THE THOUGHTS THAT ONCE WE HAD / "A Train Arrives At The Station"

ABOUT THE FILMS: 

THE THOUGHTS THAT ONCE WE HAD, 2015, Dir. Thom Andersen, 108 Min, Grasshopper Film, USA

Described in an opening text as a “personal history of cinema, partially inspired by Gilles Deleuze,” THE THOUGHTS THAT ONCE WE HAD  from master cinematic essayist Thom Andersen is a richly digressive journey through cinema. A found-footage film composed entirely of unidentified, yet often recognizable film clips and concise intertitles written by Andersen, the film leaps associatively across a vast territory spanning from Griffith to Godard, using dynamically cinematic images and sequences not to explain, but to embody Deleuzian ideas in all their rich ambiguity and nuance.

FORMAT: DCP

“A Train Arrives At The Station,” 2016, Dir. Thom Andersen, 16 Min, Grasshopper Film, USA

“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. 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 (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015… So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.” -Thom Andersen

FORMAT: DCP