From the Lumière brothers’ legendary locomotive to today, trains have shaped the language and imagination of film. In this book, Genevieve Yue offers an original and evocative meditation on this enduring cinematic motif, charting how railways have served not only as engines of narrative momentum but as spaces of reflection and quiet transformation.
Across a range of filmic genres and geographies, Yue traces the many ways trains structure cinematic experience. Rather than focusing solely on the spectacle and technological wonder traditionally associated with railways on screen, she considers departures and reunions, romances, reveries, and encounters with strangers. With a feminist politics in mind, Trains explores how movement through space becomes movement through memory, fantasy, and thought.
Central to Yue’s exploration is the experience of being a woman on a train. In such instances, trains become places where desire, vulnerability, and possibility coincide. The book also reflects on broader questions of infrastructure, ecology, and state power, revealing how railways shape both collective histories and individual lives.
Written with clarity and wit, Trains invites readers aboard a richly idiosyncratic itinerary through film history. At once critical and personal, it offers a fresh way of seeing the moving image—through the sensations and stories of travel by rail.