In the film La Jette, there’s a scene where the man is in a mental hospital where a German doctor in the background says, “Die Hälfte von ihm ist hier, die andere Hälfte ist in die Vergangencheit.” (“Half of him is here, the other half is in the past.”). I saw the film in an open air Kino in Berlin, after the film was over a man turned to me, sighed, and said, “Lieben ist Keine Ponyhof.” ("Life isn’t a pony farm.")
These two quotes resonated with me on my walk to the metro station. As I sat waiting for my train, the sounds of a lonely man playing a Hungarian folksong titled "I Ran Away From my Home Country" on a cimbalom echoed through the station. This lead me to consider the concept of the movement of peoples; and how that’s changed with the invention of trains and later planes and perhaps soon through time—we are all refugees moving forward through time and space. Humanity will constantly innovate in order to move faster, but we’re destined to repeat the past and never escape our path. We are constantly dragged forward and backward in time in the mind, as we relive the past, and attempt to predict the future. The trains in my film are used as a symbol to illustrate this, for they have carried people away or towards both danger or hope into the future. We allow our selves to be carried at random, always changing directions and creating these accidental pathways and patterns that cross with other peoples paths to form a map through time. As we realize the pattern of time is uncontrollable and unpredictable, the illusion of control through innovation will fade.