Rail ( Geoffrey Jones, UK, 1967)

A collage of trains running on London railway lines set to music. In Rail, Geoffrey Jones elaborates the style, abstraction and excitement of his earlier Snow (1963) with an astonishing tonal palette. The film glides effortlessly from hushed reverence to giddy exuberance to elegiac restraint as it evokes the vitality of steam travel and its imminent passing. Though the film evolved from an earlier commissioned project on British Rail design, the famous blue mid1960s rolling stock is represented only in a threeminute coda a sort of taggedon ending on behalf of the new in which the speeding electric trains go by as barely registerable blurs. I think perhaps I was a little nostalgic for the railways as they were, admitted Jones, and not all that keen on diesel and electric