Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema
Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema
ByTrisha GuptaTrisha Gupta / Updated: Apr 4, 2021, 06:00 IST
TRISHA GUPTA
Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973, remains a visually arresting reflection on India’s train journeys
The connection between films and
trains dates back to cinema’s origins. One of the Lumiere brothers’ first films was of a train arriving at the station in La Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in 1895, is central to the mythology of the movies. The claim (made in several film histories) is that early audiences leapt from their chairs in alarm as Lumiere’s locomotive seemed to race towards them. Even in soundless, jerky black-and-white, the story goes, the power of the moving pictures was such that people – almost couldn’t tell them apart from life.