A Train Arrives at the Station

This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo station from Ozu’s The Only Son. So I decided to make a film around it, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. These two shots, of course, suggest the first train film, August and Louis Lumière’s L’Arriivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.