Trains: Local Routes

On the occasion of the publication of NYC film scholar and critic Genevieve Yue’s book Trains—part of Fordham Press’s Cutaways series, each entry a journey through the history of cinema guided by a single motif or formal device—Metrograph presents a two-part series curated by Yue on the criss-crossing fates of two of the 20th-century’s foundational technologies, starting in October with Local Routes, an exploration of the short-range train on-screen.

“The humble journeys of the short-range rail rarely get their due. The subway ride, the suburban commute, and the municipal railways that encircle daily life: these are spaces we typically associate with boredom and routine, unlike the adventure of their long-distance cousins. The history of film, however, tells a different story. From the Lumière brothers’ train of early cinema, rolling into the station at La Ciotat—and, by some accounts, headed straight into the audience—to the wind that sweeps through the Mumbai local in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (2024), the short line has been a place where working people have crowded together and discovered, sometimes, romantic possibility, unnerving encounters, and opportunities for existential self-interrogation. For women especially, like the housewives in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), the train offers a space of reflection and relative freedom, even as its berth is narrow, its passages fleeting.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue