Reflections On IN TRANSIT
by inney prakash
Anyone who’s crossed America on an Amtrak train knows the experience is possessed of a magic that supersedes its inefficiencies- that spontaneous human connection is as likely as an hour or two’s delay and well suited to offset it, and that whether by air, bus or car there’s nothing like the way a landscape undulates along the tracks.
Having recently been engaged as a cinema programmer at Maysles Documentary Center, I have been using this period of isolation in part to reacquaint myself with the work of founder Albert Maysles and his filmmaking partners. It’s been rightly pointed out that the iconic Beales of Grey Gardens are models for social distancing, but the captured behavior of most Maysles subjects over the years- think door-to-door Bible salesman, the Rolling Stones, Muhammad Ali- falls dramatically short of current CDC guidelines. That’s as it should be, because despite an attraction to eccentric individuals, it’s the spirit of human connection that seems to animate the radical empathy and closeness of Albert’s camera. Nowhere is that more pronounced than in the filmmaker’s swan song, In Transit,
Al dreamed for years of making his “train film”, and when he finally assembled a team of co-directors to make it happen, they decided to spend a year and three round trips filming on Amtrak’s Empire Builder, “America’s busiest long-distance train route, running between Chicago in the east and Portland and Seattle in the west,” as announced by an authoritative title card.
The first character we meet unspools his figurative yarn to a woman on the other side of his seat. A young man leaving a dead-end job in Mississippi to join his brother in Seattle, he expresses feeling underestimated by his boss, underserved by his hometown, and eager to avoid the regret that would come of never trying to make a better life for himself.
Many of the other characters we meet going west, as Americans have always done to find their fortune, echo this ambition. One kid with dirt under his fingernails is headed back to the oil fields. Another has left a relationship in search of something more meaningful to him than settling down. When yet another of these young men voices a familiar refrain hailing America as the land of opportunity, it’s apparent that whether we believe this or not is immaterial to the fact that it’s a belief which many still live by.
Going east, others seek to reconcile fractured pasts. A native man has left Portland after a fight with his significant other to summon the therapy of the plains. A single mother with several children hopes to reconnect with her estranged father; another young woman, pregnant, heads back home to give birth, praying it doesn’t happen too soon, while the conductor figures out what to do if it should.
The most beautiful moments occur when these various characters interact with each other, bridging race and age divides with the grace of understanding (one moment of tension arises around class, and it must be said that most of the passengers represent a working class America). An African American elder counsels a young black man in tears with a psalm learned first-hand from MLK:
If I can help somebody as I pass along If I can cheer somebody with a word or song If I can show someone they’re traveling wrong Then my living will not be in vein
“And that’s what it’s all about,” he says, grasping the young man’s hands. Towards the end of the film and the end of a journey, a woman retreating from a failed marriage mourns stepping off the train. “I’ve always been a wife, a mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s something...I was just me on the train...I just reach out my hand and say my name’s Tana.”
Watching all this, I imagine stretching my hand out to the next stranger I meet- perhaps only on a crosstown train, with dark tunnels passing by instead of mountains- and saying, “My name’s Inney.” It’s a comforting thought.
