rail & train in japanese cinema

[C. Jacqui Chen]

More trains (this is a nice brain teaser, by the way):

How about Imamura's Akai Satsui (Intentions of Murder)
and Kamigami no Fuakai Yokubo (Profound Desire of the Gods)?
The train in both films become panic sites for the woman,
who is pursued to near-extinction but fights back in other,
more subtle (or indirectly violent) ways.

As for Kurosawa's Dodesukaden E Berlin mentions, the trolley boy
resembles the Buster Keaton character in The General,
more than a mechanized human being. Key to both characters
is their shared identification with controlling and maneuvering
the train. The train suggests an extension of their heroic qualities,
qualities tested against the films' major crises (poverty in Dodesukaden;
winning the civil war to attain manhood and girl in The General.)
Thinking about these two films, I wonder if the original question
about rail and train in Japanese films intended to explore a 
particularly Japanese way of appropriating the train image?

Jacqui Chen

On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:30:56 -0500 Joanne Bernardi
<jobi at mail.rochester.edu> writes:
> 
> More on trains: I'm really relying on some pretty faint recollection 
> here
> but I seem to remember a connection to trains in the 60sdetective 
> film
> KIGA KAIKYO (in English I think HUNGER STRAITS) and the 50s 
> multi-hankie
> drama KIMI NO NA WA, which did such a great job in following the two
> star-crossed lover protagonists as they kept missing each other all 
> over
> Japan from, literally, Kyushu to Hokkaido. Again, I'm not sure, but 
> may be
> worth checking out, or maybe someone has a more vivid memory of 
> these two
> films at the moment.
> 
> Joanne Bernardi
> U of Rochester
> 
> 

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