MarleneReads

Such a great film to start with. This is exciting stuff. I have read many great comments to this opening, and I particularly liked the one pointing out the innocence versus experience paradigm. We can surely see and/or hear the embodiment of innocence (the children) and of experience (the women). Men, however, do not seem to be neither innocent or experienced. In the second part of the opening sequence, we can see a group of parents waiting for their kids outside of the school entrance. In the middle, there is a man wearing a hat, separated from the rest, a bourgeois looking man, standing

The two working men have become so similar to the train, that they have learned to communicate in the same way as the train: verbal communication is impossible within this deafening environment. We are asked to sympathise with that. The coal and smoke make the men's appearances as greasy as the train's gear. To do their job well, they end up looking like the train, they simply become a part of it. It is a male dominated world of mechanical reproduction, and the train is almost like a sexual iron tool thanks to which men are able to dominate the rural landscape, enter tunnels and arrive at dest