The View From the Train (29 page)

  
7
  See, for example, Harvey,
Condition of Postmodernity
, and Stephen Kern,
The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For more on early film see, for example, Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, eds,
Who's Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey
(London: British Film Institute, 1996) and the accompanying website at
victorian-cinema.net
; Richard Abel, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Early Cinema
(London: Routledge, 2005); and Ian Christie,
The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World
(London: BBC/BFI, 1994).

  
8
  Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth',
The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists
4: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 89–118, at p. 101.

  
9
  Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière's Arrival of the Train', pp. 89–101.

10
  According to the BFI's database, this is Lumière catalogue no. 653. It also matches Loiperdinger's description of no. 653. Loiperdinger mentions two other Lumière train arrivals, no. 8 (at Villefranche-sur-Saône) and no. 127 (at Lyon), and that three versions of
L'Arrivée d'un train de La Ciotat
are known to have existed, of which no. 653 is the latest. The La Ciotat train arrival captioned as Lumière no. 653 on many internet sites is not the film described by the BFI and Loiperdinger (there are, for instance, no female Lumière family members on the platform).

11
  The cinematographers' term ‘pan' is an abbreviation of panorama, but a pan is usually the result of rotating the camera laterally whereas a ‘panorama' is the result of sideways or other movement of the camera's support.

12
  In the CNC's compilation in the BFI's National Archive, the films are edited together in non-topographical order. They are views from southbound trains
travelling from what was then the north end of the docks, passing Canada Dock (
III
), Sandon Dock (
IV
), Victoria, Waterloo and Prince's Docks (
II
) and George's, Canning, Salthouse and Albert Docks (
I
), so that the topographical order would be
III, IV, II, I
. By 1904, George's Dock had been filled in. Promio's other Liverpool films are
Church Street, Lime Street, Entrée dans Clarence Dock
and
La Rade
, a view across the river from a slow-moving viewpoint near the present pier head, with a ship moving slowly upstream.

13
  The BFI's National Archive holds five compilation reels of Lumière films, presented to the BFI in 1995 by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) on the occasion of the centenary of cinema, which are intended to include all extant films made by the company in the UK. One of the two films known as
Pont de la tour
is not included (a view from a boat moving downstream beneath Tower Bridge), perhaps because it was already held by the BFI (the
Pont de la tour
in the CNC compilation is a view of pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the bridge seen from the carriageway's pavement).

14
  One might be tempted to look for the landscape of ‘Bloom Cottage', of the episode ‘Ithaca', in Promio's panoramas.

15
  Nigel Kneale's television series
Quatermass and the Pit
includes a reference to ‘the wild hunt … the phantom ride of witches and devils'.

16
  British Biograph's forward-facing tram ride through Ealing, for example, is called
Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram
(1901).

17
  The Library of Congress's
memory.loc.gov
  offers the opportunity to compare twenty-five Biograph and twenty Edison films of New York in 1898–1906. Biograph's films include some particularly successful depictions of spatial or architectural subjects (for example,
Beginning a Skyscraper
), while Edison's often seem more interested in performance.

18
  See Barry Anthony and Richard Brown,
A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915
(Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999).

19
  American Biograph phantom rides in the BFI's archive include
Across Brooklyn Bridge
(1899),
The Crookedest Railroad Yard in the World
(1897),
From Vaudreuil to St Anne's
(1900),
In the Canadian Rockies, near Banff
(1899),
Into the Catskills: a Race for a Siding
(1906),
Railway Trip through Mountain Scenery and Tunnels
(1900),
A Ride on a Switchback
(1900, or c.1898),
Victoria Jubilee Bridge, St Lawrence River, Canada
(1900) and
The Georgetown Loop
(1901).

20
  This seems
to have been fairly widespread: in a Mitchell and Kenyon tram-ride film of Nottingham, the camera dwells on a wall of poster advertisements, the largest of which is for the North American Animated Photo Co., a UK company that commissioned many of Mitchell and Kenyon's films. Another of Mitchell and Kenyon's customers was A. D. Thomas, who traded as the Thomas-Edison Animated Photo Co. and sometimes billed himself as ‘Edison-Thomas'.

21
  Urban's intertitles refer to the sinking of the
Lusitania
in 1915, so must have been added later.

22
  Many of the UK's tram networks were electrified during the late 1890s and early 1900s. Horse trams had not offered such a steady movement, but the top of a tram was perhaps more accessible than the front of a locomotive, and the streets a more active camera subject, offering the possibility that people photographed would become the film's paying customers.

23
  For the distinction between the American and European pattern of railway carriage and the dangers of the latter, see Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey
, Chapter 5, ‘The Compartment' (pp. 70–88) and Chapter 6, ‘The American Railroad' (pp. 89–112), particularly ‘The New Type of Carriage' (pp. 98–103) and ‘River Steamboat and Canal Packet as Models for the American Railroad Car' (pp. 103–7).

24
  See John Barnes,
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, Vol. 1: 1894–1896
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 38–41.

25
  Hales Tours of the World Ltd was superseded by Hales Tours of the World (UK) Ltd, for which a receiver was appointed in 1908 (see Ian Christie et al.
London Project
, at
londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk
).

26
  Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde', in Elsaesser and Barker,
Early Cinema
, pp. 56–62, at p. 58.

27
  Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attractions', pp. 56–62.

28
  Ibid., p. 57.

29
  Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)' (1913),
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
(London: Vintage, 2001), Vol. 12, pp. 123–44, at p. 135.

30
  See Kern,
Culture of Time and Space
, p. 43.

31
  Henri Bergson,
Matter and Memory
, transl. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 150.

32
  See, for
example, Bergson,
Matter and Memory
, p. 150: ‘Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements', which might resemble duration's fragmentation into individual frames of film, at odds with Bergson's preceding affirmation of continuity on p. 149: ‘Either, then, you must suppose that this universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment of duration, or you must attribute to it that continuity of existence which you deny to consciousness, and make of its past a reality which endures and is prolonged into its present.'

33
  Lefebvre,
Production of Space
, p. 25.

34
  Perhaps not so much in terms of Bergson's ‘gnawing', but as a crucial step in the evolution of virtual space, and of Debord's
spectacle
. Bernard Comment makes a similar observation about the panorama (
Panorama
, p. 132).

35
  Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 238.

  
1
  Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society Newsletter, February 2007, at
glias.org.uk
.

  
2
  Karl-Artur Haag, at
panoramio.com
.

  
3
  
Robinson in Ruins
, completed in 2010.

  
4
  Adrian Rifkin, ‘Benjamin's Paris, Freud's Rome: Whose London?',
Art History
, 22: 4 (1999), pp. 619–32.

  
5
  The line connecting Stratford to the DLR at Canning Town opened in 2011.

  
6
  Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia', in
One-Way Street
, pp. 225–39, at pp. 227, 229.

  
7
  Christopher Phillips, ed.,
Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings 1913–1940
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), p. 36.

  
8
  Henri Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life, Volume
1, transl. John Moore (London/New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 103–29.

  
9
  
Artists and Sound
, Tate Gallery, 23 August–19 September 1982.

10
  Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation' (Chapter 23 of
The Revolution of Everyday Life
) in
Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International
, ed. and transl. Christopher Gray (London: Free Fall Publications, 1974), pp. 131–51.

11
  Raoul
Vaneigem,
The Revolution of Everyday Life
, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Rebel Press/Left Bank Books, 1983, revised 1994), pp. 236–66.

12
  Lefebvre,
Production of Space
, pp. 189–90. See also p. 142.

13
  Henri Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life, Volume
3, transl. Gregory Elliott (London/New York: Verso, 1991), p. 57.

14
  Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1
, pp. 228–52, at p. 250.

15
  Lefebvre,
Production of Space
, p. 25

16
  Guillaume Apollinaire,
The False Amphion, or The Stories and Adventures of Baron d'Ormesan
in
The Heresiarch & Co.
, transl. Rémy Inglis Hall (Boston: Exact Change, 1991).

17
  Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn” ',
Textual Practice
16: 3 (2002), pp. 527–46.