INTERPRETATIONS
Trains in the night
(On Andre Delvaux’s One Night... a Train)
This essay approaches André Delvaux’s One
Night... a Train (Un soir, un train, 1968)
in the light of Delvaux’s characteristic oneiric poetics,
as exemplified in his 1965 film The Man Who Had His
Hair Cut Short (De Man die zijn haar kort liet
knippen). The text accentuates Delvaux’s aptitude
for making the atmosphere of uncertainty, incompleteness
and undefined, mystical anticipation, while remaining true
to the ontological status of film images. As oneirism is
a psychic state similar to the dream, and the dream itself
has realistic, mimetic effect, the oneiric achievement
in a medium which is largely mimetic representation, such
as film, has to be carried out without questioning the
truth of film images. Only then, when the filmmaker succeeds
in making the film images as close as possible to the appearance
of the world outside film, does he succeed in making an
oneiric (dreamlike) movie. Hence Delvaux’s One Night...
a Train is one of the greatest achievements of oneiric
cinema.
Bruno Kragić |
