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ACCELERATION

By David Finkelstein | February 26, 2004

Images of the windows of moving trains, reflecting the stationary faces of passengers on the platform. Parts of the film are silent; others are accompanied by the sounds of trains and rushing air, cut in tandem with the images.

Despite the title, the whole film conveys a feeling of people caught up in a tremendous lateral right-to-left movement, with very little acceleration or deceleration. It is beautiful to see how movement itself makes the image abstract, so that little is identifiable except the sensation of speed. The people we glimpse reflected in the windows seem to be the still center of a whirlwind, a poetic depiction of the commonplace modern sensation of high-speed travel, where we look through a window from one time-space continuum, to view people in an entirely different one.

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