Vapor Trails

Saving The Last Steam Rail Service in Europe

A Feature Documentary

 

 

Filmmaker's Bio

Peter Abramowitsch has returned to film making via an unusual route.

He grew up in a European emigre` household of classical musicians and graduated in Anthropology from UC Berkeley during the late sixties. He then attended the London International Film School, earning an honors diploma for directing and camera. For the next six years, he worked as an assistant in British features and documentaries, and then in the United States, editing and directing educational films for the US Office of Education, as well as crewing educational and industrial films.

But since the early 1980s, Peter has worked almost exclusively as a software designer, preferring not to return to filmmaking until "he had something to say". He has intentionally avoided falling in love with the filmmaking process - a temptation that was, at times difficult to resist. The software work lead to ten years living in London and eight years in Milan and Florence - providing a matrix of cultural experiences that would form the basis for future film projects.

His computer work also included four years at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, where he participated in the design and development one of the first nonlinear editing systems, the EditDroid, the progenitor of contemporary digital editing systems such as Avid and Final Cut Pro. Here, he was involved behind the scenes with a number of productions while they pioneered the new system. For example Oliver Stone's "The Doors", Steven Soderbergh's "Kafka", and Lucas' "Young Indiana Jones" series..

Boris, Piotr and Kasimir

Only last year, as the side effect of an adventure instigated by his wife, has it seemed the time to try the medium again. He has come back with a film, and the incomparable experience of driving steam passenger trains across the Polish countryside.

For Peter, film is one of the few media, like music, that is a direct conduit to the soul. It can alter one's perception of time and space and can trigger strong emotions in the stoniest of hearts. It has an huge role to play in helping to interpret the complexity of our world and increase understanding between people. It has the power to bring joy and a needed distraction from the difficulties of life and, of course, it also has the power to corrupt and to poison. So the opportunity to have the attention of an audience of strangers for an hour or two is a remarkable privilege which he plans to exercise with love and with care.

Synopsis

The next few years will determine the fate of steam powered railway travel. Only a very few ordinary scheduled rail services pulled by steam exist in the world today - the rest are museum pieces or historical preservations. India, China, and Poland are among the last countries still hosting the original thing.

This film, which features the last remaining regular steam service in Europe uses the story of its professional engineers and firemen as a metaphor for the bittersweet changes that are taking place as Poland leaves its late nineteenth and early twentieth century roots to join modern Europe.

Steam powered railway travel for residents of Wolsztyn, Poland is a normal everyday experience, but for most of the film's audience, it will evoke a powerful nostalgia for a time when life moved more slowly and its concerns were more basic and comprehensible to the average person. Images of trains and train travel are archetypes that figure in the day dreams and fantasies of practically every child. In the course of this film, these images will come dramatically to life.

The Polish keepers of this technology are a wonderful group of workers - the proverbial salt of the earth, competent, strong, light-hearted generous, and dependable. They and their work environment - a slightly dilapidated post-soviet industrial landscape form the perfect backdrop to celebrate the culture they're keeping alive.

Now couple this with an ingenious scheme designed to keep steam railways alive in Poland - an informal program that permits a small number of enthusiasts to learn to drive and maintain steam locomotives under the instruction of the local crew and you have an entertaining mixture unlike a conventional railroad documentary. This program is not a tourist enterprise, but rather a form of cultural exchange that pairs its visitors one on one with the Polish crew, working in the engine yard, and also over a bowl of bigósz (beef stew) at the railway-men's snack bar at five in the morning.

For anyone that has never driven a locomotive - the first few times bring an exhilaration and sense of accomplishment that is positively visceral and one can see this immediately in the smiles of the learner-drivers - and it's contagious.

From the inherently comic language barrier between the professional and visiting crews to the playful banter and practical jokes comes a sense of warmth that the film radiates as a counterpoint to its story of an imminent loss to living European culture.

Notes

On one level, the outer story of Wolsztyn and its steam trains is clichéd in the telling. An often repeated elegy to some aspect of the past. Here, we're attempting something a bit different. Not concentrating so much on the technology of steam trains, we look around for vestiges of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in gestures, in farmyards, in sounds and smells. We're looking for symbols, not only the physical artifacts that got left behind. I had no preconceptions of what I would find there (not even being a train enthusiast myself) and I suppose the first impulse was simply to document the experience. But what I found was more like a living archeological site.

To be a participant as well as filmmaker makes it impossible to maintain a strictly journalistic eye. Just as empathy is a necessary qualification of the documentary film- maker, the direct experience of firing and driving these trains through the Polish countryside has provided a visceral understanding of the thrill, the drudgery and the danger of this work. Then too, my Eastern European heritage, coupled with a family history that was intertwined with the Holocaust added layers of meaning onto each experience - even onto the bricks of each small shed at the side of the railroad tracks which must have seen trains of camp victims pass by each day.

The film could have taken many directions and perhaps it has already fragmented into too many - but I feel it would have been wrong to simplify an experience whose richness is precisely in the ambiguities and contradictions it evokes. Seen from the past, steam trains represented a future that ran at an inhuman speed, but from our vantage point, they and the lives of the people that run them seem so stable and permanent. Even the rhythmic chuffing of the engine lulls one into a pleasant stupor. From the outside we can savor this feeling, but the reality for the engineers is different. So I found out something about nostalgia too.. that it can be a very one-sided view of the past.

More than anything, the film tries to distill the notion that trains have altered our perception of time. Music plays an important role in this film because it too has such power over our experience of time and memory. There are a lot of train fanatics out there and they'll like some of the images, but I hope that the real substance of the film will appeal to a wider audience.

Details
A Film by Peter Abramowitsch
Timing 58:40
View Trailer

Links
pabramowitsch@yahoo.com
Polish Rail Site