DVD: Train of Shadows (Guerín, 1997)

It is a coincidence, or perhaps an occasion of synchronicity, that I should watch this film the night before Pages Bookstore would call to inform me that the new Caboose translation of André Bazin’s ‘What is Cinema?’ had arrived and that my copy was ready for pick-up. Bazin’s ideals on the photographic documentation of realism, and the mummification involved in the photographer’s intent to preserve reality, are well-presented in Guerín’s Train of Shadows, a study on representation, reality vs. fiction, old vs. new, the lit and the unlit, and the ghosts of film’s past. Guerín structures his film around an actual incident involving a man named Gerald Fleury, who disappeared in a lake near the village Le Thuit while he was seeking out a shot with very specific lighting for his film. The opening of Train shows about twenty minutes of aged, hand-held family documentation, not dissimilar to modern family home videos shot on consumer camcorders. The film is in terrible condition, and is dazzling, but dizzying and difficult to watch because of the spastic patterns of spots and general deterioration that has consumed the film; it could easily pass as a black & white Brakhage or Breer film. I was concerned in the latter half of this look at Fleury’s footage that Train of Shadows would just be this, as it goes on for so long. My fears were alleviated, though, as the film shifted to a long segment in which Guerín himself photographs stunning glimpses of natural and dynamic instances of light and shadows found in and around the Fleury estate.

The film exhibits Guerín’s gift for sound design, and his ability to locate almost supernaturally alluring instances shadows, lights, and compositions of objects and spaces in nature. Both of these traits have amassed a good deal of attention in his recent In the City of Sylvia. More than these technical signatures, though, Train of Shadows focuses on what seems to be Guerín’s key interest in his films: the subjectivity and complexity of the gaze. While Sylvia is primarily interested in a more feminist approach to the gaze, asking the viewer to be critical of the male and the artist’s obsessive gaze on women, Train takes more of an interest in a neutral gaze, and takes more interest in the viewer’s own gaze, and one’s interest in the gaze of the subject. While I was lulled into Guerín’s extended study of light and reflections that made up the center episode of Train, the film once again abandons its form, and becomes an obsessive investigation of the finer details of the Fleury film showed in the previous episode. The sound design really kicks in here, with luscious clicks and clacks of a machine speeding up, rewinding, and tabbing back and forth, frame by frame, through the Fleury film.

The Fleury film becomes a different entity during the analysis of the frames. When it is first seen, it carries the precious nostalgia commonly associated with old film stock and family footage. Here, though, under the microscope, it has the staginess of fiction. At one point, Guerín juxtaposes two different shots into split screens to create an illusion of the same space and time in the composition of the frame, similar to the flattening of space in Sylvia at the cafe, such as when a woman in the background might seem to be having a discussion with a person several meters in front of her, who in reality is not listening to the woman at all. In this portion of Train, a shot of a woman in a carriage who, at the last moment before riding off, flashes a suggestive glance at something, which, when followed by a separate shot of a man also looking at something, gives the illusion that they are looking at each other. This is basic film editing, picked apart right before our eyes, but it has a meticulous graduation that makes it seems as if we are witnessing the very discovery of the power of editing.