43.3km Transylvanian Timber is a portrait of two professions operating independently in the same remote valley in northern Transylvania near the Ukrainian border: the loggers who chop down trees and load the logs onto fragile-looking rail wagons, and the patrolmen policing what is currently the outer border of the European Union, established at the start of 2007 when Romania joined the club.

But Georg Tiller and Claudio Pfeifer’s film is more meditation than conventional documentary.  Aside from a scene-setting opening title and two brief, elliptical extracts from a patrolman’s anecdote, the film is entirely wordless.  It eschews explanatory depictions of the process of logging or patrolling: most of the film shows workers between shifts, either travelling or whiling away the time fishing, worshipping, dancing or painstakingly chipping ice and snow off the track, their only lifeline to the outside world.

The film’s soundtrack is key to its hypnotic quality.  Fans of the trolley-car scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) will recognise its central motif, which opens the film and recurs constantly throughout: the clank of the carriages and wagons as they negotiate the narrow-gauge track.  Shepherds and their dogs guide their flocks through bitterly cold, snow-muffled landscapes in search of edible sustenance via a complex counterpoint of whistles and barks.  There is no non-diegetic music score, though an impromptu riverside Orthodox service provides some beautiful choral singing while a radio appearance of Wham’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ is delightfully incongruous.

The film’s meditative qualities extend to its silent studies of faces, most of them gnarled and weatherbeaten (one is a dead ringer for Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood), though women and children appear too.  The happiest face, paradoxically, is of a hitch-hiker of indeterminate non-European origin trying to attract passing cars by waving an EU flag, beaming at them even when they fail to stop.  Brief glimpses are given of the way the loggers live their lives: a neon motel sign, a makeshift dormitory packed with beds bunched tightly together (at least there’s no shortage of wood to heat the rooms), an impromptu dance during which a woman lowers her jeans to reveal a pink thong.

Given the absence of context, it’s tempting to read too much into the patrolman’s spoken anecdote about apprehending a potential illegal immigrant on a bicycle, though this ultimately proves as elliptical as everything else.  There’s a reference to an unhelpful boy in a striped pullover (the same one seen stoking the brazier on the train?) and assistance finally being offered by “a trustworthy person” who nonetheless carefully guarded his anonymity.   The patrolman acknowledges that he should “respect his concealment”, and it’s also made clear visually that the border police are dependent on the loggers’ goodwill.  The only way they can get around at (relative) speed is via vans and minibuses that have been modified so they can run on the tracks, owned outright by the Romanian-Swiss wood processing company whose operations seem to dominate the region.

But one shouldn’t read too much into a film whose primary purpose is to be evocative and impressionistic.  As with any long train journey (in real life, this one takes five and a half hours to travel just 43.3 kilometres), one is just as likely to spend the time staring out of the window or fixating on small, seemingly insignificant details (for instance, a chain linking the wagons that’s bound up with fragile-looking wire).  At just under 43.3 minutes, the film offers enough variety along the way to ensure that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Michael Brooke
Curator (Screenonline) at the BFI National Archive and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound

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