Un soir, un train: Nightmare of a Divided Self and Nation

Commissioned by the Belgian web site Cinetek and posted in December 2022.

Displacement in relation to language stands at the center of André Delvaux’s troubling and troubled Un soir, un train (1968) — so precisely and so relentlessly that even the disquiet created by the collision of disparate nouns in the poetic title (a time and a place/ thing/vehicle, improbably yoked together like a chance meeting between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table) arguably becomes lost or at least diluted in its English translation. One Night… A Train, by contrast, feels like the opening phrase in a familiar-sounding narrative, a prosaic flow of words that accounts for the three- period ellipsis, continuance replacing collision. And somewhere in between this collision and this continuance is the sort of stasis or uncertainty of both time and place evoked by the Flemish title of the Johan Daisne novella that the film is loosely based on, De trein der traagheid, which my Google translation engine, recognizing it as Dutch, translates as “The Train of Indolence”.

In the film, a conflict is being played out between Mathias (Yves Montand), a Flemish linguist and literature professor, and a theatrical stage designer named Anne (Anouk Aimée) who left France to live with him in Belgium and feels both excluded and scorned by the Flemish members of Mathias’ circle. Read more

Global Discoveries on DVD: The Importance of Not Being An Auteur

My column in the Winter 2021 issue of CinemaScope. — J.R.

Teaching an online course on Agnès Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-Blu-ray box set, The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, every week. The packaging reminds me in some ways of the handsome 78 rpm albums I used to cherish as objects and totems in the mid- to late 1940s, when I was still a toddler, although Criterion’s version of this sort of assembly, held in a box, manages to be neater and more compact. There’s also a richly illustrated and annotated 200-page book inside the box, with essays by Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, and excellent “program notes” on all the films by Michael Koresky. In short, plenty to keep a coronavirus shut-in busy, even without a course to teach. 

The course has gradually brought home to me the complexly ambiguous lesson that Varda wasn’t really or exactly an auteur, at least not in the boys’-club meaning of that term as it’s most commonly used. But not being an auteur gave her a kind of freedom and a form of elasticity denied to most auteurs. Read more