It is the arrival of a train entering La Ciota station, filmed by Louis Lumière in 1895, which constitutes one of the very first shots of cinema and will outline the contours of what will become the seventh art. The most expensive scene in the history of silent films is also that of a train accident in Buster Keaton’s The General, in 1926, filmed in a single take with a real locomotive. First proof, if any, that the train is inseparable from cinema. find there. Thus, the station, a place of intersection, is a high sentimental place in the cinema, whether it is the scene of heartbreaking farewells, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Call Me by Your Name, or of passionate reunions, as in Un homme and a woman and La Boom. But you can also kill there, like in Les Incorruptibles or Nikita, or even dance there, like in Slumdog Millionaire or Sexe entre amis. Sometimes, the station can even transform the film, as in Le Chance by Krzysztof Kieślowski, where the main character sees his destiny change according to a train he misses or catches. train journeys are also highly cinegenic. With the summer holidays approaching, we wanted to rank, subjectively, the best movie scenes on board a train. Whether the action is entirely on the rails or the trip is temporary, here are the ones that rocked us or made us laugh, travel or dream. Beware of the automatic closing of the doors, watch out for the departure!The water train of Spirited Away VoyageTravel in the journey, the one-way train in the direction of the “bottom of the lake” station that little Chihiro takes is the most poetic of all cinema trains. Accompanied by the hamster, the fly and the Faceless victim of the witch Yubaba, surrounded by ghostly, sad and absent workers but lulled by the piano of Joe Hisaishi, she seems to fly over the sea while landscapes worthy of a romantic painting pass by. .Inside this car, object of our daily life, the story finds a little realism and it is in this train with no possible return that she took alone that Chihiro’s journey ends. She has grown up and, contemplative, she fixes the horizon, a symbol of the future. Through this famous train scene, Hayao Miyazaki offers the viewer a moment of delicate poetry that soothes the lively rhythm of his story and suspends time for three minutes of pure melancholy. second film of the Toledano and Nakache tandem opens Montparnasse station in Paris. In a railway sequence of pure delight, the directors laid the foundations of their story. In turn, the small and big protagonists of the film are introduced to us and it is through this old Intercity that their main personality traits, on which the comedy of the film will be built, are sketched. Anxious parents, over-excited children and overwhelmed animators, we already laugh a lot. Recalling their memories of filming at our microphone, Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache declared that in the cinema, “trains, children and animals are the most difficult to film”. In Our Happy Days, they ticked two boxes out of three, and this, for our greatest happiness. in the first part of this real-time romantic trilogy, which has become as precious as it is timeless. A supposedly ephemeral romantic encounter that gave pride of place to words in dialogues on life, death and love, sometimes profound, often innocent, written by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the prime of their twenties. Trilogy Before: memory of a trip in pleasant company The first part of this river film was shot day by day and in chronological order, each weekend being devoted to working on the script for the following week. In the end, twenty-five days, 2.5 million budget and many round trips between Vienna and Salzburg will be enough to put in a box this work of youth, on the ideals and the questions inherent in this very particular period. The sleeper train from Compartment number 6 “It’s not where you go that matters when you run away, but where you leave.” It is while meditating on this quote and to the sound of “Voyage voyage” by Desireless that Laura, a young Finnish girl, will board a train heading for the region of Murmansk in Russia, for an icy road trip. The journey in the company of his fellow car mate, a young man given to alcohol and questionable hygiene, promises to be long and uncomfortable. But, as their journey progresses, their relationship will calm down and go where you least expect it. their one-to-one dinners in a car-bar which has more charm than those of our Ouigo, the exchanges between these protagonists who are opposites illustrate how travel opens our minds. Even on board a very small compartment will crackle, the dreamers will find their account there. the Aquatic Life boat, where travel and a change of scenery are also on the agenda. Respecting the well-known meticulousness of the director, the train which welcomes the Whitman siblings, dislocated and on a spiritual quest, is a real reconstructed train which, for the purposes of filming, circulated for the most part in the desert of Rajasthan, excluding studio shooting. despite all the logistical difficulties inherent in such an exercise. From the train combining Indian style and the luxury of an Orient-Express – where everything was done by hand in the purest Indian tradition – to the luggage of the three brothers designed by Marc Jacobs, the trip aboard the Darjeeling Limited, straight out of the overflowing imagination of Wes Anderson, is a feast for the eyes. We could go on and on about the list of legendary cinema trains – from the Hogwarts Express to the Pole Express, from the Snowpiercer at the Last Train to Busan, from the metaphorical train of Death by Hunt to the ingeniously filmed one of Unbreakable – but we too have a train to catch!
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