T - “Train”

 

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Timothy Spall and Reece Dinsdale) arrive at Elsinore, they make a grand entrance as they chug through the snow on a scaled-down locomotive. Built on Blenheim Palace’s grounds in 1975, the miniature 15-inch gauge track ferries tourists around the palace to this day (the original locomotive was appropriately named for Sir Winston Churchill). 

Trains have long been integral to cinematic history, and as any cinephile will tell you, the Lumière Brothers’ short film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) gave rise to what film scholar Martin Loiperdinger calls “Cinema’s Founding Myth.” The story recounts that at a premiere of the aforementioned 50-second silent film, an audience unaccustomed to motion pictures “reared back in their seats” at the sight of a train coming toward them and “got up and ran from the auditorium.” Though it provides a compelling tale and “defines film’s power as its unprecedented realism,” historians doubt this ever happened. More likely, however, the first audience to see an example of Louis Lumière’s experimentations with stereoscopic (aka 3D) film may have been shocked in 1934, when he demonstrated this technology at the French Academy of Science.

Trains play a prominent role in several David Lean films, many of which influenced Branagh’s filmmaking; he has stated that Brief Encounter (1945), which is largely set in and around train stations, is one of his favorite films of all time. Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) all feature trains as essential plot devices, Zhivago being explicitly stated by Branagh in interviews and film commentary as inspiration for the epic scale and production of Hamlet, from his casting of Julie Christie (who played Lara in Zhivago) to employing Alex Thompson, who was the focus puller for Lawrence of Arabia. 

Branagh would go on to direct and star in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017), in which the famous eponymous train has a starring role, as do Hamlet alumni Dame Judi and Sir Derek. 

Sources:

Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 818-832

Wikipedia: L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat