BAGDContext CSM

Lovely

Lovely…

I’ll be looking for these online!

Here’s a post for halloween…there is quite a body of literature that explores the steam engine and its association with the supernatural. The sound, fire, and fury, of the engine would certainly have terrified anyone unaccustomed to the sights and sound of the railway.

Here is a page from Lewitt-Him’s illustrations for The Little Red Engine (1942), complete with ghost-like whistles from the engine. Perfect!

Luckily, both Lewitt and Him, (see post below), were able to come to Britain before the advent of WW2…

They became famous, in Britain, for their illustrations to the story by Diana Ross of The Little Red Engine. The first story, The Little Red Engine Gets a Name, was published in 1942. The book was published by Faber and Faber.

Here are some pictures of the illustrations. There is no note about the printing. But, the colour litho is different in quality from the book featured previously. My guess is that these books were printed using plastic-sheet colour separations of photo-mechanical offset litho. Not the same; but lovely nevertheless.

Here are some pictures, by the Polish design duo Jan Lewitt and George Him, for a children’s book from the end of the 1930s. There are Polish and English versions of this book, and later editions with different illustrations.

My copy is in French and published by les Editions des Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Paris.I note that the book was printed in Poland.

I love the soft chalky quality of the colour lithography, and the dynamic illustrations by Lewitt Him. The machine is big, fast, and fun! Also, I love the way that litho printing allows for the break-up of the letterpress grid in favour of an integration of image and text, This expresses itself in a form of typography derived from concrete poetry and Futurism.

There are hundreds of children’s books which feature railway engines…In Britain, we are familiar with The Railway Children and Thomas the Tank Engine especially.

I’ve just purchased this book…it’s about how, during the 19C, people learnt to be passengers on the railway…this wasn’t without a struggle. Indeed, I could just as easily have purchased a book about how the prospect of railway travel induced a whole series of new illnesses and neuroses!

Of course, these two aspects of the railway journey are linked: the active engagement of the passenger, with the view from the train, is a form of displacement therapy. The therapy is designed to provide a diversion from any thoughts and anxieties associated with the train.

I love the idea that there are a whole lot of learnt cultural associations that can enrich the everyday experience of our lives. I guess that’s what the integration of art and life is all about.

The word, defamiliarisation, comes from the radical theatre of the early 20C…here’s a link to the wiki page about it

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Defamiliarization

The term was first used by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917. Nowadays, we associate the term with a range of dramatic techniques associated with Bertolt Brecht and avant-garde theatre…

I have already posted about the link between railway travel and Freud, and how looking out of the window is understood as analogous to dreaming…a feeling that is heightened by the sense of being driven by the train, and of being slightly distant, or removed, from the world observed.

Here are my previous posts

Freud on the Train

Freud on the Train

The Interpretations of Trains

The Interpretation of Trains (Freud on the Train, part two)

The Trains of Alfred Hitchcock

The Trains of Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock was the first film director to understand the implicit Freudian meanings of the cinema and to incorporate them into his films. He also made a number of films that make significant use of the railway to drive the story…

I found this lovely picture of Bertolt Brecht playing chess with Walter Benjamin from 1934.

I also expect that there’s a link between the optical formation of culture as described by Benjamin and the railway…especially in the kino-eye theory of Dziga-Vertov etc.This is a scene from Man with a Movie Camera (1929). And here is a self-portrait of Dziga Vertov which includes the integrated machine extension of the film camera…

Which will bring us around to Paul Virilio and high-speed disaster…

I love the way that all this art theory and philosophy can be used to amplify the everyday experience of the railway journey…it’s never boring with these travelling companions.

One of the main characteristics associated with the optical experience of railway travelling is the phenomenon of motion parallax…whereby distant objects appear to move more slowly than those close by. Indeed, it’s impossible to see the objects closest to the train clearly.

The parallax produces a powerful sensation of discombobulation, or topsy-turvydom. How Brechtian is that?

Virgin have announced that they received 15 000 applications for the 78 train driver jobs on the new East Coast main line…

Here is a lovely Swiss travel poster, for the Bellevue Hotel, from 1913.

I love the flat colour and geometric symplification of the tweed sports coat and breeches. That comes from Ludwig Hohlwein’s designs from a bit earlier, and from the Japanese coloured woodcuts of ukio-e…and Toulouse Lautrec.

I noticed that Hohlwein made a poster for the sports outfitters, Isidor Bach, in Munich, that shows a group of tourists on the railway platform…Later during the 1960s, these elements become part of the visual language of comic books – especially in the work of Hugo Pratt and Guido Crepax…

Here are some more Hohlwein’s

This was my best find in Japan. It’s a modern sign, printed on plastic film, for display on the front of an engine. It’s usually back-lit for special effect. I believe that it is for the Kaiji Limited Express, a seasonal service between Tokyo, Shinjoku, and Mount Fuji…

Here’s a Japanese blog that shows the train, and sign at its best

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/fujibusa2005/14410193.html

The trains…

And the sign, in situ..

And an LED version on a more modern train (not so good)

And, here are some stills from youtube…