The Fleeing Gaze

‘La Bête humaine is dead’: that headline, which appeared in a January 1987 issue of the newspaper Le Monde, quoted a remark made by a train driver during one of the most serious strikes in the history of French railways. The report then listed his lengthy complaints about working conditions and, above all, the ‘loneliness on the engines; there used to be two of us, and we’d always talk a bit. We’ve been driving alone for the last three years.’ ¹ The visual memory of the reader immediately conjures up the opening shot of Renoir’s film, where the camera, by tracking back to reveal, behind the gaping mouth of the locomotive, the fireman shovelling in coal and the engine driver at his controls, constructs a centaur with a steel body and a double human bust. At the same time, echoes of old interviews crowd back into the mind – interviews that explicitly recognized the railwaymen’s right to dignity in their work which was one of the strikers’ demands during the winter of 1986–7: ‘The railwayman’s job is no joke, it is a grand profession. For some, it’s almost a vocation.’ ²