BAGDContext CSM

Martin le Lapin is Charlotte Martin, an illustrator with a love of trains, and the view from the window…This is from a series of images of trains in Japan.

Charlotte studied at CSM, and is now a based in Folkestone.

I love this Just Eat baroque style mash-up…

Feel-good ending, and with a nod to Soul Train…Perfect

Luc Besson is a prolific film director who is credited with re-booting the action genre. Subway (1985) was his breakout feature…it begins with a high-speed car chase that reminds us of French Connection, and also the high-speed short, C’etait un rendezvous (1976). Nowadays, Subway seems quite slow.

Back in the day, Besson had been directing music videos. He was an early adopter of digital filming and was one of the main protagonists in the evolution of le cinema du look…with an art-direction devolving from the saturated colour of luxury brand advertising (fashion, perfume etc and Grace Jones music videos).

The film is remarkable for being almost entirely filmed underground in the Paris Metro. From a formal point of view this is quite an interesting challenge, and almost as good as the space-ship science-fiction film. The underground lighting and the reflective white tiles of the corridors produce a discombobulating combination of illuminated precision and spatial confusion…

The film also features a number of actors at early-stages in their careers – Christopher Lambert, Isabelle Adjani etc.

It’s no surprise that, later, Besson was producer for Taxi (1998).

The BBC are showing a new thriller set on the railway sleeper service between Glasgow and London…The series is available to stream on the BBC iplayer. The series has received almost universally poor reviews, but it was pretty tense and included a lot of background railway IT details.

Here is a Swiss railway poster from the 1950s…The poster combines several of my interests: posters, railways and modernist engineering and architecture.

The poster shows an elegant and beautiful concrete bridge in the style of the pioneer concrete engineer, Robert Maillart. I looked, and this bridge is the Mundbach bridge. It’s not listed as by Maillart. The road original bridge is stone, with a second bridge in concrete alongside. The Swiss railway infrastructure is documented, online, with impressive accuracy. The poster, on the other hand, is an idealised representation.

The background landscape seems very different from that shown in the poster, perhaps appealing to train passengers with a taste for a more gentle landscape…

If you are interested in the history of concrete, as a building material with under-realised sculptural potential, there is a documentary film: Maillart’s Bridges (2000). Maillart was a genius at working out how to achieve structural integrity with the least and most elegant use of concrete – see, it doesn’t have to be brutal.