Jose Luis Guerin
Spain
Films about the family, more than fictional ones, have the power to revive our ghosts, to bring the dead back to life," explains Catalan Jose Luis Guerin, director of Tren de sombras (Train of Shadows). The pic is art-house fare at its most challenging. In 1930, Gerard Fleury, a Parisian lawyer, went to look for the right light for a film he was shooting around Normandy's Lake Thuit. He died the same day, in circumstances which have never been made clear - an idea brought to life in the film's final images.
The title comes from Maxim Gorky: "It isn't life, but its shadow, it isn't movement, but its silent ghost... This, too, is a train of shadows."
In 1990's Innisfree - which featured at that year's Cannes - Guerin went back to the village where John Ford's Quiet Man was shot and looked at the impact of the film on the population. Train, his foth pic, is likewise a daring study of the effects of light and time - which is to say that it is a study of cinema as seen through the eyes of Fleury.
Almost entirely free of dialogue, it is the haunting images of Train which
dominate - of the Thuit Chateau, of Fleury's daughter on a swing (from the first black and white section, which is a reconstruction of the films Fleury himself made), to a beautifully shot Normandy landscape, to the final images of a boat disappearing into the fog. Unusual, striking camera angles, image alternation and split screen techniques shuttle us cannily between past and present, real and imagined with a rare artistic integrity.
Guerin thus shows an unfashionable willingness to allow his film's effect to take place in our own minds rather than on the screen. "I wanted," he says, "to recover some of the mysteries of the cinema that have disappeared as the result of mass cinema consumption." Which makes his film a homage - to Fleury, to Normandy, and finally to the potential purity of cinema itself. Jonathan Holland
Prod co: Grup Cinema Art/Films 59
Prods: Pere Portabella, Hector Faver
Dir/ Scr: Jose Luis Guerin
Ph: Tomas Pladevall
Art dir: Rosa Ros, Isabel Caellas
Ed: Manuel Alminana
Cast: Juliette Gaultier, Ivon Orvain, Anne Celine Auche
Running time: 88 mins
Int sales: Grup Cinema Ar
