“It was my son’s idea,” Polish filmmaker Maciej J. Drygas says of the ominous Franz Kafka quote which opens his new archive-based film Trains, a world premiere in International Competition at IDFA this week.
“There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope…but not for us.”
At first, Drygas was reluctant to use Kafka’s words. “I thought it might narrow the interpretation of the film,” he confides. Eventually, though, he decided it was “super suitable” for a movie that has a bleak undertow. “I thought these words are very heavily loaded with meaning…and I didn’t want just to do a movie about the history of locomotives. I wanted to show a deeper truth about the human condition through the journeys on the train.”
“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 travelling. The joy was the spark to begin this project. But very quickly they [the trains] became the curse of humanity…”
Drygas wrote down the idea for the documentary in his notebook 10 years ago. Right from the outset, he knew how the documentary could be structured. There would be deliberate use of repetition. One motif which recurs again and again is soldiers in trains.
The dogged filmmaker and his team scoured the shelves of 98 different archives around the world, and used material from around 45 of them. This was a process that took years…and cost a small fortune.
“It was a very, very expensive movie, probably the most expensive documentary ever made in Poland,” Drygas sighs as he remembers being charged 11,000 Euros a minute for some of the footage.
“There were also archives that gave me a discount. I really enjoyed collaborating with British Pathé.”
The director also pays tribute to the Dutch. The Eye Filmmuseum was so enthusiastic about the project that it became a producer partner.
Footage here, all shot during the 20th Century, includes everything and everybody from Charlie Chaplin to Adolf Hitler, from Nazi death wagons to the last word in luxury travel. Much of the imagery, though, deals with war. Soldiers are being transferred to front lines. Civilians are often fleeing in the opposite direction.
The director loves to spend time in archives. “It is an illness I will never be cured of,” he jokes of his obsession with found footage. “Archive material is my life.” In his 2005 feature, One Day In People’s Poland, he took a seemingly random day, September 27, 1962, in the history of Soviet-era Poland. He then spent five years researching, discovering just how closely the paranoid government of the period tried to monitor the lives of the people.
A difference between Trains and the director’s earlier work, though, is that Drygas, who knows Polish archives inside out, is now using international archives.
He wanted the sharpest footage possible. At the same time, he wanted to keep the “taste” of the original material. If there was graininess, he would therefore sometimes keep it. The images he used were shot in many different formats, with a huge variety of camera and techniques. Some of the footage was shot privately by non-professionals (including home movies made by German soldiers). His challenge was to bring everything together. If material hadn’t been digitalised, he rented labs and did the job himself.
“But when Russia invaded Ukraine, I decided I didn’t want to spend even one Euro on supporting Russian archives – and they have very good archives.”
Yes, legendary Russian auteur Eisenstein is spotted briefly, his face hidden behind a newspaper, but this material was found in the Netherlands. There are also shots of Soviet soldiers transporting Stalin’s portrait – but again, these weren’t sourced in Russia.
Trains has a very distinctive rhythm. Early in his research, Dryhas had spent a considerable amount of time looking for writing done inside train carriages (“letters, journals, diaries.”)
“But when I started editing, I realised very quickly that the film didn’t need any text, sound or speaking voices…it is self-explanatory. It was kind of an experiment. I wanted to do something completely new in my artistic life – to make an 80-minute movie without one word in it.”
The Kafka quote is as close the doc comes to conventional commentary. Instead, on the soundtracks, we hear rhythmic music. He used fragments of composer Paweł Szymański’s piece, Compartment, in the background. He also uses foley (everyday sound effects) and ambient sound. “I myself recorded train sounds,” the director remembers.
Drygas hopes viewers will feel that they were on an emotional journey. “I wanted viewers not just to bear witness but to draw them inside this journey.”
As for the horrific footage of Holocaust victims crammed inside trucks or their corpses piled high, he felt this was necessary to include. “I wanted to showcase the structure where the same train cars that were taking these people to concentration camps were the same ones when these people died – and then [other people] were cheerfully going home on exactly the same trains.”
At this week’s IDFA premiere, Drygas was very happy to see audiences reacting just as he had hoped, like passengers who had been on a big rollercoaster ride.
“I saw that people watching this movie are smiling and laughing but also crying. That as exactly what I intended,” Drygas concludes. “I wanted this journey to be emotional but maybe also exhausting…”
Millennium Against Gravity its handling the Polish release of the documentary.
The documentary was made through the director’s own company, Drygas Film Production, and produced by his partner, Vita Żelakeviciute. “If I said to a normal producer that I would make a film once in seven years, then I would be fired from the job,” he jokes of why he likes to keep his doc projects in the family.
