Kawalerowicz: Pociag (Night Train) (1959)

This extraordinary film has often been described as the Polish New Wave’s response to Hitchcock, and, on paper, there’s certainly something Hitchcockian about the premise: a man and a woman are forced to share a sleeping berth on an overnight train from Warsaw to the Baltic Sea, during which she starts to suspect that he may be a murderer. For the most part, though, narrative and character are largely extraneous to this mood piece. More specifically, the geometrical carriages of The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train couldn’t be further from Kawalerowicz’s project, which is one of the first films set on a moving train that feels shot on a moving train; in many ways, it is how a phantom ride might look if translated into a feature film. Most of the action takes place in the compartments and corridor of a single sleeper carriage, and most of the time the camera has to dodge at least three or four people to propel or even sustain the mise-en-scene. That might sound  claustrophobic – and it is claustrophobic at moments – but Kawalerowicz’s sinuous, silky sequence shots, usually accompanied by muted xylophones, subsume the camera into the momentum of the train; or, rather, subsume the train itself into its own slipstream and momentum, until it’s no longer a discrete space, but a bundle of movement through space. To that end, the camera tends to float just at the threshold of the train – there’s nearly always a window or a door open – while many of the crucial moments involve characters leaning, looking or climbing out of windows and doors as they move through the night. And, as the night progresses, the characters are also subsumed into their own slipstreams, and those slipstreams into that of the train, until neither the characters nor the train exist except as participants in a collective flux that the camera somehow manages to crystallise and consummate, in a kind of cinematic frotteurism. In the end, it’s hard to say whether it’s fulfilled or dispersed when we finally arrive at the Baltic – the representative limit of so many Polish films of this era – just because it feels fulfilled at the very moment of dispersion, like the tensile togetherness that moves through the audience when the film ends, but the lights haven’t gone up yet.