Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Closely Watched Trains
1966 · Jiří Menzel · Closely Watched Trains on Sightlines
A dispatcher picks up the station's official rubber stamps and, one after another, presses them onto the bare thighs and backside of the young telegraphist, Zdenka. It's a game, and she's in on it. Later, men in uniform sit down to investigate the incident with complete solemnity, as though a crime against the state has been committed in ink. Nobody in Closely Watched Trains raises their voice about it. The camera holds still and lets the absurdity sit there in plain gray daylight.
If you want to know how Jiří Menzel's first feature works, start with that stamp. It is a small object that carries the whole film's quarrel between institutions and bodies, and Gilles Deleuze gives us two ways to see it.
The first is what he calls the demark. Some objects mean something through habit: when you see a stamp, you expect an approved document. Deleuze calls an object like that a mark. A demark is the same object pulled out of its usual chain, so that habit breaks and you have to stop and interpret. A stamp on a timetable tells you nothing. A stamp on a thigh makes you ask what stamps were ever for. In an occupied country, run by German authority through Czech clerks, the stamp is how the system says this is in order. Menzel moves it six inches and the whole apparatus of order looks ridiculous.
The second is the gest, a term Deleuze takes from Brecht. A gest is a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation, the way a bow shows a hierarchy without anyone saying the word. The investigation is pure gest. The officials don't have to say what they think a woman's body is for, or how much they need everything to be filed. Their straight-backed seriousness says it. Menzel's method, here and everywhere in the film, is to stage institutional propriety running into bodily life and keep a straight face while it happens.
Then there is Miloš Hrma, the new apprentice, played by Václav Neckář, a young pop singer and not a trained actor. Neckář gives him a hangdog, half-blank sincerity. His job is to stand on a platform and watch trains go by. The war is literally passing in front of him, car after car, and he is thinking about something else entirely: his virginity, and his humiliation with Máša, the conductor he loves.
This is where the larger Deleuzian lens earns its keep. Deleuze argues that classical cinema ran on the action-image: a hero perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the film's editing carries us from cause to effect. The war film is the purest version of this. A man sees the enemy and does something. After the Second World War, Deleuze says, that circuit began to break. Characters could still perceive, but they could no longer respond adequately to what they saw. He calls this the crisis of the action-image, and he locates its beginning in Italian neorealism, the cinema André Bazin championed for its non-professional faces and real streets. Bicycle Thieves is one of this film's ancestors, and you can feel the debt in the unglamorous station and its unpolished lead.
Miloš is a crisis of the action-image in a railway cap. He is what Deleuze calls a seer, a figure who watches and endures rather than acts. The war is just out of frame, in the relative out-of-field: the space next to the shot that we know is there, rumbling along the tracks and implied by every whistle and bell. The resistance is all around him. He doesn't notice.
Menzel makes us share that inattention, and this is his real invention. The editing keeps a relaxed, anecdotal rhythm tuned to the slow tempo of a provincial station. It wanders into vignettes. There are the pigeons. There is the upholstered furniture. There is the stationmaster, endlessly preoccupied with his coming promotion. Deleuze would call these stretches dead time, moments where nothing pushes the plot forward and ordinary life is simply held on screen. He would call the loose chain of episodes weak links: causes and effects that have gone slack. In a conventional war film these would be padding. Here they are the point. While we laugh, the history passing along the tracks gets as little of our attention as it gets of Miloš's.
That is why the lens matters. Read as a sex comedy, the film is charming. Read through Deleuze, it becomes a film about the distribution of attention, about what it means to be young and preoccupied while history happens in the background. It asks a question it never answers outright: is looking the wrong way a failure, or simply what it is to be a person?
The lineage runs deep. From The Good Soldier Schweik comes the Czech comic idea that a passive, oblivious little man can indict a war machine just by being himself. La Grande Illusion supplied the humane wartime register that is tender toward ordinary men and refuses combat as spectacle. The 400 Blows offered the template of an adolescent's private drama pressed against an indifferent institutional world, carried by an untrained lead. Closer to home, Loves of a Blonde had just shown how to watch provincial sexual embarrassment with deadpan patience. And The Shop on Main Street, also from 1965, showed that a gentle, digressive comedy of the occupation could build enough warmth to carry real weight.
Menzel brought these together with Bohumil Hrabal, who adapted his own 1965 novella alongside him. That partnership would shape Menzel's career. Jaromír Šofr's black-and-white camera stays clean and legible, close to lyrical realism, saving its emphatic moves for the moments when the private story brushes against the historical one. Jiří Šust's music is sparse, so the railway's bells and whistles become the score.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and remains the Czechoslovak New Wave's most internationally recognized title. Its larger achievement was to take the war film away from the partisan hero and give it to a distracted boy on a platform. It insisted that history erupts into lives that were busy with other things.
So when you watch it, keep half an eye on the edges of the frame. Notice what passes on the tracks while everyone in the foreground is busy with stamps and pigeons and promotions. Then notice how easily you let it pass too.
Concepts in play
- demark — The station's official rubber stamps, normally the mark of bureaucratic approval, pressed onto Zdenka's thighs and backside, which breaks their habitual meaning
- the gest — The solemn bureaucratic investigation of the stamping 'outrage': institutional posture exposing how the occupation-era apparatus regards bodies
- crisis of the action-image — A war film whose protagonist, preoccupied with his virginity and his failure with Máša, can't respond to the war and the resistance surrounding him
- the seer (voyant) — Miloš, the apprentice whose job is to watch trains pass, played by Neckář with a passive, half-blank sincerity
- relative out-of-field — The war plot proceeds almost unnoticed in the background, implied by passing trains, bells and whistles
- dead time (temps mort) — The long, meandering middle of station routine: the pigeons, the upholstered furniture, the stationmaster's obsession with his promotion
- weak links — Episodic, digressive editing that drifts into vignettes and comic business with slackened causality