Tren de sombras: le spectre de Le Thuit

In the early morning of 8 November 1930, the Parisian lawyer Gérard Fleury set off to find the light with which he wanted to end his pastoral film about the area around Lake Le Thuit. That same day he died in circumstances that have never been explained. Three months before, he had made a family film that underlined the pleasures of the summer and outdoor life. The garden of the Chateau Le Thuit looked like a paradise that was forever sunny, without a context and outside of time.’We tried to find an explanation for these shots and for their power,’ José Luis Guerín writes in the synopsis. ‘First and foremost it was necessary to situate them.’ He found the location and shot new material, in black & white, but not affected by moisture, dust and time. Tren de sombras also incorporates scenes in colour, investigating what happened before Gérard Fleury disappeared.This almost entirely silent and convincing fake-found-footage film by Guerín is less about the mystery of the disappearance, but more about the play of light, reflections of water, wind and rain evoking memories of the poetic oeuvre of Renoir, père et fils. The director found his inspiration in a text by Maxim Gorki, written after he had seen one of the first shows of the Lumières cinematograph: ‘It is not life, but its shadow, it is not movement, but its soundless spirit (…) It is a train of shadows.’