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Il Passaggio Della Linea (2007) is a documentary by director Pietro Marcello, which was shown last week at the Cinema Del Reale festival in Puglia, Italy. I saw it after the hour I spent waiting at Miggiano station, after I arrived (by train) in Puglia, and after my friend told me about the overnight train she took to Sicily, where they take the train apart and put it on a boat and transport it across the sea in the middle of the night, so that when you wake up you are in Sicily but you have never left the train. The Sicily train features in Il Passaggio Della Linea: a great black shape of shadow blocks out an opening of light and the sky, with a shot of the train entering what is only later revealed to be a ferry leaving port. For once the train is still and it is the scenery behind it that is moving. Il Passaggio Della Linea is a film formed entirely of the sonorous rhythms, shadowy corridors and eccentric characters encountered on the express trains from the foggy North to the Southern peninsular of the country. For me it was the absolute highlight of the film festival.

Il Passaggio Della Linea reminds me exactly of what it’s like to be on a train in Italy. Not only because of the country-wide survey of blue signs, place names like Foggia, Cesano; words like centrale, binario. There’s something about the way it is shot that is like an actual journey, the oblique angles, the sudden snatches of blurred things. There is a shot leaning out of the window as the train rounds a bend and the too-rigid carriages seem to describe the curve in slow motion, with each angle clicking into place in an inadequate straight line. The film features the constant background noise of the trains, the unique sound of metal tracks and the clacking and creaking of the carriages.

The trains are filmed as much at night as at day. Trains at night bring out what can be sinister, lonely, or somehow invincible about these lumbering industrial behemoths – everything inside is still, everything outside is fast. The accidental combination of characters and the unifying condition of mass movement (one-way? return?) mean you can make up your narratives, and the train motif seems to lend itself to flickering edits and sudden cuts - parents putting a child in pyjamas, a woman sleeping and a hooded man entering a carriage, cigarette-holding hands resting on window ledges and outside the fast fast sea, fields, factories, fog, rivers. I remember taking the overnight train from Naples to Milan, on my own. It was a last-minute decision, I hadn’t booked a ticket and slept in one of the non-sleeper compartments. That’s when I found out that train seats in Italy pull out and collapse to almost-meet in the middle to make an almost-bed. That night I slept with my handbag as a pillow and gripped onto it through half-sleep, mildly terrified of being robbed, made paranoid by the old woman in the carriage whispering about the man from Napoli in the other seat.

And the people. Il Passaggio Della Linea passes through dialects and local languages as it passes through signs, seasons, weather. It carries people who don’t have cars perhaps, people who have to travel at night to be at work in the morning, ‘stranieri’ from outside of Italy, or Italians who talk about leaving Italy to find work elsewhere. There is a man who proclaims his own intelligence and demonstrates his French language skills to prove it. He’s lived everywhere, he says, and goes on to offer his philosophy on life, on Italian life.

That’s something I remember from train rides in Italy – the philosophy. I miss much of the language in the film but it is so strongly evocative it doesn’t matter. The images are astounding; they roll past and induce the same sense of quiet contemplation that you slip into on a train. Trains are for thinking, so is this film. There seems to be one main protagonist, I missed the start so I can’t be sure. An old man looks through train maps and charts, seems to be travelling interminably, he recounts his knowledge and memories I think. His eyes are old, he wants to find the right timetable, flicks through the dog-eared collection. At another point he looks into the mid distance, his eyes are old, lashless, his face is stubble, he stifles a yawn.