Closely watched trains (1966)

After finishing Closely Watched Trains () I have a hard time actually explaining what the film is about, you know - basically. Is it about a young, innocent apprentice railroad worker who falls in love with a conductress only to find out that he has some sexual problems. Or is it about the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia? Both, I guess, and more. It's a strange, imaginative little film, a film that makes no grand thesis about human existence but in its own eccentric way it conjures up the world of the railway station and the people working there (most of them seem to be preoccupied with sex most of the time). The tone of the film is light-hearted, and many of there is no plot to speak of. Instead, we have a bunch of people, some clashes, some catastrophies, and one grand thing that happens at the end. The gender politics of the film? Well, one could say, if one wanted, that this is quite a marvellous way of ironically playing with the meanings of "being a real man" and the idea that mere sexual organs enforce the eternal law of "becoming a real man". And well, maybe there were one or two jokes about heroism here as well, the Grand Heroism of the resistance movements fighting the nazis. Trying to explain the effect the film had on me is equally hard as explaining its story. It operates by means of b/w images of harsh landscapes, long shots - and eerie frames with which you don't know quite what to do (a retired father's sock in close-up, a man who kills a rabbit, a woman who fondles the neck of a goose, a clock).