"Train of Thought" by Kent Jones

I love cinema. There are few aesthetic pleasures in life that compare to staring at a bright screen in a dark theater and thinking about what you are seeing. Kent Jones’ article in the January/February 2009 issue of Film Comment, “Train of Thought,” about James Benning’s 2008 film RR, only makes me long for that pleasure all the more.

For, in my opinion, there are few films worth seeing that are released in theaters in Greenville, South Carolina. Hence my use of the word “cinema”: it’s old-fashioned and exotic enough to connote something more than “the movies.” And it’s Kent Jones’ penchant to refer to the timeless, yet not readily apparent (at least to most modern, American viewers) pleasures of film (and the world beyond film) that allows me to enjoy his article so much.

Jones opens the article by describing the basic premise of RR: the film consists of only forty-three shots (from various angles) of trains moving through, as Jones describes them, “all-American landscapes” (26). He compares RR to films ranging from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) to Sullivan’s Travels (1941) to Reverse Angle (1985). Yet Jones marks RR off as a unique pleasure and describes many of its singular images and sounds before, at the end of the article, he remarks, “The train-watching experience itself has harmonized with cinema since its beginnings, but never as fully as it does here [in RR]” (29).

And it’s this final paragraph of the article that whets my appetite for seeing not only RR but also other films that seem to possess a certain meditative quality so often absent from mainstream American cinema. Jones describes taking time for train-watching as “one of the rare moments when we give ourselves over to purely poetic time” (29). (It may help to think about that the next time you’re in a hurry and a train prevents you from getting where you want to go.) In some bizarre, fascinating way, this connects to what we’ve been learning about transcendentalism. Wasn’t it Thoreau who worried that he would live his life away without really experiencing it, without really living? And even though we commonly appeal to the movies as entertainments that have been produced to take our minds off of everyday life and the stress that comes along with it, couldn’t it possibly be more helpful and rewarding for us to watch something that reminds us we are alive, something that lets us breathe, something that reminds us of the pleasure of seeing, of vision, something deeply rooted in real experience?

Of course at first glance the contradiction between transcendentalism and watching trains lies in the fact that transcendentalists often sought solitude and learning in nature, not in noisy machines. But in today’s always-something-newer, technology-ridden society (we are blogging, remember?), isn’t there a kind of simplicity (cf. Thoreau’s motto) in a train crossing railroad tracks? A train moves in one direction and then disappears; it stays on its track. And you have to wait for it, as Benning’s film does with each shot (Jones mentions “a waiting period at the head of every shot”) (26). There’s no fast-forwarding.

We see an even closer connection between transcendentalism and both cinema and watching trains in Jones’ article, again in the final paragraph. Jones writes, “Our eyes feel most at one with the whole wide world after they’ve been locked into and released from constant motion” (29). I don’t know what evidence he has to back up that statement, but I think he’s right. Transitioning from watching a train to watching nature helps us to see nature clearer, to see details we missed before the train passed. Likewise, after even the most action-packed, mind-numbing film, we tend to see the world around us in more detail. There have been many times when I’ve walked out of a movie theater and seen the parking lot in a new way, as something both alien and immediate, real. The color of the cars seems brighter, the play of light and shadow more exciting. And—to connect back to transcendentalism—the effect can continue to the drive home and the moonlight and blur of trees that come with it.

The one problem with Jones’ article is that it’s so masterful in describing RR and the pleasure one can derive from watching it that the article makes me want to watch the film itself (or simply watch trains and the landscape surrounding them) instead of read the article again. But since RR is not exactly playing in a theater near you and may never come out on DVD, I’ll have to settle for Jones’ words and the pictures from RR that accompany them.

Note: I would also like to state explicitly that what I read about RR was a major influence in naming this blog “Reading Railroad.” My hope is that the joys you receive from reading compare to the meditative, life-affirming pleasures of watching excellent cinema, passing trains, or a beautiful, isolated landscape (or even a parking lot). Then there’s also the fact that “Reading Railroad” sounds like “Reading Rainbow,” the name of a television show which (for those of you who never watched it) featured LeVar Burton talking about children’s books. I watched it frequently on PBS a number of years ago, so it reminds me of my childhood and the love I had for books and for reading even then.