ABSTRACT
A male voice reads a letter on the soundtrack: “May 10, 1938. Dear sister, here come some questions you should answer in Swedish and German. 1: name, 2: profession, 3: nationality […]” Simultaneously, a man approaches the camera in the aisle of a train. He is framed in a frontal silhouette, the shadowy black of his figure merging with enveloping beams of light. As he walks directly toward the camera, the silhouette grows darker. The man stops and turns to look into a compartment, and again the camera frames him from the front, this time in closer proximity. The man, however, is bound to the darkness of the silhouette’s texture, the outlines of his uniform playing with the enveloping light. The camera then turns to the interior of the compartment, slowly sweeping from left to right, and finally stopping at a table on which a Russian tea glass, a passport, and a notebook are laid out. Under the notebook is a partly covered photograph that the camera subtly singles out. On the soundtrack, the male voice keeps reading the list of questions and briefly contends: “I am on the trains this summer and I often have to question foreigners.”
