29/11/2024 - We chatted to the Polish documentary director, whose recent IDFA winner reflects on the atrocities and joys of the 20th century

(© Vita Drygas)

Established Polish documentarian Maciej J Drygas maps out the unique process of putting together Trains [+see also:
film review
interview: Maciej J Drygas
film profile], an 80-minute found-footage film that reflects on the atrocities and joys of the 20th century. The movie earned him the Best Film Award and Best Editing for Rafał Listopad at the recently concluded IDFA (see the news), and it screened later in the Doc@PÖFF section of the Black Nights Film Festival.

Cineuropa: During your research, you found a lot of literary material, but ultimately, you didn’t use a single word in the film – it’s silent. Why?
Maciej J Drygas: When I started researching the archive footage, I was also going through documents – texts that were written either on or about trains, memos and so on. I wrote a script with a libretto based on these writings – some of them humorous, some very dramatic – and it was compelling. For example, there was a memo about trains carrying barrels of water to Siberia, where gulag prisoners were forced to build train tracks. They were so parched that they ignored the shots fired at them and drank all the water, even from the locomotive. But when we started to put together the first sequences, we realised that the visual material didn’t need to be supported by words. In fact, words weakened the impact of the images.

We edited Trains differently from my previous films, where I used the appropriation method – giving new meaning to the material I used. Here, we allowed the footage to seduce us; we followed it, as if we were boarding a train. So, the writing became obsolete. It wasn’t an easy choice to make. The editing was a long process, and even once the film was finished, I had doubts about the last six to eight minutes. I don’t remember how many versions of the ending we went through – maybe 35? When we finally finished, I started working with a fantastic Lithuanian sound designer, Saulius Urbanavičius.

This is not your first film exploring the life of ordinary people paying a huge price while living under different regimes. Why are you looking back at the 20th century again? Is it a distant time or quite the opposite?
It’s not far away at all. I have a notebook in front of me that I used for this film, and the first note I made – dated 19 September 2014 – was: “The journey of a train is a metaphor for life: people travel, ride, read books, sleep. People go to wars, they return, or their bodies return.” I knew I wouldn’t be making a film about the history of railways, but I believed I could make the metaphorical connection because our lives are also a kind of journey. So, while researching the archives, I looked for materials that were close to people and their emotions. I wanted to make a film that had the chance to be a grim, timeless tale – with a chorus of voices, celebrating the immense joy at the fact that this mechanism, which enables movement, had been created. But, as we see, it was soon subordinated to the army, carrying soldiers, and wars became the film's leitmotif. This film has a dark conclusion: we don’t learn from our mistakes; we repeat them. I feel that this film is timeless, and unfortunately, what is happening in the world today proves that.

You browsed through thousands of pieces of footage from 98 archives around the world. Was there any footage that stood out particularly for you?
Sorting through all of that material was a lengthy process, and one of the things that was important to me was showing the wars from different perspectives – for example, the World War I footage of masses of people who go to war and return without hands or without sight. I think the shot of a soldier getting a prosthetic face is very powerful. And then, life restarts again: women cleaning carriages, workers mending the tracks.

An edit I really like is the one that combines Charlie Chaplin’s cinema with Adolf Hitler. I was overjoyed when I saw footage of a screening room in a carriage – I wondered, what were people watching? The screen was empty, so I edited in footage of Chaplin’s The Idle Class.  Also, when I saw the material with Chaplin and the locomotive arriving at the station, I thought that audiences interested in the history of film would find a lot to engage with. This included footage of Eisenstein riding a train, which I found in a Dutch archive. So, these sequences – the emotional greeting of Chaplin, which is then connected to a similar sequence with Hitler – are not so different. I mean, people are there and their emotions are similar, but in Chaplin’s case, we have someone bringing joy to the people, whereas in Hitler’s case, the person is bringing an apocalypse.

But if we look at my film from a broader perspective, I did use the appropriation method like in my previous works – but within sequences, creating new meanings by assembling particular footage. So, in a way, working on this type of film resembles working on a fiction feature for me because I bring my own artistic world to life. Some may accuse me of not portraying events accurately, but that was never my point. It’s the truth I’m trying to convey to the audience, without lies or dissonance, but through my own vision.