A Train Arrives at the Station

"This film was a gift to me. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu's The Only Son. So I decided to make a film around it, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, from 1904 to 2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black and white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. So, after all these years, I've made another structural film, although that was not my original intention" (Thom Andersen). (Locarno Festival)