Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, 2021) (Patreon)

Peter Tscherkassky's newest film world premiered in Cannes, his fourth appearance in the Quinzaine. Cannes is not particularly friendly to non-narrative and experimental film, to put it lightly, but Tscherkassky is one of a handful of avant-gardists whose work has captured the attention of the broader cinephile community. (Nathaniel Dorsky is another, and recently folks like Kevin Everson, Sky Hopinka, and Jodie Mack have attracted more diverse audiences.) Tscherkassky is currently the best known experimental filmmaker from Austria, a nation that has an exceptionally large a-g filmmaking community. So why is Tscherkassky the breakout star?

Of course, his films are exceptionally well-made. His Cinemascope trilogy (1999-2005), in particular, exposed viewers to an entirely new language of sounds and images. Many of the basic elements of Tscherkassky's work had been in play before -- looping, superimposition, frame lines and sprocket holes, positive / negative reversal, and an approach to montage that is both propulsive and disorienting. Part of what Tscherkassky added to the mix is an awareness of how the use of found images could generate a perceptual clash between our cinematic image-bank and the materialist deformations applied to those images. When we see Barbara Hershey menaced by the instability of the film-strip (Outer Space and Dream Work), or Eli Wallach narrowly evading death as the whole visual field conspires against him (Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine), our responses to formal stimuli are supercharged with a psychological frisson that isn't exactly the same as narrative, but could be said to run parallel to it.

Train Again, the new film, is Tscherkassky's tribute to the great Viennese master Kurt Kren, and in particular an homage to Kren's 1978 film 37/78 Tree Again. (Kren began his titles with their corpus number and year of production. He made it all the way to 50/96.) Where Kren's film was about changes in light, weather, and shape over time (a single tree shot over fifty days), and Tscherkassky's recent works have been about the tension between form and culture, Train Again is about the formal condensation of history, as exemplified in the role of the railway throughout cinema.

There have been entire books written about the connection between cinema and trains. In particular, cultural historians of the 19th century have argued that the train's reorganization of the landscape for its rider was analogous to cinema's transformation of time and space, through montage or even just the segmentation of life into 24 frames a second. (Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book The Railway Journey is well worth a look.) Also, numerous filmmakers have explored this relationship in their work, including Dziga Vertov, Abel Gance, Ken Jacobs, and even Godard. So in drawing this connection between cinematic / perceptual history and the train (locomotives and locomotion), Tscherkassky is walking on well-trod ground.

To be fair, in calling his film Train Again, Tscherkassky is acknowledging his return to one of the 20th century's deepest conceptual wells. It's a film intended to function as a repetition and a rehearsal, and for better or worse, that's exactly what Train Again is. The film begins with a startling opening segment, in which an approaching train at a 45-degree angle is juxtaposed with horses approaching (and growing in size) at a seemingly faster rate. This is a reversal of industrial history as we know it, the noble animal outpacing the "iron horse." 

But soon after, Tscherkassky embarks on a greatest-hits collection of films that have made express(ive) use of trains. We hear the score from The Man With a Movie Camera, and Tscherkassky introduces easy-to-spot clips from The Great Train Robbery, Ballet mécanique, The Arrival at La Ciotat, and other early train films. He subjects these bits of film to his rather familiar process, with train tracks morphing into or colliding with the edges of the celluloid, or the essentially orderly movement of the trains being disrupted by jagged collaged intrusions. Optical printing produces new highlights and unexpected irises and shadows, resulting in a highly volatile representational universe.

Despite Tscherkassky's ample mastery of the materials, it's hard to shake the feeling that Train Again is telling us what we already know. Maybe this is the point, and the film is a postmodern gesture about the exhaustion of cinema and its dominant tropes. But this reading is belied by the throbbing excitement that the film's formal strategies clearly mean to generate. It's certainly the case that, if one were introducing students to the documented history of the cinematic train, Train Again would be an ideal teaching tool. It neatly encapsulates the problem as it's been understood in both academic and filmmaking circles.

All the same, Train Again has the dull redolence of a major artist's mid-career effort: comforting, agreeable, yet all too familiar. It will be duly programmed and applauded, but at this point Tscherkassky is providing shocks that we are quite prepared to absorb.