, Sabzian invites film critics, authors, filmmakers and spectators to send a text or fragment on cinema that left a lasting impression.
Pour Passage, Sabzian demande à des critiques de cinéma, auteurs, cinéastes et spectateurs un texte ou un fragment qui les a marqués.
In Passage vraagt Sabzian filmcritici, auteurs, filmmakers en toeschouwers naar een tekst of een fragment dat ooit een blijvende indruk op hen achterliet.
The Prisma section is a series of short reflections on cinema. A Prisma always has the same length – exactly 2000 characters – and is accompanied by one image. It is a short-distance exercise, a miniature text in which one detail or element is refracted into the spectrum of a larger idea or observation.
La rubrique Prisma est une série de courtes réflexions sur le cinéma. Tous les Prisma ont la même longueur – exactement 2000 caractères – et sont accompagnés d'une seule image. Exercices à courte distance, les Prisma consistent en un texte miniature dans lequel un détail ou élément se détache du spectre d'une penséée ou observation plus large.
De Prisma-rubriek is een reeks korte reflecties over cinema. Een Prisma heeft altijd dezelfde lengte – precies 2000 tekens – en wordt begeleid door één beeld. Een Prisma is een oefening op de korte afstand, een miniatuurtekst waarin één detail of element in het spectrum van een grotere gedachte of observatie breekt.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati once said, “I want the film to start the moment you leave the cinema.” A film fixes itself in your movements and your way of looking at things. After a Chaplin film, you catch yourself doing clumsy jumps, after a Rohmer it’s always summer, and the ghost of Akerman undeniably haunts the kitchen. In this feature, a Sabzian editor takes a film outside and discovers cross-connections between cinema and life.
Jacques Tati zei ooit: “Ik wil dat de film begint op het moment dat je de cinemazaal verlaat.” Een film zet zich vast in je bewegingen en je manier van kijken. Na een film van Chaplin betrap je jezelf op klungelige sprongen, na een Rohmer is het altijd zomer en de geest van Chantal Akerman waart onomstotelijk rond in de keuken. In deze rubriek neemt een Sabzian-redactielid een film mee naar buiten en ontwaart kruisverbindingen tussen cinema en leven.

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