The Train (2006)
By Olga Chernysheva
The vast expanses of Russia make trains into more than means of transportation: instead, they become places of residence where singular forms of life unfold. In Olga Chernysheva's work, the inhabitation of trains gains its inner form from the economics of beggary and traveling trade with cheap goods and from the aesthetics of wandering musicians and rhapsodic poets. The film's ethical mood is underlined by the "timeless" music of Mozart, which supplies the recognizable social texture of the image with an exalted well-temperedness, as if to tell the spectator: you don't have to hurry, you have already reached where you wanted to go to. For the duration of the journey, it is you who belong to this space and not it to you. Chernysheva's train can be likened to a monad, whose movement through physical space (movement to…) runs opposite to the forces that supply it with its form. The camera moves from the tail of the train to its head wagon, while the train's inner forces (traders, beggars, rhapsodic poets) move in our direction. These forces are obviously recognizable as images of the past, coming toward us from the future. It is this sequence of image-memories from the future movin…
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