The View From the Train (23 page)

Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L & NW Railway
(1898)

Dickson, born in Brittany to British parents, had emigrated to the United States in 1879, joining Edison in 1883. In May 1897, he returned to Europe as the technical manager and cinematographer of the newly formed British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate (later Company),
¹⁸
travelling in the UK and Europe, and in South Africa during the Boer War. The British Biograph Company's films include
Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L & NW Railway
(1898) and
Irish Mail – L & NW Railway – Taking Up Water at Full Speed
(1898), the southbound Holyhead-to-Euston boat train photographed passing through Bushey station from the rear of a train on a parallel track, which is overtaken by the express towards the end of the film. These films would have required extensive, precise collaboration with the railway company: the London and North Western appear to have been more often involved in early films than other railway companies. Another Biograph film was photographed on the same route –
Menai Bridge – The Irish Day Mail from Euston Entering the Tubular Bridge Over the Menai Straits
(1898) – and Charles Goodwin Norton's
Railway Traffic on the LNWR
(c.1897) was photographed from the platform of what was then Sudbury and Wembley station (now Wembley Central).

All these films survive in the collection of the British Film Institute's National Archive. There are other Biograph railway rides in the BFI's archive, most of them American Biograph titles.
¹⁹
If these were exhibited in the UK, as seems likely, this is one example among many of the transatlantic, westward orientation of much early cinema, at least in the UK,
²⁰
which suggests a relationship between film and the prospect of emigration reminiscent of the role claimed by Oetterman for the moving panorama in the settlement of California. In American Biograph phantom rides such as
In the Canadian Rockies, near Banff
(1899) and
Railway Trip through Mountain Scenery and Tunnels
(1900), the movement of the trains suggests an anticipation one might imagine as
characteristic of nearing the Pacific coast. Perhaps Biograph's international spread and Dickson's transatlantic journey were factors in Biograph's interest in the railway between Holyhead and London. A clue as to why this was the subject of so much attention – another film,
Phantom Ride: Menai Straits
(anon., c.1904), begins at about the same place as Biograph's
Conway Castle –
is offered by a remark of Charles Urban, an American film producer active in the UK: in an intertitle in
The Old Mauretania
(Charles Urban Trading Company, c.1910)
²¹
he writes that, when crossing the Atlantic, ‘we usually took advantage of the Kingston–Holyhead route to reach London more quickly, by boarding a tender off Queenstown' (the port of Cork, now Cobh); i.e. he took a train to Dublin, the mailboat to Holyhead and the Irish Mail to Euston, suggesting that the train may have derived its status at least in part from its being patronised by transatlantic commuters. A comparable evocation of elsewhere was offered by British Biograph's
Through Miller's Dale (near Buxton, Derbyshire) Midland Rail
(1899), also known as
Through the Chee Tor Tunnel in Derbyshire
, a three-take view from the front of a Midland Railway train as it passes though and beyond Miller's Dale Junction, where the branch to Buxton left the main Midland route between Derby and Manchester. Both the location and the railway journey were celebrated for touristic qualities that derived in part from the supposed resemblance of this and other places in Derbyshire to painterly landscapes in Italy.

Through Miller's Dale (near Buxton, Derbyshire) Midland Rail
(1899)

The majority of UK railway rides date from before 1900, after which the electric tram was more often employed as a moving-camera platform.
²²
All the British Biograph railway titles in the BFI's archive were photographed before Dickson left for South Africa in 1899. The only British Biograph moving-camera film in the archive that dates from after his return is
Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram
(July 1901), which was probably photographed by Dickson. By about 1903 he had left Biograph, returning to his profession as an electrical engineer. There are later American Biograph railway rides, including
The Georgetown Loop
(1901), photographed by Billy Bitzer, who later became D. W. Griffith's cinematographer.

Other film companies made phantom rides, though few are as spectacular as the large-format films produced by the Biograph companies. In the UK, both Cecil Hepworth's Hepwix and the Warwick Trading Company (the European branch of Maguire and Baucus set up by Urban) produced a number of examples. In Hepworth's
Through Three Reigns
(1922), a retrospective compilation of his early films, he refers (like Urban, in an intertitle) to ‘stereoscopic cinema', meaning a feature of moving-camera films in which differential parallax suggests the illusion of depth. The film so introduced is
Thames River Scene
(1899), a panoramic, sideways view from a launch travelling downstream among other craft on the river at Henley, but the ‘stereoscopic effect' is also characteristic of phantom rides. The stereoscope was one of the entertainments that preceded cinema, a competing medium which offered a three-dimensionality that cinema conventionally lacked, so that there would have been a potentially commercial aspect to Hepworth's interest in and realisation of ‘stereoscopic' cinema.

Railway actualities are among the forms most closely associated with the period of early cinema. Their production declined
with the development of narrative cinema, but the phantom ride played a significant role in this development. One of Hepworth's railway rides is
View from an Engine Front – Train Leaving Tunnel
(1899), which survives both as a film in its own right and as two of the three shots that comprise G. A. Smith's
The Kiss in the Tunnel
(also 1899). This was not the first film to attempt continuity editing, but is among the earliest successful examples in that it creates a convincing continuity from two quite separate camera subjects seen from different viewpoints. Smith made a studio shot in which a couple are seen in side view in a railway carriage compartment (like that of the fairground ride in
Letter from an Unknown Woman
). The window is dark, as if the train is in a tunnel, and the couple (Smith and his wife Laura) take the opportunity to embrace and kiss. As far as anyone knows, the scene survives only in combination with Hepworth's film, but it was advertised for sale as a potential addition to any phantom ride in which a train passed through a tunnel. Hepworth's film begins with a view from a stationary locomotive facing a tunnel entrance. A train emerges from the tunnel and passes the locomotive with the camera, which advances into the tunnel until the screen is entirely dark. At this point, Smith cut in his railway compartment scene, which is followed by the remainder of Hepworth's film – a moment of darkness in which a point of light appears and widens until the train emerges into daylight. The film's publicity took care to assert the propriety of the scene depicted, though viewers must surely have been aware of the dangers, real and imagined, that accompanied travel in isolated railway compartments.
²³
There is another three-shot
Kiss in the Tunnel
made by the Riley Brothers and Bamforth companies in 1899 or 1900, in which the first and third shots are views of the train from beside the track. If this is a less successful example of film construction, it is perhaps because the forward movement in the first shot in the Hepworth/Smith film suggests that the carriage interior of the second shot is really in motion. Smith's insert functions as what became known as a cutaway, whereas the Riley/Bamforth film appears as three shots rather awkwardly joined together.

Despite the apparent decline in phantom ride production during the 1900s (in the UK at least) their exhibition continued. In 1904 George C. Hale, a former chief fire officer of Kansas City, began to exhibit phantom rides and other panoramas in spaces fitted out as replicas of American railway carriages, known initially as ‘Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World'. At the height of their popularity, Hale's Tours had sites throughout the United States and in many other countries, opening in the UK in 1906 as ‘Hale's Tours of the World'. In the tradition of the fairground ride, which continues today in simulations of space travel and other kinds of flight, Hale's Tours offered trips to ‘the colonies or any part of the world (without luggage!)' for sixpence. Descriptions of their premises, in which the benches shook and the films were accompanied by the sounds of steam and whistles, recall the space described in Robert W. Paul's October 1895 patent application for a ‘time machine'
²⁴
that preceded his first screen projections. This was suggested by H. G. Wells's novel, and is another indication of the parallel between time travel and the railway panorama alluded to by Louis Jourdan's line in
Letter to an Unknown Woman
. In the UK, Hale's Tours had sites in London (one at 165 Oxford Street) and in other cities, and though the UK company does not appear to have survived for long,
²⁵
at the height of their international popularity Hale's Tours were ‘the largest chain of theatres exclusively showing films before 1906'.
²⁶

Tom Gunning has characterised cinema's early period as ‘the cinema of attractions',
²⁷
observing that after 1907 ‘the cinema of attractions does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films'.
²⁸
In David Lean's
Brief Encounter
(1945), there is a curious echo of Promio's supposed first use of the moving camera. Celia Johnson (‘Laura') is sitting by the window of a compartment on a train between ‘Milford Junction' and ‘Ketchworth', with a back-projected panorama of a near-dark English landscape outside and, in voice-over:

This sequence, with its added superimpositions and narration, confirms an interpretation of the railway panorama – suggested by Promio's first examples – as an image of the stream of consciousness. In 1913 Sigmund Freud wrote, famously, that psychoanalysts might usefully tell their patients to ‘say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you are seeing outside.'
²⁹
The phantom ride, on the other hand, more particularly resembles Henri Bergson's ‘predatory'
³⁰
image of duration introduced in
Matter and Memory
(1896), in which the present is ‘the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future'.
³¹
The forward-moving cine camera, with its reciprocating claw and rotating shutter, might almost have been expressly devised to accomplish this ‘gnawing'. Bergson's subsequent interpretation and critique of the cinematographic mechanism as a model of perception was to become a founding text for much contemporary film and other critical theory;
³²
cinema's fragmentation of continuous duration is rarely so demonstratively enacted as by the railway and similar forward-moving films of the medium's first decade.

Gunning's distinction between ‘the cinema of attractions' and what came later parallels other descriptions of the spatial transformations characteristic of the period. For Henri Lefebvre, ‘around 1910 a certain space was shattered'
³³
so that early cinema, arguably, offers a glimpse of this space just before (or possibly during) the period in which its ‘shattering' occurred. One might even imagine the cinematographic mechanism itself as implicated in the ‘shattering'.
³⁴
As Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second'.
³⁵
Benjamin's ‘dynamite of the tenth of a second' is usually understood as a reference to montage; his essay mentions nothing of cinema earlier than the work of Gance and Vertov, but it seems to me at least as intriguing to imagine the prison-world burst asunder by juggernauts comprised of cine cameras, locomotives and electric trams, after whose passing nothing was ever the same again.