The extension of railway infrastructure across huge distances and the integration of services had the effect of accelerating time and compressing distances. This phenomenon was understood and described as a force. The experience of this was brilliant and unsettling at the same time; a bit like a fairground ride.
The railway expresses this mechanically. The machine ensemble is a complex, large and interactive mechanism. Literature and art explore the psychological and visual consequences of this acceleration too. Cubism, photography and cinema each feed from this speeding up of everyday life.
Of course, the most profound expression of this shift in our experience of time was provided by Einstein. It’s no accident that Einstein conceptualized his theory living in a boring city, doing a boring job and riding on trams.
Here’s a lovely diagram of Einstein’s train thought-experiment that describes relativity
I wonder if Einstein ever took the tram in Hamburg? See my post below, about Dada. Anyway, here’s a picture of Einstein arriving in London.
I mentioned, earlier, that I’d found a book that looked interesting. Well, I ordered it and I’ve been reading bits of it all this week. I was delighted to find this and it has turned out to be most interesting. It will be really useful for work at CSM. Let me explain.
I work in graphic design, where I run the contextual teaching across three years of undergraduate study. I also co-ordinate our undergraduate activities with those of postgraduate Communication students and with students and colleagues in architecture, product design and materials. For practical purposes, most of this work is the supervision of dissertation writing. In reality, I wonder around chatting to people and watching films and reading magazines…
There are three distinct strands of learning at CSM
• The Workshop – where things are made
• The Studio – where ideas are worked out
and
• The Conversation
This is the learning that will give students the words and concepts that allow them to speak convincingly about their own work, and to comment legitimately about the work of others. The conversation begins about food, cars or shoes, and turns to design. Eventually and because we are a University, the conversation is expressed through writing. I take the view that; if you can speak, you can write. It’s just a question of understanding the systems and structures of academic presentation.
In fact, all academic writing is a form of conversation. It’s a conversation that is international and that has been running for many years. Each book is positioned, as part of this conversation, in relation to previous publications (history), and as a contribution to the development of the conversation’s main themes (ideas). Understanding the historical interaction of ideas and interpretation is a key skill in making sense of the world. Being able to speak convincingly about all this is crucial to professional life; otherwise, it’s just colouring-in!
In the old days, graphic design was understood as a print-based activity of commercial art. Nowadays, it is digital. But digital has changed too – it is now dynamic (potable), continuous (always on) and interactive (changes as you move through it). That’s producing a new kind of spectacular environment. We can call this The Matrix (watch the films). Architecture and engineering, communication and products; each progressively shape and define us through this experiential environment.
The railway provides an interesting historical precedent to this kind of system integration. And it has lots of lovely architecture, engines and posters and publications to describe. Perfect!
The sub-title of the book is Time, Space and the Machine Esemble
The term Machine Ensemble describes the interaction of mechanical systems, machinery and people.
The Enlightenment philosophers conceptualised society as a structure governed by mechanistic laws
of cause and effect. These laws of motion recast Newton’s mechanics as politics. Today, we understand
these ideas as levers of power.
In Britain, the first machine ensemble was the Portsmouth Block Mill. This was a factory equipped with
machinery and organised so as to maximise efficiency. The Block Mill was designed by Samuel Bentham (administrator), Marc Brunel (engineer) and Henry Maudsley (machine tool designer).
The integration of resources, machinery and effort produced a spectacular rise in productivity. The economic
logic of this organisation was promoted by Charles Babbage. I’ve written about all this in a previous post on my other blog site. You can look at it, here
Anyway, the point is that the mechanical standardisations of early 19C Britain produce both products and people. Te worker, the consumer, the voter and the passenger all become consistent performers within the machine ensemble.
The synchronicity of the great system is beautiful and deadly…
Of course, I don’t mean that it lieterally kills us. It kills some of us when things go wrong and accidents occur. But generally, the mechanical forces of society are of greatly reduced violence. The brutality of the system is in the promotion of conventional thinking as consistent, efficient and productive. It’s convenient and comfortable (like the train) but the consequences are huge.
This is a post about Otto Dix, Dada, collage and trams. Anyone who knows about art and design will know the destination – it’s Schwitters and Merz. All aboard.
This is Otto Dix’s collage of an electric tram. I saw it in a report about a sale at Sotheby’s, where it made over 2million. I love the odd perspective, the letters and numbers and arrow. Best, I love the manic grin of the driver. He’s dangerous!
Otto Dix was a German artist who promoted a form of New Objectivity in painting during the 1920s. In a way, he was painting the obvious hardship and social upheaval in the aftermath of WW1. Somehow, he found a way of making it compelling and beautiful too.
It’s kind of structural too. He makes the misalignments between power, money, prestige and integrity evident. The collage element in this work suggests a nod in the direction of Dada.
The electric tram has a special place in railway history. It’s also significant in relation to art and to the experience of the city. Accordingly, it played a key role in the transformation of collective identity in the modern city. The significance of these effects is hard to judge, especially if you are used to living in the city. However you can track their impact, and over the 20C, by measuring the Flynn effect.
The Flynn Effect describes the phenomenon that metropolitan populations across the industrial world appear to make substantial and sustained gains in IQ scores throughout the 20C. Furthermore, the improvements in intelligence are in quite specific areas. These are associated with spatial awareness and cognitive reasoning.
Living in cities and riding on trains actually makes you cleverer. Amazing (and brilliant)!
Notwithstanding all the usual clap-trap about modern life and hell-in-a-handcart, its pretty obvious that the acceleration of modern life and the patterns of the great machine-ensemble of the city must impact on your cognitive development. Personally, I’m not surprised that it’s positive. That’s the way it feels.
Anyway, back to trams. If you’re a bit unsure about what trams look like and how they feel, check out Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). There a terrific sequence of trams leaving their shed.
The film is the classic day in the life of the city documentary. It claims to be an experiment in cinema and to have abandoned the usual convections of theatre etc. The camera eye, or kino eye, promoted by Vertov was a modernist way of seeing facilitated by optical technology.
The shift in perception made possible by accelerating technology also plays itself out in the fields of art and music.
There’s a new print of the film available as a dvd and with a new soundtrack by Michael Nyman. Another of Nyman’s works is an opera about the time that Kurt Schwitters spend designing tickets and stuff for the Hamburg bus and tram service.
Schwitters is famous for a type of modernist collage art that he made out of the printed paper detritus of everyday life. Sraps of labels, tickets and type are combined to recreate the fragmentary and elusive experience of modern metropolitan life. He called these works, Merz.
The art practice promoted by Schwitters has had a profound effect on art and design in the 20C. The whole thing became a bit of an industry.
Here’s a picture of Schwitters by El Lissitzky
I got a return ticket. So, we’ll be coming back to tram’s and modern life…
This is a post about railway related ephemera. These things aren’t strictly strictly railway ephemera. They weren’t produced by, or behalf of, railway companies. However, they do show the symbolic power of the railway engine as a trademark or brand.
I’ve got a small matchbox label collection. I love the slightly primitive quality of art direction and the cheap-and-cheerful production values. These come from a mixed album I just purchased at auction. There are tractor images, Swiss road safety labels and a nice lot of UK pub and beer typo lables.
Karen, my wife and fellow collector (we met looking at the same thing), was a bit anxious about more bits of paper in the house. However, even she was forced to admit that the album had a few interesting things in!
This is another post about psychoanalysis and the railway.
It’s about the correspondence between the emotional experience of train travel and the language we use to describe these feelings. So, it’s also post about language.
Both, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud would surely have agreed that, in the end, it is always about words. Or maybe, it’s in the beginning? I guess it depends on your perspective.
You can see what I’m talking about in the picture by Ravilious, above. The landscape, with its evident historical and antiquarian meanings, is used to provoke powerful emotional feelings of familiarity…
Anyway, I’ve posted before about the obvious similarity between train-travel and the slightly otherworldly and detached sensations we have when dreaming. That similarity suggests that we could transfer ideas and interpretations from psychoanalysis to railway travel. This transfer has worked in relation to cinema and psychoanalysis; so, why not?
The point about Freud, as I’ve mentioned before, is that he provides a vocabulary for talking about and describing hidden things. In psychological terms, this is all the stuff that is buried in the sub-conscious. The interpretation of inner-feeling, in relation to environment and experience, is entirely appropriate in the traveller.
I would say that the relative detachment of the railway traveller (from the world through the window) is one of the most singular pleasures of railway travel. It’s all very well, until you see something you shouldn’t have…
There are a number of films that explore the consequences and moral ambiguity of voyeurism. Some of these films even explore these themes in the context of the railway carriage.
I want to use the example of Carol Reed’s great film, The Third Man (1949). There a scene on a fairground ride that exemplifies what I’m talking about.
The Third Man is one of a number of films directed by Reed based on the work of Graham Greene. Greene’s story is set amongst the war-torn ruins of Vienna. Representatives of the victorious powers have partitioned the city. The resulting administrative confusion, along with the inevitable shortages of essentials, are exploited by a criminal underclass.
An American writer, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Harry Lime. Matins is shocked to discover that Lime is dead. His attempt to investigate the death of his friend reveals the unpleasant truth that Lime was well known as a racketeer involved in the sale of corrupted penicillin.
The film is divided into two main parts. In the first, Lime’s personality is recalled as charming and compelling. At the same time, the facts of his duplicity begin to be pieced together by Martins.
In the second half, Lime suddenly reappears. His death is revealed to have been another fraud, aimed at escaping justice. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend before fleeing through the sewers. Eventually, he is cornered and dies like a rat.
The Third Man shares a number of themes with Greene’s other work. The circumstances of war, along with the terrible revelations of brutality and genocide, combine with Greene’s Catholic belief to suggest a world where corruption and original sin are commonplace. For Greene, the struggle against the forces of evil remained largely futile. Greene’s Catholicism retained, accordingly, a particularly bleak sort of outlook.
Perhaps the most famous scene in The Third Man is the discussion on the giant Reisenrad Ferris wheel. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend Martins by looking down at the small dots of humanity below and asking whether, at twenty thousand dollars each, any of them would really be missed. Finally, Lime suggests that Switzerland, with its centuries of peace and cuckoo clocks, is a poor alternative to the Renaissance of the Borgias. At that point in history, suggests Lime, were combined bloodbath and genius in equal measure.
You can watch the scene, here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZg8a0nqjTE
It is entirely appropriate that, in the end, the fugitive, Lime, runs to the Viennese sewers. The subterranean caverns, reminding us of Pirenesi and by implication excrament, become the setting for the doomed endgame where Lime is hunted down. Lime’s pursuers are implacable. Eventually, they corner him and a short gunfight comes to its inevitable conclusion.
There are several other points that need to be made in relation to this film. The Third Man was a triumph for a young lighting cameraman, Robert Krasker. Krasker devised an art direction for the film based on German Expressionist film-making from the 1920s and from the Noir thrillers, of the 1940s, in America.
Krasker, filming amongst the rubble of Vienna, used powerful directional lighting to create a world of exaggeratedly sinister shadows and weird perspectives. The result was a morally ambiguous and visually destabilising world in which Lime and his cronies seemed all too believable.
The film belongs, through its visual associations, to what may be identified as a NeoRomantic film language. The 1940s reinvention of romanticism was based on the rejection of a form of modernity that has led to two world wars and genocide. This brings us neatly around again to Ravilious; who may be associated with this group.
Artists and poets were amongst the first to find an alternative value in the landscapes, places, feelings and values of particular locations. For many, these were identified as traces of a lost England. For others, the ancient Mediterranean culture provided a route out of the contemporary nightmare. Baroque Vienna, in ruins, became a powerful symbol of a lost civilisation.
Obviously, the ferris-wheel is not a train. But the fair-ground entertainment provides for a kind of ride. So, the analogy holds, and the sense of moral detachment can be applied. Indeed, the fairground is another environment replete with hidden (Freudian) meanings.
In the context of the railway, this Freudian stuff plays itself out through the combination of detachment and voyeurism in the subject along with the implicit contiguity of the machine assembly.
This usually depends on a train traveller observing something, in passing and from a distance (usually another train) and at a particular time. In order for these actions to be intelligible from a distance, they usually involve forceful male protagonists and (unwilling) female victims. That’s the sex and violence.
The point is that trains insulate from any direct moral involvement in what we are observing. This moral detachment provides for a kind of voyeurism. Nowhere, is this more compelling that at those moments in the railway journey when houses back up against the track. The obvious intrusion of this kind of voyeurism is mitigated by the fleeting nature of passing by train.
At the same time, we have a powerful feeling of inevitability. The machine assembly and the rigorous punctuality of the railway system, suggests both mechanical causation and destiny.
Now, this is an idea that Slavoj Zizek describes in his Lacan and Hitchcock (1992) book. The idea originates with Henri Bergson who suggests that something completely new retroactively creates its own possibility – that’s Terminator (1984) or the Matrix (1999). In the more prosaic world of railway travel it’s Sliding Doors (1998).
This is a post about railways and psychoanalysis. I’ve already posted about the close relationship between cinema and trains, And also about the films of Alfred Hitchcock (at least those that have trains in them). You can see my previous, here
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 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 psych0analytical interpretation of the unconscious.
You can read all this in the film journal, Screen. Check out their website, here
http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/
and, here
http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/
It’s worth recalling the intellectual genesis of film studies…
In France, cinema was quickly recognised as a significant form of cultural production with special claims on the 20C imagination. So, film studies began in France. But it arrived, by train, from Germany before WW2. The journey begins in Frankfurt and with a group of intellectuals who pioneered the critical examination of popular culture. The Frankfurt School comprised a group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research. The Frankfurters pioneered the idea that popular cultural forms made for a kind of language with rules of signification. They suggested a difference between appearance and meaning. You can find out about it all, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
It’s easy to understand why the application of Marxist social theory to the analysis of degenerate popular cultural forms, (such as jazz, western films, and shopping malls), might have offended National Socialist sensibilities in Germany. It’s harder to understand why it took until the 1970s for this approach to break into the anglo-saxon academic mainstream.
In the UK, film studies grew as a consequence of a block in opportunity within the English faculty. By the end of the 1960s, there was a much larger student population. Those with academic ambition found their career paths blocked by an older, tenured, caste of professors in the established disciplines. The new plate glass universities of the 1960s had pioneered the expansion of the social science methodology.
In the circumstances, it was natural for this methodology to apply itself to new kinds of text. Hey presto, film studies was born as an academic discipline!
It’s worth noting, again, that the older universities and the cultural establishment generally have been hugely resistant to this kind of activity. The ICA, in London, pioneered the serious discussion of popular cultural forms during the 1950s. These discussions, amongst a small group of people, paved the way for the Pop Art boom and for the emergence of a radical swinging lifestyle at the end of the 1960s.
Even today, there is a widespread misunderstanding about the distinction between film studies, media studies and a training as a film technician or journalist. These disciplines are about a critical engagement with the structures and systems of cultural production – they are not training programs.
There was a terrific example of this weird cultural blind-spot on BBC Radio 4 recently. Francine Stock was discussing the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method. This is a film about the triangular relationship between Freud, his protege Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. You can read about the film, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dangerous_Method
Anyway, Francine directed the discussion towards the subject of the relationship between Freud and film. By that, she meant the portrayal of Freud in popular cultural film entertainment! There wasn’t a word about the formal relationship between cinema and Freud’s work in psychoanalysis (see above). No wonder we don’t really understand the world!
Anyway, back to psychoanalysis…
One of the key feelings that connects cinema and psychoanalytical interpretation is the overwhelming feeling of helplessness in the subject. This usually manifests itself through the expression of anxiety and behavioural psychopathology.
It seems obvious to me that the experience of the train journey offers many of the same characteristics as those of the cinema…
The railway train provides a distanced, and voyeuristic, platform for observation of the world. The train also provides for its own systemic organisation of the world – machinery, time and motion are integrated into a specific experience. Indeed, it is this specific experience of being on track, that is comforting and disconcerting at the same time. the train passenger abandons the usual autonomies of modernist identities in favour of being driven. There’s a powerful sense of the train being unstoppable. That’s terrifying.
It’s all very well when the landscape is picturesque and we have chosen the destination; but what happens when we are forced onto the train. Consider the childhood evacuees of WW2, or the deportations of the holocaust, or of the symbolism of train accidents and derailments. The palpable sense of danger, associated with the railway from its very beginnings and derived from machinery, force and system, heighten the usual anxieties of displacement and separation.
There’s always a sense of sadness at the end of the railway line. Indeed, the expression end-of-the-line suggests an association between distance, isolation and desolation. hence, the peculiar, and conflicting, feelings that attach to English seaside resorts.
Nowhere is the latent Freudian symbolism of the railway more evident than in the phallic penetration of tunnels by the train. This symbolism provides the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint recline in the sleeping car as the train enters the tunnel and the end-credits roll.
The association between the railway train and feelings of excitement and anxiety, and expressed through sexual desire, could hardly be more Freudian. Freud was notoriously anxious about displacements and train travel especially…hmm…
I notice that there is only one accredited university course in railway studies in the UK. I don’t imagine there is a Freudian module, nor is there any sign of the psychoanalytical-model railway!
I did notice this
which includes a chapter on Freud and the Railways, by Laura Marcus. If you google Freud and Railway, you can find this text. Otherwise it’s all a bit of a blank. Obviously there are lots of historians whose work investigates the railway and there are various cultural perspectives that can take in the railway. But, it’s surprising that there isn’t very much work on the structure and system of the railway and its cultural meanings…
Next stops; the runaway train, and the surrealistic railway…
Charles and Ray Eames are probably the best known US designers of the mid 20C . In addition to the architecture and furniture designs for which they are famous, they made short films as educational and moving image elements in multi-media exhibition presentations.
One of their films is called Toccata for Toy Trains. The film was made in 1957. You can watch it, here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYgt8Ni9vQ
Charles and Ray Eames first became famous for their development of moulded plywood splints for the US military during WW2. This materials technology was transferred into furniture production. In the late 1940s they were invited, by Architecture Today, to design a case study house. The CSHs were experiments in new types of domestic architecture and the Eames house was constructed entirely of readily available standard parts.
Charles and Ray Eames were part of a west-coast design scene that included colleagues and associates – Herbert Matter, Saul Bass and Billy Wilder (what a gang).
The idea of using toys to communicate complex ideas of mechanical interaction and of systemic organisation was entirely appropriate for the Eames studio. The spirit of Eames is one of fun and of possibility. The communication of life’s unlimited potential (enhanced by science, materials and technology) provided for a powerful message of American progress.
The opening part of the film is a bit like Pacific 231. I posted about that, here
London – Paris – Milan.
