Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 50-second silent picture “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” from 1895 ― one of the earliest films ever made ― follows a train gradually approaching the camera until it passes at close range.

The story goes that when the film was shown for the first time, a panicking audience thought the train would crash through the screen and crush everyone in the cinema. It is a pivotal moment in the history of cinema, one that brings together extreme fictional realism, surprise ― and trains. 

That the Lumière brothers chose to film an approaching train was by no means incidental. By the turn of the century, the train had become the symbol par excellence of the modern industrial age; an ominous, awe-inspiring, excessive phenomenon at once introducing an entirely new spatial and temporal experience to which the audience of “The Arrival of a Train” had only just become accustomed.

This is how E.M. Forster’s fin de sicle novel “Howards End” (1910) captures the new spatio-temporal experience of a country’s cultural history: “The train sped northward … She passed through the South Welwyn Tunnel … She traversed the immense viaduct, whose arches span untroubled meadows and the dreamy flow of Tewin Water. She skirted the parks of politicians. At times the Great North Road accompanied her.” The passage conjures up a panoramic view of England throughout the ages ― and yet, “It was only an hour’s journey.” The historical legacy of generations reduced to one hour; this is how modernity heralds the breakdown of any natural connection between time and space.

Like Forster’s “Howards End,” Leo Tolstoi’s novel “Anna Karenina” (1877) describes the brutal experience of modernity with reference to the train. The novel begins with the protagonist Anna witnessing a shocking event as she arrives in Moscow; a railway worker accidentally stumbles on the tracks and is killed by an oncoming locomotive.

One could say that the remaining of the novel’s plot consists of a persistent effort to endow this meaningless, random event with significance. In the face of the fearfully contingent forces of modern technology, Anna Karenina thus throws herself in front of a train near the end of the novel ― by which the accidental death of the railway worker retrospectively turns into a tragic foreboding of her own undoing.

Experienced as a blind, explosive force of modernity, the train became closely associated with 19th-century psychiatry and neurology. Railway experiences spurred the creation of a whole new vocabulary of concepts ― like shock, trauma and hysteria. Sigmund Freud attempted to rationalize this pathology of railway experiences through his psychoanalytic method ― yet, Freud himself is said to have suffered from train anxiety.

During World War I, the connection between trauma and trains was further consolidated through the mass transportation of soldiers to a place from which so few returned. And when Freud outlined a theory of war trauma and shell-shock in the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” a couple of years after the war, he based it on psychiatric knowledge of shock experiences related to railway incidents.

A few decades later, Freud and his family took one last train journey across Europe, to London, after having been exiled by the Nazis. Meanwhile, his sister, Rosa, took the most fateful of all trains ― the one leading into Auschwitz.

Reaching an absolute terminal point with the horror of the concentration camp, the train embarks on a different journey, one toward the inner fabric of everyday life after the World War II. No longer about force and anxiety, this is a train that carries a different set of dreams, a train that encapsulates absence, waiting and longing ― as elegantly illustrated in David Lean’s 1945 film “Brief Encounters,” which tells the story of an unhappy housewife who falls in love with a stranger while waiting for a train.

The trauma of the Lumière brothers’ film “A Train Arrives” is here replaced by an aesthetic sentiment that is more aligned with the ontology of the filmic medium as such ― the endlessly repetitive fantasy of being transported elsewhere, of being rescued from the dreariness of everyday life. The train becomes something altogether more ambiguous ― an itinerant, transitory space that serves as a portal to escape, but also the limit point of our fantasies.

The main character in Danny Boyle’s manic film “Trainspotting” (1996), Mark Renton, dreams of escaping; but when he finally gets the chance to run away with a lot of money, which will enable him to start on a fresh, he immediately conjures up fantasies ― of an entirely normal life. For there is a sense in which the train in our time will only ever take us to the same place, as the Greek poet Cavafy says; “You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.”

Although Cavafy did not exactly have globalization in mind when he wrote these lines, his poem nonetheless articulates the lot of the modern traveler; that we have always already been to all the places that the train could possibly take us. The modern train passenger is neither blessed with the possibility of properly leaving any place, nor with the possibility of properly arriving anywhere. In a space crossed out with railways, highways, bridges, air routes, courses, paths, directions, plans, itineraries, GPS, apps and Google Maps, the art of getting lost ― of boarding the wrong train or a train whose destination is unknown, of missing the train, one’s station ― is truly undermined: and with it, amid the thousands of roads laid out for us, the chance of finding the route in life that is truly ours.

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.