Trains, Children & Dreams: A Shorts Program

Director: Multiple Dirs

1977 / 67min / DCP

A program of short works, including the great-grandaddy of all train-oriented cinema, Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.

“The train that begins Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste also sets in motion a child’s dreaming. Like Conner’s synechdocal found footage classic A Movie, the loosely connected scenes that follow are retrieved from film history, as if to say that our dreams are made of movies, or vice versa. Wasn’t it a kind of dream to imagine, in 1896, that the Lumières’ train would tumble into the audience? Or that, in Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for the Train, the children of Lo Hermida, a working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Santiago, might one day see themselves on a real cinema screen? Or, despite the protest made by one of Harun Farocki’s young daughters—‘I don’t want to hear or see any more trains!’—the locomotive that arrives just as she and her sister drift off to sleep?” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Ignacio Aguero, 1988, 55 mins)

L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Louis Lumière, 1896, 1 mins)

Valse Triste (Bruce Conner, 1977, 5 mins)

Bedtime Stories: Railways (Harun Farocki, 1977, 6 mins)

Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, September 5th

Part of Trains: Local Routes