Films and trains follow the same track - of movement, of modernity. We've lost count of the number of French films in which trains star, or are even THE star. This way please!

It was mutual attraction from the start. One of them, the railway, is older since it was born in Great Britain between 1810-1820. The other, the cinema, broke onto the screen in France at the very end of the century. This involves the arts and, on the other hand, an industry – and a service. But both are a result of developments in machinery, and they acknowledge each other. From the start, cinema tried to capture the image of the powerful railway machines, these demi-gods of rail, carrying the simple pedestrian on their backs or their flanks.
The first film ever made, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by Louis Lumière (1895), shows a few seconds of a steam train entering a station. All the strength and movement are there, steam and life, captivating and frightening the few viewers witnessing for the first time the miracle of the moving image, the flickering light.

Trains in cinema are a metaphor for moving energy. Flight, racing. Panting. Sweat and steam mixed together. Flight, racing. Panting. Sweat and steam mixed together. In The Wheel by Abel Gance (1922), the theme is rhythm. A melody that jumps with a thousand jolts, jerks emphasised by Arthur Honegger’s violent and fierce musical score. Railway disasters, self-destructive dizziness: Sisif, the romantic mechanic, in love with little Norma who does not requite his love, pushes his machine to the limits into the void.

This fascination with speed as a kind of fatal inebriation is also found in The Human Beast by Jean Renoir (1938 based on Emile Zola). Jean Gabin, a working class mechanic on the Paris-Le Havre line, is obsessed by a violent compulsion that drives him to murder. Renoir emphasises the fact that it is violence similar to that found in its raw state in the very movement of the pistons and wheels of the steam goddess. The worker, having offered himself up to the divine god of speed, loses his humanness by spending too much time with his engine – Moloch, who devours wood and spits fire in his race towards the other end of the line...

At the other end of the line, we enter the unknown. It is the train that takes us, through the turning of its magical wheels, from one country to another, one station to another. The train lifts us to other levels of reality. In Concorde Affair (Claude d'Anna, 1978), Bruno Cremer travels an imaginary Europe where, behind the apparently harmless façades, a terrifying reality lurks, full of intrigue. In La voie sans disque, 1933 (Léon Poirier), we find this espionage theme again, set this time in Djibouti during the First World War.  A more poetic reality is discovered by the father and daughter in
Un étrange voyage (1980, Alain Cavalier), during their journey on foot between Troyes and Paris, as they look for their mother and grandmother who disappeared during a previous journey.

The train is a slice of life. The life of those who take it, of course. In the comforting belly of the compartment, like a long lost mother, souls are bared, confidences are breathed.
In Celles qu’on n’a pas eues by Pascal Thomas (1980), a small group of men, amongst them Michel Galabru, Daniel Ceccaldi and Bernard Menez, reveal their past lives and loves during one journey.

The protagonists of Those who love me can take the train, by Patrice Chéreau (1998) face up to their empty lives on the way to the funeral of one of their loved ones in Limoges.

A place of calm and a meeting point for lovers, the train allows us to be carried away by love, is conducive to conversations and eye contact, and creates a certain intimacy within the compartment. A sometimes paradoxical intimacy, as in The Train, by Pierre Granier-Deferre (1972), in which Julien (Jean-Louis Trintignant) meets Anna (Romy Schneider), in a cattle truck during the debacle of 1940; too late in their lives, too late to be able to love each other.

But the railway also belongs to those who make a living from it, who work, love, laugh – or cry – in the shadow of these great railway beasts.
A better life, a film by Renaud Victor (1985), tells the story in a thousand delightful details, of the family and working life of a travelling postal worker.
In Le voyage à Biarritz, by Gilles Grangier (1962) with Fernandel, a humble station manager daydreams every day as he watches trains from the Riviera pass by. He ends up making his dreams come true, taking his wife on a trip to Biarritz...
Modest everyday dreams, human destinies interwoven with the destinies of machines, turning and returning, passing through again and again. Trains are gods, but are they not also prisoners of the tracks – thus following their own destinies? Fleeting destinies, tragic destinies too, like in
Le signal rouge by Ernest Neubach with Eric von Stroheim (1948), where a man, taking revenge for the rail accident that took the life of his wife, causes derailments. Common destinies too, those of the whole railway world, of those who are on the move and those who are not, united by the same fears, the same pleasures. In Gargousse by Henry Wulschleger (1938), a station manager fights to save his line in Provence, an echo of the railway line closure policies that characterised the history of the railway up until the 1970s. In 1978 another film took up this ever-present, ever-painful theme: La comédie du train des pignes, by François de Chavannes with Philippe Léotard.

As time goes by, the train increasingly becomes a keeper of memories. A memory of France and of the France that has come and gone over the years and the different eras... Nostalgia for the magnificence of the great luxurious trains of the past, as in L'étoile du Nord by Pierre Granier-Deferre in 1982. Or even in Robert Siodmak’s Katia (Magnificent sinner) with Romy Schneider (1959), where we see the arrival of the imperial Russian train at the Porte Dauphine station, on the inner circle line in Paris. Memory of the rolling stock, the engines, racing cars and carriages of all shapes and sizes, in all their finery. In Father’s trip (1966, Denys de La Patellière) with Fernandel, we see a "Picasso" railcar speeding past. La Roue, a remake of Abel Gance’s classic made in 1956 by Maurice Delbez, celebrates the BB 9004, the famous locomotive that set the world speed record in 1955. In The Human Beast engines from the 1930’s guest star as themselves... the model train is not forgotten, indeed the passion for railway models demands it, in films as different asDestins, by Richard Pottier with Tino Rossi (1946) orThe Toy, by Francis Weber (1976), with Pierre Richard, where we can admire a whole network in the so-called HO scale.

Finally, the railway is a political arena. That is the case in The Battle of the Rails, by René Clément (1945), which praised the resistance shown by railway workers, as soon as it ended. In this classic film, Clément does not shy away from sacrificing rolling stock in the famous final derailment scene, in order to give more realism to the cruelty of the struggle.

Trains run through our French souls like beautiful objects from our memories and our lives – like sweet dreams from the movies.