Phantom Rides and Lantau Island

The relationship between the train and cinema go back along way – in fact to the very beginning of cinema. The train window with its fleeting images has often been compared to the cinema screen (something that I explored in Traversal – First Passage) offering passengers something akin to a cinematic experience; so with this in mind, it is little wonder that one of the first subjects that cinema pictured was train travel. From around 1897 a popular film genre involving a different type of view from the train emerged known as ‘phantom rides’. In these films both the cameraperson and the camera would be strapped to the front of a moving train, the resulting film gave the viewer an exciting experience that was both dynamic (cameras in early film were generally completely static and fixed only in one place) and offered a unique perspective, that is, the view from the front of the train as it accelerated along train tracks, entered tunnels and went round corners. What was exhilarating about phantom rides, and hence its name, was that the movement filmed appeared to be powered by an invisible force.

'Hale's Tours of the World'

To start with the journey’s pictured in phantom rides stayed close to home, such as the one seen above in View from an Engine Front – Barnstaple (1898) by the Warwick Trading Company, shown here courtesy of the fantastic BFI film channel. Before long, however, the entertainment possibilities of these films was to be explored in a much more ambitious way in 'Hale's Tours of the World'. In these attractions the phantom ride would screen in a specially designed cinema styled on a train carriage, with cinemagoers seated on train benches to watch films depicting ‘exotic’ scenes from around the world. Sight, however, was not the only sense to be stimulated in these events as the fake train carriage would vibrate, shake and tilt to simulate the movement of the train. While the film might be silent, plenty of other sound effects were on offer such as the noise of the train wheels grinding and the train whistle blowing. Following from a pre-cinema device - the moving panorama – out of the side windows viewers (passages) would see painted scenery roll by. You have to wonder if ‘Hale’s Tours of the World’ were not in fact the very first attempt at virtual reality.

During a recent stopover in Hong Kong, I had occasion to think of the phantom rides of early cinemas as I took a cable car ride from the top of Lantau Island. Looking out of the front of the glass encased car I glided gently through the air watching spectacular landscape pass me by, with my small photographic camera running on video mode and seated comfortably (and safely) I thought about those pioneer filmmakers who strapped themselves to the front of steam trains and ambitiously powered themselves towards the future.

Lantau Island - Phantom Ride

James Benning - RUHR

 

Still from RUHR, James Benning 2010


I saw RUHR by James Benning on Saturday as part of the London Film Festival.

Comprising seven fixed frame composition that range in length from seven minutes to one hour, the film is primarily an exercise (as Benning himself proclaims) in looking and listening. The footage is all shot in the heavily industrialized region of Ruhr in Germany; however, these images could be of anywhere in the world, as the intention here is not really about place, but about the viewers relationship to observing place.

Watching the film, which at times can be challenging, (as you are watching the same scene/object/setting for up to one hour with very little change taking place) is what I can only describe as what it might be like to watch the world with your eyes closed. To explain what I mean by this it is first necessary to consider the way the philosopher Henri Bergson chose to talk not of things or appearances, but rather to speak everything in the world as ‘images’ and how images can be both matter and perceptions at the same time (see Bergson: Matter and Memory). Therefore, as I watched RUHR the line from the first page of Matter and Memory came to mind, ‘Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.’ What I experienced in RHUR felt like what it might be like to see what happens in the world when my eyes are closed, in other words to perceive (to see) without perception. For Bergson perception serves action; that is, unable to take in all sensory information in the world, perception filters images that make up the external world; meaning that the images that do not concern our needs and actions pass right by us. What I see or perceive in the images on the screen in RHUR is that which is present, but without potentiality for action - in other words that which perception normally filters out.

A different way of thinking about the seven fixed framed composition that make up RUHR is to consider them as 'animated photographs'. Animated photography was the name frequently given to very early films in the period 1895 - 1906. These films normally lasted from anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and were fixed frame (the camera did not move) and the action, which was usually of a simple city scene, unfolded gradually in front of the camera. The movement that was witnessed by those early audiences often seemed to take place as if by magic. In these films, which were also referred to as living pictures, the movement was not the big movement that cinema would soon be so proud of as it demonstrated it’s array of techniques; instead, these were the detailed movements of smoke drifting out of a factory chimney (just as smoke drifts out of the coke quenching tower in RUHR) or leaves blowing down the road (just as in watching RUHR attention falls on the subtle rustling of a leaf blowing in The Matenastraße Tunnel). Animated photographs did not yet have the techniques of pan, zoom, edit and montage that came with the 'movement-image'. Another comparison between RUHR and animated photographs could be seen as both having durational equivalence between the time taken to film and the time taken to play back the film to audience. In many ways RUHR could be compared to animated photograph; however a big difference is technology and its ability for manipulation. Benning made it very clear in the Q&A that followed the screening that in this film small manipulations had taken place to give a truer feel of the place being portrayed. Elsewhere he has stated ‘sometimes irregular events give a false sense of reality and by removing them the truth becomes more apparent; but of course any truth is only the perception of the viewer ...’ What that perception might be brings us back to my starting point ...

In Time @ 272 High Holborn Oct 15 & 16

In Time is a group show that explores the subject of time and is taking place this Friday and Saturday at Blueprint, 272 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EY.

The show comprising screenings, installation and performance seeks to examine time as duration, material, and as concept and process.

RSVP: info@samnightingale.com


Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life will be screened during the exhibition, between 5.30 - 6.30pm on Friday 15th October and again on Saturday 16th of October between 2.30 - 3.30pm.

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life addresses time through the relationship between the still and moving image. The film looks at the concept of time as it is first arrested in the still photographic image (as a moment that is isolated and taken out of time) and then (re)animated as a moving image in digital video. This experimental film takes the analogue photograph as its source material and transforms the still-ness of photography into the dynamic movement of film. 

Olympic Changes originates from six medium-format photographic negatives taken from a moving train. Each of the negatives were digitally scanned and repeatedly divided and cropped to make 600 separate images – each becoming a frame in the film. Movement is re-animated through digital video to reflect the play of motion present at the original moment of capture. The frames of the film are sequenced in such a way that the viewer not only journeys through the changing urban landscape, but also journeys through each of the six still photographs. Witnessed is the banality of an everyday train journey, entwined with the structural changes taking place to the urban environment around the Olympic site in East London.


Further details concerning In Time can be found at: http://intimeexhibition.wordpress.com/

Traversal - First Passage screening at Ear Me Now

Traversal - First Passage is to be screened as part of 'Ear Me Now' an evening of performance, film, installation and conversation celebrating and investigating the dialogue between hearing and seeing. Ear Me Now takes place on Friday 17th September, at Second Floor Cafe Netil House, Bocking Street Entrance, E8 3RL, 8pm / doors open 7pm.

In Traversal - First Passage the image is not constrained to visuality – but it attempts to utter its own existence in the sonic realm. The overarching soundtrack in Traversal is made as ‘visual sound’, an experimental procedure I use that connects with the way sound is transmitted in optical sound films – a process first developed in the 1920’s to allow sound to be synchronized to images in cinematic film. The technique of 'visual sound' that I have developed in this film translates light frequencies, read with a specially designed microphone, into sonic frequencies, which become the film’s abstract and vibrational soundtrack, and in turn offer a non-visual perception of the image.

The idea of the utterance of the image, in Traversal, is literally the graphical inscription of the image running through the projector to external speakers as a kind of activation of the material trace between sign and object. In this journey the sound goes from visible (what we see on the screen), to invisible (sound waves), to the physical (the vibration of tiny hairs in our ears to enable audition), offering a tangible trace and a material connection between object and sign. In this process, no longer satisfied to appear before the eyes, the image translates its being to the sonic realm where it presents itself in a new form of perception, one which looks to conquer the historic dominance of visuality which as Douglas Khan puts it ‘overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses’.

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progress part one

Traverse (verb)

Move across an area: transitive verb to travel or move across, over, or through an area or a place

To go back and forth across something: transitive and intransitive verb to move backwards and forwards across something

Traverse (noun)

Movement across an area: a movement or journey across, over, or through something

Route taken: a route or way across, over, or through something


Traversal is a new project that I am working on that intends to explore the relationship between the embodied and disembodied travel experience.

The framework for this project is grounded in historical changes that took place in the 19th century with the emergence of the railroad as a dominant form of transportation - taking over from the stage coach and walking, for example. I am particularly interested the effect this development had on perception for those traveling. Wolfgang Schivelbusch1 has suggested that the railway journey made possible a new way of perceiving the landscape that was very different from earlier forms of travel experience. Schivelbusch claims that, for the passenger, rail travel supported a panoramic perception of the terrain; this suggestion is put at odds to a multi-sensual engagement with the environment that was much more the case in pre-industrialized forms of transportation. In panoramic perception, Schivelbusch suggests, the traveler sees objects and landscapes mediated through the apparatus of the train. In this, the space of the traveler and the space of the perceived objects is separated and there is dissolution of the embodied experience. The landscape becomes a moving panorama, passing at speed outside the train window - one could imagine this like a movie projected on the window, where the only sensory experience of the landscape is vision - a vision that is separated from any further bodily experience.

To explore these ideas I undertook to traverse the landmass of Australia by train - from the bottom of the country to the top and back again. A journey of 6786km, comprising three train journeys, totaling 124 hours of train travel made during seven days travel. The journey started in Melbourne, Victoria; traveling to Darwin in the Northern Territory and ended in Adelaide, South Australia. All the railroads taken had played a historical role in the industrialization of Australia's transportation system; the earliest route taken was completed in 1888.

The experience of the journey was translated to visual, sonic and written representation using various apparatus, such as: still photography - digital and celluloid, moving image - video, field recordings and written observations.

My main attention was directed to the grand vista and the subtle detail.


1. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, New ed., Leamington Spa, UK: Berg. 1986.