Reels and Wheels: The Railway and the Cinema, 5 cr

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the basic concepts of film analysis including camera movements and perspectives, editing, light and sound, composition and mise-en-scène, as well as principles of filmic narration, with an emphasis on ways of reading and interpreting the language of cinema. Thematically, we will focus on representations of trains and railway journeys on screen. Indeed, the histories of the cinema and the railway are deeply entwined: as technologies of movement that operate through the turning of wheels and reels respectively, both are connected to modernity’s machines and to new spatial experiences and sensibilities; as the audience in the cinema is transported to new spaces, the train passenger experiences a panorama of landscapes that flit across the screen-like window of the train. This love affair between the cinema and the railway, discussed by Lynne Kirby in Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, will serve as a starting point for an exploration of how filmmakers from the beginnings of film history in the late nineteenth century (e.g. George Albert Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel, 1899) to the present (e.g. Magnus Martens’s SAS: Red Notice, 2021) have used the train journey as a poetic, narrative and cinematic device to reflect on the ideological, geopolitical and aesthetic dimensions of modern (im)mobilities. In doing so, we will move across railway and film history, from the American western (where trains functioned as figures of manifest destiny) to the interwar political thriller (Alfred Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes, 1938), postcolonial nationalist cinema (Ravi Chopra’s 1980 film The Burning Train), post-apocalyptic fiction (Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer, 2013), and the conspiracy thriller (Jaume Collet-Serra, The Commuter, 2018). We will discuss a different film every week. Each seminar session will be followed by a screening of the film for the following week (hence the four-hour slot).