When I was a child I had a horror of the Gap. I had to be carried over it, clawing at the neck of whoever bore me over, my small heart pounding. I had panicky dreams that trains were falling from the sky in a dark, rust-coloured mass of industrial metal and screaming men. Perhaps I saw a film I shouldn't have when I was too young? Or was my horror organic, in which case - why?
My father has a face that tells a story of some different time. The world is in his eyes and in the set of his jaw. He used to take the Parisian Metro to and from uni, when he was poor and struggling. I can remember him there, my little internal movie screen ticking over with the dusty crackle of old film. He is small in the shot, centered, and his bell-bottoms and longish chestnut curls give him a Simon and Garfunkel sort of wistful seventies cool. Parisians in long coats with pointy collars sit around him on the train, reading Le Monde to the rhythmic clickety-clack, eyes down, but my father's eyes are up, and sad, and swirling. I wouldn't be born for another ten or so years, but in the same way as Burgin describes a memory of his mother as he was in her womb, this "memory" I have of my father "of course is a fantasy with a decor almost certainly derived from a film" [1].
This course has prompted me to realise notions I have about trains that that I may never have been prompted to articulate otherwise. They inhabit a symbolic, dreamy sort of place for me - associated with the "internal movie screen" that I have found myself continually referencing in this blog. This seems strange, for trains are such staunchly utilitarian things, the farthest things from dreaminess imaginable. Yet I suppose they're a bit like Howard Roark's skyscrapers. It is their supreme and single-minded trajectory towards one practical aim that gives them a kind of beauty. Moreover, they are visually and aurally larger-than-life. In the texts we have studied, nearly all of which have a modernist preoccupation with industry and the machine, trains are represented with a distinct tendency toward the poetic.
Trains overcome, supercede nature, supercede humanity. They cut lines through cities, plow through mountains, underwater, over water. They can be both romantic in aesthetic, or deeply ugly. They will kill us without noticing if we are silly, or sad, enough to meddle in their paths. They are monstrous and lovely at the same time. Their atrocious hugeness is both moving and frightening, and calls into question the idea of scale: little person and big train.
In Berlin: Symphony of a City, the train, dark and not without menace, hurtles into the city. There is not a human in sight, just this train that seems to drive itself. The train is represented as its own agent - a notion that is by no means unreasonable. Standing on King's Cross platform every morning, I strain to see the train approach through the tunnel: first just two pricks of light, then a great looming shape, and the air pressure changes as it plugs the entrance, and there is a great whoosh and chaos of metal wheels on metal tracks. There is a small drama in every arrival, replete with an imminent, muffled roar, then orgasmic cacophony, then gentler, post-coital hiss as it stops as if spent. I have taken to peering into the front cabin as it passes, trying to glimpse the human at the front. Always vaguely surprised that he is, indeed, there, and that his face is placidly human.
In Man With The Movie Camera, trains are again a central motif. The man and the camera go beneath a train to record the uncompromising, visually hypnotic rhythm of its movements - and to admit to a kind of defeat. The train is the biggest thing in this film. Bigger than the city, which the man can overcome with his camera. Bigger, in fact, than the camera. The man with his movie camera cannot supercede the train; he lies beneath it as a testament to its power. I suppose these days, the jumbo jet represents what the train did to modernity: the machine that still causes my breath to catch as I watch it miraculously take of and - fly. So big, and somehow airborne: I am struck each time by this strangeness. However, in Vertov's film, the aeroplane is still a flimsy, Icarus-esque looking thing. The train is the real triumph of industry.
Rutmann and Vertov focus on the exteriority of the train, and its symbolic power. As such, we see the great metal outside of trains; we see the tracks and hard metal slicing the outside air.
And yet, it is within the train that humanity is present, and a new kind of drama takes place. Worn seats, graffiti, chewing gum, discarded newspapers, people, fractured snippets of conversation, vomit, crazy people, business people, bad smells, ipods, red hair, no hair...
The drama of the interior train is the drama of so many people in one roaring, speeding, deeply impersonal, deeply personal space. This dramatic interior space has always drawn the attention of cinema and literature. It is such a strange and sensory experience. For Michel de Certeau, the train passenger is in a state of "travelling incarceration" [2], and there is great cinematic potential in this notion of captivity. Short of engaging in the wild western drama of jumping in and out and over trains, there really is nothing much one can do between stations on a speeding train, but stay, seated and submissive, at the whim of the machine. The camera senses this mood, pounces on the potential.
This in-carriage drama is played out by in Wise Blood - a novel which is markedly cinematic in its highly visually-based and non-psychological delivery, especially so in the initial train scenes. Hazel Motes sat forward on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. [3] It is not that we know he wants to jump out - he just looks like he does, which is all the cinema can offer us. O'Conner lingers over Hazel's experience in the train: the woman sitting opposite who annoyingly makes conversation, the experience of the dining car, the experience of the berths, the experience of missing the train. It is effectively a sequence of relative non-events, ordinary train events, that are nonetheless charged with an air of confinement and dull discomfiture. Hazel is a little freakish, people look at him oddly, and he becomes increasingly agitated. But the train bundles them all tight in a parcel of metal, not delivering him any remorse. The train ploughs on forward on its voyage to who-knows.
And what about that wonderful idea, expressed in class by Melissa and giving me a little jab of "ooooh I hadn't thought of that", that to look through the window of a train is a very similar experience to the viewing of a movie, "a series of moving images at a fast and predictable pace"? Outside, as inaccessible as fiction, the world slides by, we passengers passive and voyeuristic, our eyes fixed on the one spot as moving pictures take us on Cocteau's "strange adventure". Either it is a film we know well - the trip from Redfern to King's Cross: black-Central-black-Town Hall-black Martin Place-black- one moment of open air and views across Woolloomooloo wharf- then back into black-Kings Cross-roll-credits.
Or a film we don't know. Sometimes, standing at King's Cross station about to go to uni, I am overcome by the urge to get on the train and just stay on and end up in Waterfall, or Wolli Creek, places I haven't been. Like seeing a movie for the first time. After all, all I'd do is sit there and watch. It would not be an adventure driven by me actually doing anything, but by the train/film taking me there.
Some notable cinematic train moments:
In the wonderful Australian film, Look Both Ways, a death on the train tracks acts as the catalyst for all that comes next, particularly the two main characters' musings over the nature of life, and the nature of death. Viewable here.
Another Australian film, One Perfect Day, where a DJ lies under a train with a tape recorder to satiate some great longing brought about by the aural qualities of trains. Linked here.
Harry Potter on the Hogwart's Express, a big friendly benevolent train. The Polar Express, which takes you, presumably, to Santa. Trains as kind old men who will envelope their precious cargo and deliver it safely to its destination. Steam trains waiting regally on platforms as symbols of the excitement of a great journey or quest.
The Day of the Roses, where the horrors of the train crash are laid out in full cinematic detail: twisted metal, dark tunnels, people so little and fragile compressed between layers of splintered steel and bloody seat stuffing. The sickening contrast of man and machine as an old man in the rubble sings Amazing Grace.
Sliding Doors, where a woman misses her train - the doors slide closed, stand clear, doors closing - and the entire course of her life is dramatically changed. The train is god; a philosopher; a fatalist.
And let us not forget toy trains: Charles and Ray Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains short film, and Thomas the Tank Engine. The filming of the miniature train. In the Eames' case, to marvel rather nostalgically at the aesthetic quality of toy trains - not, the emphatically inform us, miniature trains, but old-fashioned toy trains. In Thomas' case, to humanise trains, endowing certain ones with young, lively personalities, and others with a jaded slowness from too many years of - well, training. Thomas "runs off", and cries "my wheels hurt!". Do have a look at this link - if nothing else it will make you laugh fondly and remember childhood.
Which leads me back to my initial comments about my childhood dreams about trains, and my sense that trains are lodged immovably in the realm of the dream and imagination. The cinematic representation of the toy train is an indulgence of this idea. These little trains are finally stripped of their utilitarian aims, and become purely the stuff of nightmares and fantasy, as the child imagines them.
I am reminded finally of Bloc Party's music video for I Still Remember. Here, the camera moves evenly up a moving train, recording in each carriage a self-contained bubble containing different worlds. This is a perfectly articulated example of the cinematic potentials of the interior of the train, with each carriage a container of some form of human life, no two the same, each a mini-drama somehow heightened by the roar of the train and its frantic movement. In one carriage the people act distant; in another they are all mates; in another someone spots something out the window and everyone gets up to look; in another the carriage is the domain of the band and a mini-rock show. The lead singer is present in each carriage, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes a true example of de Certeau's train captive, with his palms against the glass and his mouth moving inaudibly, begging to get out. One carriage is full of just hims, emphasising the notion of the dream and the memory in relation to the railway - that this is not realism, but rather the tangent of a yearning imagination, gathered up in the idea of the moving train.
I think that I very much love trains.
Works cited:
[1] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004: p. 15.
[2] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steve Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 111.
[3] Flannery O'Conner, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
My father has a face that tells a story of some different time. The world is in his eyes and in the set of his jaw. He used to take the Parisian Metro to and from uni, when he was poor and struggling. I can remember him there, my little internal movie screen ticking over with the dusty crackle of old film. He is small in the shot, centered, and his bell-bottoms and longish chestnut curls give him a Simon and Garfunkel sort of wistful seventies cool. Parisians in long coats with pointy collars sit around him on the train, reading Le Monde to the rhythmic clickety-clack, eyes down, but my father's eyes are up, and sad, and swirling. I wouldn't be born for another ten or so years, but in the same way as Burgin describes a memory of his mother as he was in her womb, this "memory" I have of my father "of course is a fantasy with a decor almost certainly derived from a film" [1].
This course has prompted me to realise notions I have about trains that that I may never have been prompted to articulate otherwise. They inhabit a symbolic, dreamy sort of place for me - associated with the "internal movie screen" that I have found myself continually referencing in this blog. This seems strange, for trains are such staunchly utilitarian things, the farthest things from dreaminess imaginable. Yet I suppose they're a bit like Howard Roark's skyscrapers. It is their supreme and single-minded trajectory towards one practical aim that gives them a kind of beauty. Moreover, they are visually and aurally larger-than-life. In the texts we have studied, nearly all of which have a modernist preoccupation with industry and the machine, trains are represented with a distinct tendency toward the poetic.
Trains overcome, supercede nature, supercede humanity. They cut lines through cities, plow through mountains, underwater, over water. They can be both romantic in aesthetic, or deeply ugly. They will kill us without noticing if we are silly, or sad, enough to meddle in their paths. They are monstrous and lovely at the same time. Their atrocious hugeness is both moving and frightening, and calls into question the idea of scale: little person and big train.
In Berlin: Symphony of a City, the train, dark and not without menace, hurtles into the city. There is not a human in sight, just this train that seems to drive itself. The train is represented as its own agent - a notion that is by no means unreasonable. Standing on King's Cross platform every morning, I strain to see the train approach through the tunnel: first just two pricks of light, then a great looming shape, and the air pressure changes as it plugs the entrance, and there is a great whoosh and chaos of metal wheels on metal tracks. There is a small drama in every arrival, replete with an imminent, muffled roar, then orgasmic cacophony, then gentler, post-coital hiss as it stops as if spent. I have taken to peering into the front cabin as it passes, trying to glimpse the human at the front. Always vaguely surprised that he is, indeed, there, and that his face is placidly human.
In Man With The Movie Camera, trains are again a central motif. The man and the camera go beneath a train to record the uncompromising, visually hypnotic rhythm of its movements - and to admit to a kind of defeat. The train is the biggest thing in this film. Bigger than the city, which the man can overcome with his camera. Bigger, in fact, than the camera. The man with his movie camera cannot supercede the train; he lies beneath it as a testament to its power. I suppose these days, the jumbo jet represents what the train did to modernity: the machine that still causes my breath to catch as I watch it miraculously take of and - fly. So big, and somehow airborne: I am struck each time by this strangeness. However, in Vertov's film, the aeroplane is still a flimsy, Icarus-esque looking thing. The train is the real triumph of industry.
Rutmann and Vertov focus on the exteriority of the train, and its symbolic power. As such, we see the great metal outside of trains; we see the tracks and hard metal slicing the outside air.
And yet, it is within the train that humanity is present, and a new kind of drama takes place. Worn seats, graffiti, chewing gum, discarded newspapers, people, fractured snippets of conversation, vomit, crazy people, business people, bad smells, ipods, red hair, no hair...
The drama of the interior train is the drama of so many people in one roaring, speeding, deeply impersonal, deeply personal space. This dramatic interior space has always drawn the attention of cinema and literature. It is such a strange and sensory experience. For Michel de Certeau, the train passenger is in a state of "travelling incarceration" [2], and there is great cinematic potential in this notion of captivity. Short of engaging in the wild western drama of jumping in and out and over trains, there really is nothing much one can do between stations on a speeding train, but stay, seated and submissive, at the whim of the machine. The camera senses this mood, pounces on the potential.
This in-carriage drama is played out by in Wise Blood - a novel which is markedly cinematic in its highly visually-based and non-psychological delivery, especially so in the initial train scenes. Hazel Motes sat forward on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. [3] It is not that we know he wants to jump out - he just looks like he does, which is all the cinema can offer us. O'Conner lingers over Hazel's experience in the train: the woman sitting opposite who annoyingly makes conversation, the experience of the dining car, the experience of the berths, the experience of missing the train. It is effectively a sequence of relative non-events, ordinary train events, that are nonetheless charged with an air of confinement and dull discomfiture. Hazel is a little freakish, people look at him oddly, and he becomes increasingly agitated. But the train bundles them all tight in a parcel of metal, not delivering him any remorse. The train ploughs on forward on its voyage to who-knows.
And what about that wonderful idea, expressed in class by Melissa and giving me a little jab of "ooooh I hadn't thought of that", that to look through the window of a train is a very similar experience to the viewing of a movie, "a series of moving images at a fast and predictable pace"? Outside, as inaccessible as fiction, the world slides by, we passengers passive and voyeuristic, our eyes fixed on the one spot as moving pictures take us on Cocteau's "strange adventure". Either it is a film we know well - the trip from Redfern to King's Cross: black-Central-black-Town Hall-black Martin Place-black- one moment of open air and views across Woolloomooloo wharf- then back into black-Kings Cross-roll-credits.
Or a film we don't know. Sometimes, standing at King's Cross station about to go to uni, I am overcome by the urge to get on the train and just stay on and end up in Waterfall, or Wolli Creek, places I haven't been. Like seeing a movie for the first time. After all, all I'd do is sit there and watch. It would not be an adventure driven by me actually doing anything, but by the train/film taking me there.
Some notable cinematic train moments:
In the wonderful Australian film, Look Both Ways, a death on the train tracks acts as the catalyst for all that comes next, particularly the two main characters' musings over the nature of life, and the nature of death. Viewable here.
Another Australian film, One Perfect Day, where a DJ lies under a train with a tape recorder to satiate some great longing brought about by the aural qualities of trains. Linked here.
Harry Potter on the Hogwart's Express, a big friendly benevolent train. The Polar Express, which takes you, presumably, to Santa. Trains as kind old men who will envelope their precious cargo and deliver it safely to its destination. Steam trains waiting regally on platforms as symbols of the excitement of a great journey or quest.
The Day of the Roses, where the horrors of the train crash are laid out in full cinematic detail: twisted metal, dark tunnels, people so little and fragile compressed between layers of splintered steel and bloody seat stuffing. The sickening contrast of man and machine as an old man in the rubble sings Amazing Grace.
Sliding Doors, where a woman misses her train - the doors slide closed, stand clear, doors closing - and the entire course of her life is dramatically changed. The train is god; a philosopher; a fatalist.
And let us not forget toy trains: Charles and Ray Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains short film, and Thomas the Tank Engine. The filming of the miniature train. In the Eames' case, to marvel rather nostalgically at the aesthetic quality of toy trains - not, the emphatically inform us, miniature trains, but old-fashioned toy trains. In Thomas' case, to humanise trains, endowing certain ones with young, lively personalities, and others with a jaded slowness from too many years of - well, training. Thomas "runs off", and cries "my wheels hurt!". Do have a look at this link - if nothing else it will make you laugh fondly and remember childhood.
Which leads me back to my initial comments about my childhood dreams about trains, and my sense that trains are lodged immovably in the realm of the dream and imagination. The cinematic representation of the toy train is an indulgence of this idea. These little trains are finally stripped of their utilitarian aims, and become purely the stuff of nightmares and fantasy, as the child imagines them.
I am reminded finally of Bloc Party's music video for I Still Remember. Here, the camera moves evenly up a moving train, recording in each carriage a self-contained bubble containing different worlds. This is a perfectly articulated example of the cinematic potentials of the interior of the train, with each carriage a container of some form of human life, no two the same, each a mini-drama somehow heightened by the roar of the train and its frantic movement. In one carriage the people act distant; in another they are all mates; in another someone spots something out the window and everyone gets up to look; in another the carriage is the domain of the band and a mini-rock show. The lead singer is present in each carriage, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes a true example of de Certeau's train captive, with his palms against the glass and his mouth moving inaudibly, begging to get out. One carriage is full of just hims, emphasising the notion of the dream and the memory in relation to the railway - that this is not realism, but rather the tangent of a yearning imagination, gathered up in the idea of the moving train.
I think that I very much love trains.
Works cited:
[1] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004: p. 15.
[2] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steve Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 111.
[3] Flannery O'Conner, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
3 comments:
Have you seen Noise? This Australian film positions trains as symbolic of a Modern nightmare - loud, strange, dirty, dangerous and isolating. Trains are paradoxically isolating, as although they connect us to other people, we travel with absolute strangers, and like the Parisians with their eyes downturned, no attempt to rectify this is usually made.
I love your discussion. Another early filmic representation of trains is in the classic 'Keystone Cops' Buster Keaton films. I think these may have been the origin of the whole damsel in distress, tied to the train tracks thing.
Ross.
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