The first Oyster card

Renovation work at Richmond station has revealed a handful of posters dating from the mid-1980s (see date top right, above), including one explaining how to use train-door buttons (bottom).

Underground cinema 2: the Paris Métro on film

Fred Cavayé's tremendous Point Blank is due to be released in the UK 20 May and I can't recommend it highly enough. The French thriller (which I suspect will be marketed so as to mask its nationality and maximise its audience) features a great chase scene in the Métro, so I thought I'd follow up my post on films in London's Underground with a look at movies set on the Parisian tube network.

Appropriately enough for the city of love, romance features highly - from The First Night (1958) by Georges Franju through to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie (2001). In Bande à part (1964), Jean-Luc Godard's trio of Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey invent stories for a sad-looking man on the Métro, while fellow nouvelle vaguer Francois Truffaut caught Le dernier métro (1980) with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve in wartime.

Louis Malle acknowledged social unrest in his adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro (1960), when ingenue Catherine Demongeot arrives to find the underground barred by one of the system's endemic strikes. Bernardo Bertolucci also stayed above ground in Last Tango in Paris (1972) for those memorable shots of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, where the Métro crosses above the Seine between the Eiffel Tower and the posh sixteenth arrondissement. Those views are replicated in Gilles Mimouni's stylish 1996 thriller L'appartement, featuring Vincent Cassel, Romane Bohringer and Monica Bellucci.

In another thriller, Jean-Pierre Melville mounted a chase in the underground, intercut with indicator bulbs lighting up on a tube map, in Le samourai (1967), starring Alain Delon. Peak time for Métro movies came in the 1980s with the cinéma du look when first Jean-Jacques Beineix burst onto the scene with Diva (1980), which features a chase through the Métro, on and off trains and up and down escalators - on a postman's scooter!

Luc Besson uncovered a world of bag snatchers, bodybuilders and pop wannabes down there in romantic comedy-thriller-musical Subway (1985), starring Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani (pictured). Paris is always amenable to directors using its public spaces and so it was for Leos Carax' beautiful and audacious homeless romance, Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - the most expensive French film ever.

The city's authorities were happy to close the bridge at the movie's heart for some filming but delays meant that shooting had to continue on a set recreated, with requisite Métro station, in the south of France. In a particularly brutal scene, Carax regular Denis Lavant runs through those iconic white-tiled corridors tearing down posters emblazoned with the image of his missing girlfriend, Juliette Binoche, before setting fire to the bill-sticker himself. It's a wonder Binoche doesn't stay clear of the Métro: she gets her carnet out again for Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000), which uses a confrontation with a young man on a train to examine similar racial themes to those in Hidden (Caché) five years later.

Underground cinema: London's tube on film

London’s tube is the oldest underground system in the world, so it’s not surprising that filmmakers have dwelt on the horrors that lurk beneath the city’s crust, including alien spaceships (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967) and sleeping dragons (Reign of Fire, 2002). In classic British horror film Death Line (1972), Donald Pleasence’s investigation into deaths at Russell Square leads him to inbred, plague-ridden cannibals trapped underground following a cave-in back in 1892.

Tottenham Court Road station is the scene of a memorable chase in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) while Franka Potente discovers the dangers of dropping off on the last train home in Creep (2004). Appropriately, director Ben Hopkins views commuters almost like zombies in The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (2000).

Londoners’ propensity for (urban-)myth making began as early as 1935, when rumours started to circulate that the disused British Museum station was haunted by the ghost of one of the institution's (Egyptian) mummies; a national newspaper even offered a reward to anyone willing to spend the night in the closed station. There were no takers.

The story appears to have sprung from that year’s hit Bulldog Jack, which features a supposed tunnel from the old station - renamed Bloomsbury in the film - to the historic museum. The film, starring Ralph Richardson and Fay Wray, features a climactic chase scene aboard a runaway tube train.

Zone extension: Manhunt, Passport to Pimlico, Sliding Doors, Tube Tales.

More fictional stations: Crouch End (Shaun of the Dead), High Holburn (Bulldog Drummond), Hobbs End (Quatermass and the Pit) and Vauxhall Cross (Die Another Day).

Tube blunder: Going to Heathrow on a train marked Cockfosters - the other end of the Piccadilly Line (The Rachel Papers).

after the quake

In January 1995, Japan's Kansai region was struck by an earthquake that killed nearly 6,500 people. The home of the parents of writer Haruki Murakami was destroyed; Murakami had grown up in the Osaka-Kobe area but was teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the time. On 20 March followers of the Aum cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo underground, killing 11 commuters and affecting 5,000 others.

As has been well documented, Murakami had left Japan following the monstrous success of his novel Norwegian Wood, which has just come out as a film in the UK. When his teaching in Cambridge was completed, he decided it was time to return to Japan and investigate these events that had struck the core of his countrymen.

'I spent my last year abroad in a sort of fog when two major catastrophes struck Japan: the Osaka-Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack,' he is quoted as saying in Jay Rubin's critical biography, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. '[These were] two of the gravest tragedies in Japan's post-war history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness 'before' and 'after' these events. These twin catastrophes will remain embedded in our psyche as two milestones in our life as people.'

His response was twofold: he spent 1996 interviewing survivors of the Tokyo gas attack, giving rise to the book of their testimonies, Underground. In the book's introduction, he tells of reading a letter in a magazine from a woman whose husband had lost his job because of the attack: 'A subway commuter, he had been unfortunate enough to be on his way to work in one of the carriages in which the sarin gas was released. He passed out and was taken to hospital. But even after several days' recuperation, the after-effects lingered on, and he couldn't get himself back into the working routine. At first he was tolerated, but as time went on his boss and colleagues began to make snide remarks. Unable to bear the icy atmosphere any longer, feeling almost forced out, he resigned...

'As far as I can recall there was nothing particularly plaintive about [the letter], nor was it an angry rant. If anything, it was barely audible, a grumble under the breath. "How on earth could this happen to us…?" she wonders, still unable to accept what had out of the blue befallen her family.'

That letter could also be seen as the starting point for Murakami's second action: a series of short stories serialised in August 1999 that came to be collected as after the quake. The six tales in the book are all set in February 1995, after the earthquake and before the gas attack. Many are naturalistic examinations of individual lives, which reach a pitch in Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, a comic monster tale of the type we may associate with kitsch Japanese Godzilla movies.

Both books are remarkable works from a contemporary author, which I recommend. I'm particularly touched that in September 1995 Murakami gave two public readings in the earthquake zone to benefit severely damaged libraries, 'in one of which,' Rubin writes, '[Murakami] had spent many days as a middle-school and high-school student and "dozing" in preparation for his entrance exams.'

UPDATE For its 28 March Japan issue, the New Yorker is reprinting one of the stories collected in after the quake, UFO in Kushiro. Shame they can't use The Seventh Man, which wasn't inspired by natural disaster but makes for an even more powerful take by Murakami that could be applied to the current tragedy and its aftermath.

In Britain, the Red Cross has launched an appeal to help Japan following the latest earthquake.

London's other underground lines

We're rightly fascinated by London's disused tube stations, deep-level shelters and secret rivers but last week I gained an unexpected insight into the underground telephone infrastructure. I thought the lines lay a few feet beneath pavements but five nights of work outside my flat - until 2am and beyond, zzz - has shown me otherwise.

Two very enthusiastic and loyal BT workers showed me the three-storey drop they had to descend to fix phone lines on my road; at the bottom was water. According to one of them, there's a route at Tottenham Court Road that runs beneath the Underground; he said it's known as the German line because it was built by prisoners of war, though I'm not sure if the chronology tallies on this. If anyone knows any better do let me know.

The repairmen were here as a length of cable had been stolen from along the whole road, affecting 1,600 homes. I was told cable can fetch £5,000 a tonne and, in this case, the thieves had probably made away with £7,500-worth.