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2006.
45

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

Early works of film barbarogenius
Elio Petri’s films, or, De te fabula narratur!
Qatsi trilogy: respectable project, unevenly presented
Divine decadence — Bob Fosse’s Cabaret

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