Last year in early winter, after a very refreshing few days in Belgrade and saying goodbye to my dear friend and local guide Nicola, I took a night train from Belgrade to Budapest. The film I created and posted here is a record of that night on the train.

This is of course a very amateur work. I only used my handheld smartphone to shoot, and my untrained video editing skills and philosophy to make the film. It perhaps doesn’t deserve a thousand words to talk about it, but in the following, I want to take the chance to explain the ideas behind the film. Thus, I may touch on the topic of boredom, which I have been struggling with in the past few years.

The making of this film is meant for three things, two of them related to boredom. The trip on that night train from Belgrade was boring: I had no one to chat with, no book to read or no TV episodes to watch, the mobile network didn’t work all the time, and very soon the games I have on phone became boring. I didn’t have much to do, but wait until I finally reach Budapest.

It was profound boringness, and I wasn’t simply feeling bored but also being aware of boredom. Being aware of boredom is different from feeling bored. When one feels bored, s/he may simply do something else different that is interesting or fun, and be absorbed in it. When one is aware of boredom, s/he is in a mental or even life status, in which s/he would understand that anything s/he is doing or will do, is perhaps simply a distraction from the boredom, or life itself. But one would sooner or later be aware of the ineffectiveness or meaninglessness of distractions, and thus return to boredom again, and again and again — for distraction is never proper solution.

Actively making the film on the train — thinking about what to shoot, how to shoot, and actually shooing them — killed quite some time, and was simply fun. The short film here, while not (particularly) creative, was nonetheless a serious creative work, or creation for short. Like any other serious creations, the author has to consider many problems, and part of fun comes from solving these problems. Another source of fun comes from an active attempt to be creative by, for example, bringing new unique angles to perceive things. One example in the film was me shooting the toilet and the lack of flushing water, with partly the intention to show that one could be so bored that the functioning of a toilet was worth observation. Creation in this case is actively countering against profound boringness.

But more importantly, I was hoping to capture, present and deliver the boringness on the train, and the experience of boredom. The boringness on the train on that night was profound partly due to my anticipation of returning to the repetitive student life in Vienna after an VICE-styled experience in Serbia.¹And at the time I was still waiting for the result of my MPhil thesis, the waiting of which, along with the waitings on the train, had triggered the panic about my life being a repetition of struggling for progress (towards whatever end) but in essence, repetitively waiting for the for the judgement of others, repetitively wishing for the best. And the trip to Serbia, then, seemed to be also a runaway and distraction from the real life.

And the making of this film as a creation, was a hope to combat this boredom in life on the train. There is an intuition in me that creation is one solution to the boredom in life: at least the one I feel, the boredom that resulted from aiming at accumulation of possessions (of all sorts of things) and any instruments for such achievement, and the ultimate alienation of human being shaped into certain frame, becoming a computer or machine. A private creation — by not focusing on what benefits the creation can bring about, but on the process and what has been experienced by the creator — can perhaps be a good rebellion against the boredom in life.²

And if the boringness and boredom can be captured and received by the audience, I also wonder how they would react to and what they would think of the boredom. I couldn’t help but imagine anyone watching this film of mine would yawn at some point. But hopefully someone would still ‘actively’ watch the film, and be able to sense, experience and reflect on the boredom in it, or their own boredom. This intention behind the film proposed a challenge in the shooting and editing, i.e. I couldn’t really make a boring film about boredom. It’d be a failure for me, I imagine, if any audience would comment that the film is really boring, and they close the video five minute into it. Therefore, the film is not the true representation of how boring that trip was. For example, I didn’t put all the waitings and the true length of waiting in the film. The visa check at the Serbo-Hungarian border was arduously long, but it’s only a few minute in the film — after all, I can’t risk wasting my friends or any viewers’ life.

In addition to the topic of boredom, I was also hoping to capture the beautiful view from a moving train at night. I love travelling with train mainly because of the view from the train: it is close to the earth, giving travellers more detail about the world they live in. And because the course has been set, the landscapes are brought to the outlookers who simply couldn’t filter what they see by wanting to see certain things, and choosing what to see. Therefore, often travellers can encounter lots of unexpected views that without taking the train, they wouldn’t have known or notice actively. And the expectation of something that I can appreciate is coming can generally ease the boringness of a long trip on train.

It’s more so with a trip at night. I have noticed that the world is rather busy at late night and in the early morning. Or should I say, there are actually two worlds: the world of the day and early evening,³ and the world of late night and early morning. There have been a few occasions when I went to airports before dawn and saw people having already started their daily work, such as farmers at markets dealing with distributors and workers in Vienna delivering daily newspapers. This was also captured in the film during one waiting, when I saw the late night freight train, and the worker (as seen in the film) working with the freight train. This is the world and the people I didn’t know, and normally wouldn’t seek to know, but they significantly support the Day World. The mere encounter with the Night World immediately struck me with an presence of a class difference. Seeing that worker who didn’t seem very much older than me alleviated my anxiety with boredom, not just because of his unexpected presence in my recording and the beauty of the light and that scene, but also the luck and privilege I felt as a person that can sleep at night and enjoy day light.

These, and the beauty of light in night and views resulted from the movement of train, were also what I wanted to captured and share with people. Another kind of beauty is the beauty in the noise, and the sounds from other people on the train. It’s hard to explain why I consider the light and the sounds from people as beautiful, but perhaps, in the seemingly eternal waiting and boredom, beauty in ordinary things is easier to be salient. And I would consider the enjoyment, appreciation and active creation of beauty is also a good way to combat boredom, as I hope the viewers could feel so when watching the film.

Last modified on 2019-05-06