BAGDContext CSM

There are a lot of films about trains on TV…And, there always have been.

John Betjeman made films of himself sitting on rural station platforms all through the 1960s. The humourist, Miles Kington made films about old steam trains during the 1970s…Nowadays the former politician, Michael Portillo, travels the network around the UK, and ventures abroad with his Bradshaw’s Guide (published 1914).

The ex-Python star, Michael Palin, has travelled all around the world by train, courtesy of the BBC. And now, there is a whole sub-genre of films about the Indian railway, its employees and its passengers.

But, this is all much harder to get right than you would think.

The comic, Griff Rhys Jones, has just set off on a train trip through Africa on ITV. This was really disappointing and set me thinking about what makes a good railway film…I’ve posted before about feature films; but this is a post about TV, documentary-style, films.

Part of the appeal of trains, from a producer’s point-of-view, is that they are relatively inexpensive…the action is contained, and the scenery moves past the window. In addition the films have a natural story-arc of journey; with beginnings, middles, and ends, all in the right place and at regular (train time) intervals. If you’re shameless, like Stephen Fry, you can do it all as a kind of holiday programme, and you get to stay in nice hotels along the way.

From the viewer’s point of view, the films are compelling for their mixture of people, places, machinery and history…what’s not to like there?

Griff’s film didn’t really work…there were not enough characters along the way…and the immediate social context was sort of African bi-polar, with extremes of poverty and prosperity.

Amazingly, I can’t ever remember a series about the railway in the USA…

The plan is this…

Begin in NYC and travel to Chicago, along the route of the 20th Century Limited. That’s Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s, North by Northwest (1959). Once in Chicago, explore the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago, and the stockyards of the railhead. Reading a bit of Upton Sinclair along the way.

Next, down to New Orleans retracing the story of the Blues, from the Delta to Chicago and via Memphis and Nashville, along the way. From New Orleans to the west coast, and from LA, through the Rockies, up to Canada.

Then, back along the Canadian Pacific route and home…

That’s a series of films that would include amazing landscapes, amazing machines and amazing people…all against a background of popular music and imagery deriving from the unique cultural context of the north American railroad.

It’s a no-brainer, except that people don’t think of America and trains; they think of the US and cars. Jack Kerouac was on the road, not on the track!

Oh well.

The pop music producer, Peter Waterman, is selling part of his collection of model railway locomotives.

Mr Waterman is well known amongst railway conservation and preservation groups. The sale is an attempt to make space and to underwrite the restoration of his various full-size steam locomotives…if the sale is a success, the resulting endowment will guarantee the project. Well done him.

There are some amazing models…hand-built from scratch and according to the measured drawings from the original manufacturers.

We usually think of models in relation to train sets. The more larger scale detailed models might have been made to attract investment or to provide a guide to the engineers building the actual machines….

But, quite apart from the technical quality of the models and the delight in miniature; the models are elements in an important historical archive….

Most full size steam locomotives have disappeared. Obviously there are are a number of preserved engines, but these are relatively few in number. Especially in relation to the whole story of the mechanical development of the steam locomotive…so, the models provide for a sort of record of mechanical and design development. In the absence of the actual machines, all we have are the models.

Here is a lovely early Victorian drawing of a steam loco from 1846. The drawing is by the engineer, David Joy.

This kind of technical drawing is distinguished by its precision. The drawing has to be big enough to carry the detail and, at the same time, remain clear enough to be useful…

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a wonderful archive of this material.

More recently, the artist William Fenton made coloured versions of this kind of image. These images were published in a series of large-format picture books during the 1970s. These books are now quite rare, as they were often broken up for framing.

William Fenton has worked for London Transport. You can see his work in the archive of the LT Museum.

We found this lovely toy steam engine in a local charity shop. It’s an early twentieth century tinplate miniature, or penny-toy. It was made in Germany, by the firm of JLH; That’s for, Johann Leonard Hess.

The locomotive came with three carriages and some trucks. There was also a TPO carriage. That is for travelling post-office; my favourite.

The  toys are made from thin steel sheeting that has been printed and folded to make the models. The colour printing is by chromo-litho.

The history of lithography is of how this printing process became, during the second half of the 19C, the main printing process of manufacturing and industrially scaled enterprise. Posters, point-of-sale advertising, labels, and packaging, were each produced using this process.

Printing on metal was pioneered by biscuit manufacturers. Their experiments led to the development of offset lithography. That’s where a roller picks up the design, from the printing plate, and transfers it onto the paper or tin. The addition of a roller did several things…it speeded up the whole process by turning the action of the press into a rotary movement.

Spinning is always much quicker than shifting left-to-right or whatever. Also, the roller kept the colour plates tidy. So, you could print for longer and at a higher speed…that was obviously more profitable.

The make-ready of colour separations was also improved. The addition of a roller meant that you no longer had to print in negative format. The machine went positive to negative, on the roller, and back to positive, on the metal or paper. That made life much easier and reduced costs again.

I was in the studio last week and was shown this…it’s a hand drawn and watercolour iteration of the famous London Underground map by Harry Beck…I didn’t see the exact date, but I think it is from the 1930s.

Beck was an obsessive, who worked to perfect his conceptual diagram of London’s underground railway network, by constantly amending various details…so, there are an endless stream of variations and improvements. Sometimes he went back to first principles…

The diagram is based on a few simple rules…it has become the default model for mapping urban transport systems around the world. Beck’s London Underground map is the original and still the best. It’s never been bettered.

This comes from the London Transport Museum, where Ken Garland has placed the Harry Beck archive.

That’s good. Ken was the first designer to understand the design significance of Beck’s diagram…and discovered Beck living in, I believe, slightly reduced circumstances. Certainly, Beck’s relationship with LT had deteriorated….his diagram work wasn’t officially commissioned and he was viewed as a maverick obsessive.

Beck’s unsolicited work was acknowledged by a small additional payment in addition to his official salary as an electrical engineering draughtsman at LT.

Ken saved the archive and wrote the story. Without him, this would all have been lost.

So, well done Ken Garland, well done Harry Beck, and well done the London Transport Museum…Good sense all around.

Here is an image of Bradshaw’s railway map of the UK. It’s dated 1852. I love the decorative engraving of the title and the clever way some of the more important cities have their own detailed maps, ranged to the edge of the sheet.

Bradshaw is a key figure in the cultural history of railways. He was the first to publish an integrated timetable for all the railways of Britain. He also published guide books for railway travellers. Later, the business expanded to provide international timetables and guides.

Michael Portillo uses a Bradshaw for his Great Railway Journeys TV programme…

I will look for images of other railway maps from around the world…

Anyone who knows me will know that; apart from trains, I enjoy restaurant meals…quite often and as I’ve posted before, these two go together…the development of the railway system facilitated the all-day dining and fast-food environments that are familiar today.

The early railways provided picnic hampers and it wasn’t long before there were dining cars and railway hotels. The scorched-earth food offer of modern travel is an indictment of how these businesses are run…there’s no room for pleasure; but that’s where the value is.

My own preference is for the French style of brasserie cooking…hearty classics from the oyster bar and grill-room. I like the food, the scale, and the movement, of these busy places.

Good news!

Dishoom has just arrived at the next platform from CSM at KX. It’s Indian tappas-style served in their version of the faded glory of old-school Indian railway stations….this manages to combine informality and scale, with style and flavour…perfect, for me, at least.

I could quite easily spend the whole day there…

I remember that Indian railway stations are famous for their tiffin lunches. These are ready-meals delivered in lovely stacking boxes. The boxes are painted so as to be recognisable. Unlike in the UK, these railway lunches are generally prepared, fresh, in ordinary kitchens at home…

The tiffin system is combines many small businesses into an operation of scale…and without the corporate organisation that standardises and economises. It’s so unusual that even the Harvard Business School have looked at tiffin logistics as a worthwhile model.

It’s not really railway food…but the system of logistical delivery is organised through the railway system. You see railway platforms covered with tins…but they don’t stay there.

Dishoom is big business. It’s a lifestyle and leisure brand spun-out of the Tilda rice empire…I can already see more of these.

I recommend the roasted cheese, paneer tikka, a nan bread, and an iced beer. Perfect.

Well done Dishoom.

Here is a railway safety poster by Leonard Cusden. I’ve posted before about Leonard Cusden and safety posters…just google, bagdcontext and cusden. This poster is from before 1940; so, it’s quite early for this kind of thing.

Also, you can look on my poster blog to find many more, non-railway, safety images

http://paulsposterproject.rennart.co.uk/

On an other note, I recently posted about Jerry Deller’s film, English Magic (2013). It’s terrific and well worth watching…my post made a connection between Deller’s film and an historic, and mainly British, strand of film-making. Quite a  number of the films I mentioned made use of the railway…I’ve begun to think about film-time and railway-time…interesting!

http://paulandkarenartandlife.rennart.co.uk/post/107513899860/magic-in-margate#107513899860

I’ve recently been posting, on my other blog, about the cultural impact of speed…

I used the term machine-ensemble, in those posts and below, to describe the context of what I was describing. It turns out that the term is not widely known, and I have been asked to explain it. So, here goes…

The machine-ensemble is a term, first coined by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in relation to the 19C railway system. The term recognises the scale, scope and speed of machine integration so that the systemic and mechanical workings of the whole are given expression through this term. As the term suggests, it’s a group of connected machines of different sorts. The whole thing is a network system that becomes a meta-machine.

You can get a clear sense of what Schivelbusch means by looking at the integrated railway timetables for Europe. The parts all work in relation to each other.

One way of thinking about this, is to imagine an enormous train set…where all the parts move in relation to each other…and where everyone and everything arrives safely. Just by thinking about this, you can see how complex and sophisticated such a system would have to be. It’s the co-ordination that turns it into an ensemble. In practical terms, things have to be in the right place at the right time.

Actually, there are a number of examples of this kind of railway layout as system design. The film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), also provides a compelling, if slightly dystopian, vision of the modern machine-ensemble. Otherwise, you can look at the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. This is the world’s largest model railway!

Nowadays, it’s not just trains though; it’s trains, boats, planes and cars. Each moving as part of a huge and co-ordinated ensemble. Don’t forget that all the goods and services that are provided also feed into this. The internet-of-things is the next step of this co-ordinated and systemic development.

How we engage (safely) with the machine-ensemble is a matter of public health…requiring: rules, discipline, courtesy and education.

A number of interesting ideas flow form these observations….

The first is that the machine-ensemble concept develops an ealier idea of the human body as a form of precise clockwork…and applies the same form of mechanical precision across a much greater field…observation and logic reveal cause-and-effect in terms of consistent and general rules.

The second idea is that the speed of the machine ensemble is not constant…it’s accelerating. We can trace the acceleration of modern life through stages of foot, horse, railway, and internal combustion. Later, there are jet powered, solid-state and digital stages. Each of these technologies provides the basis for a step-change, or quantum advance, in the speed of everything.

The machine-ensemble isn’t just accelerating though; it’s getting bigger… Scale and speed combine as an expression of power. Needless to say, when big automated machines are moving it’s best to stay out of the way. That’s where safety issues come in.

The idea of safety is important because it protects us and keeps the ensemble going. Like the city, the machine-ensemble is never allowed to stop.

The machine-ensemble also devolves from the factory organisation that provided for the great standardisation – that’s Babbage, and Whitworth and Ford. The organisational framework of Ford’s production line evolved from an economic logic of production and became a management theory of evidence-based scientific management and, later, of data-crunching operational research…

The integration of elements and the automation of function that is implicit in the machine-ensemble change the way we see the world…it’s the matrix; but in mechanical form.

The computer pioneer, Jon von Neumann, identified artificial intelligence as depending on the possibility of a self-replicating automata. When asked what these machines might look like; he pointed to the people around the table! We became the prototype.

I mentioned, earlier, about how the the speed of the machine-ensemble changes the way we see the world. What I mean is that we needed new kinds of image culture to represent that world as we experience it. The modern poster, distinguished by colour, scale, and the integration of word and image, provided for a form of communication that could be read at distance, at a glance and whilst moving. But, the speed of the machine-ensemble also changed painting, film, literature and music!

All of the things that I’ve described, above, combine to impact on the psychological formation of modern subjectivity. In cognitive terms, human beings are hard-wired to move towards what they recognise as familiar…so the visual representations of modern life provide for a powerful normative experience of what to expect when you leave the house!

These images provide the signs of prompt and command that train us, according to behaviourism, to act in specific and prescribed ways. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we are conditioned to act according to the rules and reward of the machine-ensemble.

The objects and signs of modernity prompt us to act in ways that optimise the system…first we make our tools (machines and systems) and then they make us.

Nowadays, the big-data in the system is visually expressed as a kind of flow…you can see this in the architecture of Zaha Hadid, and on a blog that I found about footwear design…

Actually, it’s not that surprising to find that footwear and the machine-ensemble are connected…it’s all about movement and speed!

The BBC are showing a classic Hitchcock film on Christmas day evening…It’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). I’ve posted before about Hitchcock, cinema and trains…here’s an edited text that combines bits of all these old posts.

Happy holidays to you all.

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great film directors of the 20C.

He was born in England and enjoyed success at home and in America. Hitchcock’s career began in the silent-era and continued until the 1970s. His professional career also included a stay in Berlin, working at the UFA studios. This short, but important, period introduced Hitchcock to the potential of expressionistic feeling in film.

The Lady Vanishes (1938) comes from the end of Hitchcock’s “English” period. These black-and-white films were made in the 1930s and explore some of the ideas that Hitchcock had discovered in Berlin during the 1920s. The English films describe these psychological themes within the context of a more structured, not to say repressed, society.

The story is a modern (20C) reworking of the classic “vanishing hotel room” trick. The original version is a late 19C story about what happens when the usual reference points of civilised society are turned on their heads. Circumstances, paranoia (anxiety), and feeling, combine to reveal the social construction of reality, and the dark consensus of social conformity.

The film is in three parts; the opening and scene setting…in which the protagonists are introduced and an element of time pressure is introduced; the train journey – in which the lady vanishes and a search begins; and part three, the conclusion in which all is revealed and everyone live happily thereafter…

The link between cinema and psychoanalysis is well established. It’s enshrined in a whole body of theoretical work that devolves from the obvious association between the cinematic experience with dreams and with voyeurism. The darkness of the cinema and the flickering experience of the film also correspond to our notions of memory and dreaming – both important aspects of the psychoanalytical interpretation of the unconscious. The railway train also provides a distanced, and voyeuristic, platform for observation of the world.

By placing the action of the film on a train, the story is given an extra dimension of suspense. We know that speed and time are conspiring to bring the story to a climax. The established punctuality of railway services provids a readily understandable timeframe against which the action of the film can be played out. The time-pressure implicit in this sense of an unalterable timetable is a most effective device in creating a feeling of excitement, suspense and anxiety as good-and-bad play out along the tracks. Lastly, the speeding train gives the protagonists, and the audience, a powerful sense of unstoppable destiny. Obviously and because the train is roaring along the tracks, there is no escape from this destiny.

Hitchcock used the image of the steam locomotive in the central dream sequence of the Lady Vanishes. The visual association between train and dream makes the psychoanalytical association of images explicit.

Furthermore, the train projects its own systemic organisation onto the world – machinery, time, and motion, are integrated into a single coherent experience. Indeed, it is this specific experience of being “on track,” that is both comforting and disconcerting at the same time. The train passenger abandons the usual autonomy of identity, in favour of being driven… There’s a powerful sense of the train, and system, being unstoppable. That’s terrifying, and exciting.

At the same time, the train (especially the luxury trans-Eurpean express) is a place where social conventions are observed in their most minute detail, and are a little bit relaxed. There’s definitely a holiday mood.

For Hitchcock the train was also entirely practical. It was, first of all, widely familiar to all of his audience. Not so the car in 1935! It then had the great advantage of containing the action of the film. This constraint provided a creative challenge to Hitchcock at the same time as providing reassurance to the financial administrators of the production.

Not only did the train contain the action of the film, it provided a scenic and cinematic backdrop through the train window. The slightly detached observation of the world, facilitated through the train window, was understood as analogous to the sensation of dreaming.

Hitchcock exploited the voyeuristic potential of both film and train. The erotic potential associated with Hitchcock’s exploration of suspense was heightened by the director’s use of cool, elegant and blond-tinted actresses, chosen as lady travellers.

As Freud’s ideas gained popular currency, the film experience became increasingly understood as psychologically contiguous to voyeurism. The voyeuristic observer, hidden or otherwise, and marked with the obsessive-compulsive personality associated with sexual dysfunction, became a staple, not just for Hitchcock, but for the whole of cinema.

Cinema had been born on the station platform… The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1896), a short film by the Lumiere brothers, caused a sensation. Audiences jumped from their seats as the train entered the station. Later, the railway tracks became associated with the villainy of damsels in distress. Indeed, the subconscious associations between train travel, anxiety and desire were always being emphasised by Hitchcock.

Our own feelings towards trains are equivocal. We appreciate the convenience of this form of transport. But we recall, through the long history of accident and fatality that this machine-ensemble can be brutal. Suicide victims acknowledge this practicality and symbolism in their widespread use of railway platforms and bridges. The rich Freudian potential of all of these meanings was expertly used by Hitchcock, the master of suspense.

There’s also a lovely gag throughout the film about two “little Englanders,” travelling through Europe, whose main interest is the test match score. The whole world is about to go up in flames… and they are worrying about cricket!