THROUGH THE ARCHIVE.
A CONVERSATION WITH MACIEJ J. DRYGAS
by Emanuele Vernillo
A CONVERSATION WITH MACIEJ J. DRYGAS
by Emanuele Vernillo
In an interview released after the World Premiere at IDFA, you say that one of the first notes you took at the beginning of the project was:
“The journey of a train is a metaphor for life: people travel, ride, read books, sleep. People go to wars, they return, or their bodies return.”
And it was taken in 2014...Ten years to make this film.
Can you share with us where the initial idea comes from? What were you looking for? What were you searching for, when digging into all the different archives?
From the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want to tell a story about the railway in a technical sense--about locomotives, carriages, or tracks.
This was never meant to be a story about machines, but about the people who travel on them.
In the notebook I kept from the very first day of working on the film, the opening line read:
“The journey of a train is a metaphor for life.” That sentence set the course.
There is something beautiful, almost magical in train travel, yet it is often also deeply dramatic.
Sometimes the journey carries a sense of hope-that at the destination something in our life will change.
At other times, it carries the complete absence of hope. So, the railway was always meant to serve only as a pretext, a framework, a vehicle of memory.
Was it difficult to produce such a film? Was there attention from producers, broadcasters, a sensibility towards the idea of the film or, even if you had already a track as filmmaker who used archive material, did you encounter “skeptical” reactions towards the idea of the project?
The film was produced within our family company, Drygas Film Production.
We knew from the outset that because of the cost of archival footage, the budget would be very high.
Securing financing in Poland was not a problem; finding international co-producers proved much harder.
Our initial partners in Germany, France, and the UK were unable to secure funding in their countries and eventually withdrew. When Russia launched its war against Ukraine, we cut ties with our Russian co-producer.
In the end, Trains became a Polish–Lithuanian co-production, with crucial support in the form of archival materials from the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
How many different archives are present in the film? How many archives have you and your team researched and how did you organise the large archive research?
The research drew upon the resources of ninety-eight archives across the globe. The final version of the film is composed of nearly six hundred shots sourced from forty-six of them. At first, I had planned to make personal visits to more than twenty archives--ranging from South Africa, through the United States and Europe, to Australia and Japan. The Covid-19 pandemic shattered those plans, and in many cases I relied on the help of local researchers.
I gathered hundreds of hours of footage. In contacting the archives, I focused particularly on sequences where the narrative revolved around people.
The human types, the faces of passengers, the suitcases and bundles, the ever-changing fashions of clothing, the objects, the prams--these details radiate from the footage with striking force, leaving an indelible impression that while times, trains, and history change, the human being at the railway station is always somehow different. Different in focus, in expression. Perhaps it is a kind of thrill--that with movement comes the hope of something new.
Or perhaps it is only the anxiety of what awaits at the destination.
“The journey of a train is a metaphor for life: people travel, ride, read books, sleep. People go to wars, they return, or their bodies return.”
And it was taken in 2014...Ten years to make this film.
Can you share with us where the initial idea comes from? What were you looking for? What were you searching for, when digging into all the different archives?
From the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want to tell a story about the railway in a technical sense--about locomotives, carriages, or tracks.
This was never meant to be a story about machines, but about the people who travel on them.
In the notebook I kept from the very first day of working on the film, the opening line read:
“The journey of a train is a metaphor for life.” That sentence set the course.
There is something beautiful, almost magical in train travel, yet it is often also deeply dramatic.
Sometimes the journey carries a sense of hope-that at the destination something in our life will change.
At other times, it carries the complete absence of hope. So, the railway was always meant to serve only as a pretext, a framework, a vehicle of memory.
Was it difficult to produce such a film? Was there attention from producers, broadcasters, a sensibility towards the idea of the film or, even if you had already a track as filmmaker who used archive material, did you encounter “skeptical” reactions towards the idea of the project?
The film was produced within our family company, Drygas Film Production.
We knew from the outset that because of the cost of archival footage, the budget would be very high.
Securing financing in Poland was not a problem; finding international co-producers proved much harder.
Our initial partners in Germany, France, and the UK were unable to secure funding in their countries and eventually withdrew. When Russia launched its war against Ukraine, we cut ties with our Russian co-producer.
In the end, Trains became a Polish–Lithuanian co-production, with crucial support in the form of archival materials from the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
How many different archives are present in the film? How many archives have you and your team researched and how did you organise the large archive research?
The research drew upon the resources of ninety-eight archives across the globe. The final version of the film is composed of nearly six hundred shots sourced from forty-six of them. At first, I had planned to make personal visits to more than twenty archives--ranging from South Africa, through the United States and Europe, to Australia and Japan. The Covid-19 pandemic shattered those plans, and in many cases I relied on the help of local researchers.
I gathered hundreds of hours of footage. In contacting the archives, I focused particularly on sequences where the narrative revolved around people.
The human types, the faces of passengers, the suitcases and bundles, the ever-changing fashions of clothing, the objects, the prams--these details radiate from the footage with striking force, leaving an indelible impression that while times, trains, and history change, the human being at the railway station is always somehow different. Different in focus, in expression. Perhaps it is a kind of thrill--that with movement comes the hope of something new.
Or perhaps it is only the anxiety of what awaits at the destination.
Working on each sequence of the film, which were the ideas and the principles which you and your editor were guided from? Was there, already in the beginning, the idea to build up a chronological framework moving through the 19th century, even if the film itself deals more with “human emotions” rather than “history”?
How do you approach a creative use of archive material, which is not guided solely or exclusively by the narration of historical events?
At first, this film was meant to look completely different. It was to be filled with texts. For nearly a year and a half, I explored archives worldwide in search of writings composed on trains: fragments of letters, diaries, official notes.
These were records of fleeting moments, thoughts, emotions--written on the move, in the rhythm of the railway.
From this, a script of over thirty pages emerged.
When my editor, Rafał Listopad, and I began assembling the first sequences, it became clear that the film could dispense with words--that language weakened the force of the images. The pictures themselves were eloquent enough, emotionally expansive enough. So I made the difficult choice to abandon the texts and rely entirely on the dramaturgy of the image. It felt like a risk, an experiment--but a necessary one.
Editing became a journey through time: hundreds of hours spent watching, selecting, dismantling.
It was a labor of memory, silence, and rhythm.
In Trains one doesn’t only glimpse the 20th century; one also witnesses the history of cinematic technology itself--from celluloid film, through evolving editing rhythms, to the shifting ways the camera approaches human beings.
The dynamic of the shot tells this story: once dominated by wide frames and distance, later increasingly filled with close-ups, faces, glances, gestures. This is not just technology--it is a transformation in how we tell the story of the world.
The editing work is immense; I had the impression that you and the editor were carefully trying to build up and construct meaning with the different sources of materials, using an historical timeframe but with the intention to share more emotional landscapes, which resound almost as a method for a “fiction” film.
Maybe this sensation is not right but I feel a sense of profound respect for the archives and the “found footage” as a source to create a film. Can you share something about that and about the editing process?
I have worked with archival material for many years, spending countless hours in archives, scanning through thousands of meters of film. What has always fascinated me is this peculiar act of appropriation--of giving source material an entirely new meaning. How can the expansive possibilities of cinematic language be used to forge an emotional bond between the viewer and archival reality?
In Trains, I often built the higher levels of meaning not within individual episodes, but in the transitions between them.
It is in those passages, between sequences, that new resonances emerged.
From archival fragments--often incomplete, ambiguous--I constructed a new world. The process resembled, in some ways, the creation of a fiction film: it was an act of invention.
I do not regard the archive as a purely historical record; for me it is raw material, transformed into a new cinematic reality.
How do you approach a creative use of archive material, which is not guided solely or exclusively by the narration of historical events?
At first, this film was meant to look completely different. It was to be filled with texts. For nearly a year and a half, I explored archives worldwide in search of writings composed on trains: fragments of letters, diaries, official notes.
These were records of fleeting moments, thoughts, emotions--written on the move, in the rhythm of the railway.
From this, a script of over thirty pages emerged.
When my editor, Rafał Listopad, and I began assembling the first sequences, it became clear that the film could dispense with words--that language weakened the force of the images. The pictures themselves were eloquent enough, emotionally expansive enough. So I made the difficult choice to abandon the texts and rely entirely on the dramaturgy of the image. It felt like a risk, an experiment--but a necessary one.
Editing became a journey through time: hundreds of hours spent watching, selecting, dismantling.
It was a labor of memory, silence, and rhythm.
In Trains one doesn’t only glimpse the 20th century; one also witnesses the history of cinematic technology itself--from celluloid film, through evolving editing rhythms, to the shifting ways the camera approaches human beings.
The dynamic of the shot tells this story: once dominated by wide frames and distance, later increasingly filled with close-ups, faces, glances, gestures. This is not just technology--it is a transformation in how we tell the story of the world.
The editing work is immense; I had the impression that you and the editor were carefully trying to build up and construct meaning with the different sources of materials, using an historical timeframe but with the intention to share more emotional landscapes, which resound almost as a method for a “fiction” film.
Maybe this sensation is not right but I feel a sense of profound respect for the archives and the “found footage” as a source to create a film. Can you share something about that and about the editing process?
I have worked with archival material for many years, spending countless hours in archives, scanning through thousands of meters of film. What has always fascinated me is this peculiar act of appropriation--of giving source material an entirely new meaning. How can the expansive possibilities of cinematic language be used to forge an emotional bond between the viewer and archival reality?
In Trains, I often built the higher levels of meaning not within individual episodes, but in the transitions between them.
It is in those passages, between sequences, that new resonances emerged.
From archival fragments--often incomplete, ambiguous--I constructed a new world. The process resembled, in some ways, the creation of a fiction film: it was an act of invention.
I do not regard the archive as a purely historical record; for me it is raw material, transformed into a new cinematic reality.
The entire soundtrack (sound design / mix and music) is extraordinary too in crafting a profound emotional layout to the film and also because, in my opinion, it has a “fair” balance with the images and never gives the idea to over- come them, even if you feel that there was a lot of work behind.
Can you tell us more about the artistic relationship with the sound designer, Saulius Urbanavičius?
The soundscape was as crucial as the image. I understood that, in the absence of text, I would need to create a sound design of great precision. Finding an artistic key to such a complex sonic layer, and calibrating the proportions between image and sound, was among the greatest challenges.
I collaborated with Paweł Szymański, whose music brings a metaphysical dimension to the film, and with Saulius Urbanavičius, the Lithuanian master of sound design. Together, we realized that we did not want mere illustration.
We turned away from the obvious sounds of trains in motion, focusing instead on their inner life. In this film, locomotives are born in pain, in howls, in cries. When bombed, they fall ill, disintegrate.
Saulius created sound textures that drift apart, pulse, breathe. I wanted the viewer not to remain a detached observer, but to be invited inside the carriage, drawn deep within. To feel, while traversing vast distances, the changing world around them, and perhaps allow the journey to seed a reflection, or a question:
Where am I in this world? And why?... Along which tracks will my life unfold?
Nowadays it seems to me that there is an increasing interest in the use of ar- chive and found footage and also in an independent and “domestic” way of using film material, like Super 8 or 16mm, or VHS too.
ANALOGICA (the film festival you are taking part to) is an example of that.
The “general propaganda” does not seem aware of that, and, for example, it is underlining the increasing importance of the use of generative artificial intelligence. At the same time, it seems to me that the young generations have an increased interest in the use of analog devices too.
What do you think about it? Can we still cultivate a “hope” for a critical, honest and fair use of all the technological innovations, with respect towards the history of cinema and art in general?
The long, painstaking work on this film opened new horizons for me in understanding and experiencing the world preserved on archival reels. I followed the truth embedded in those films as though I were making an observational documentary with my own camera. That experience taught me humility before the source.
A humility rooted in silence and concentration, which allows one to penetrate more deeply into the material, to step inside it, to dwell there, to look around.
I value the possibilities of artificial intelligence, yet I remain a devotee of the analog world. The dynamic process of digitizing archival film has unlocked entirely new opportunities. More and more works in the found footage genre are being made. Some, however, never rise above the level of historical illustration.
What I most admire are images that carry an original, authorial voice.
And yet, in all the debates about the sense of using found footage, I find a lack of deeper reflection on ethics.
Where is the boundary in giving new meaning to archival material—the threshold beyond which an “ethical” red light begins to flash?
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Maciej J. Drygas is a renowned film and radio director, screenwriter, producer, and professor at the Polish National Film School in Łódź (PWSFTviT). His works have received numerous prestigious awards, including the European Film Academy Award for Best Documentary for “Hear My Cry” (1991), the Prix Italia for the radio documentary “Last Will” (1992), the Grand Prix at the Monte Carlo International Television Festival for “State of Weightlessness” (1995), and the award for Best Feature-Length Documentary at the Cinema Verité festival in Tehran for “Abu Haraz” (2013).
Drygas also wrote the libretto for the opera *Qudsja Zaher*, which was nominated for the International Opera Awards in London in 2014. He is the originator and founder of the Filmoteka Narodowa at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. His films and radio documentaries have been broadcasted across Europe, as well as in Canada, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, New Caledonia, and Australia. |
Emanuele Vernillo Tutor at ZeLIG’s three-year program since 2010 and Responsible of the same program since September 2025. He is also Vice-President of the cooperative.
He has worked in both documentary and feature film productions, and has collaborated intensely with director Pietro Marcello. He engineered the live sound for the film “La Bocca del Lupo”; was assistant director for “'Il Silenzio di Pelesjan”; and was in charge of organisation for “'Bella e Perduta” – all award-winning films at top international film festivals, including Venice, Berlin, Toronto and Torino. He organises independent film series since many years, writes poetry and holds a B.A. and a Master in Anthropology of Development. He graduated from ZeLIG in 2007. |
August 2025 / Emanuele Vernillo/Analogica