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
Here’s a terrific poster from France. It’s in a combination of styles – there’s a bit of art deco (the cinema style lettering at the bottom) and a bit of more modernist photo and information design (the engine and the route map).
It’s the kind of poster that could only have been produced in France, where issues of economy and rationalism in design are compromised by the desire for some kind of style.
You can date the image by the style of loco, the lettering and the use of photography.
Look at the locomotive carefully. It’s derived from a photograph and printed using a half-tone screen. In Germany, they would have retained the authenticity of the photograph. In Russia, they would have drawn the photograph by hand, to make a claim for realism. In France, they used photography and have manipulated it to provide a sensation of mass and speed. A kind of visual and poetic velocity…
You can easily imagine this as a proto-typical bit of photo-mechanical composition – all diagonals, machine-set type and a more generic sans face. Hat’s off to N (whoever that is) for these two posters.
It’s worth contrasting this poster with A M Cassandre’s more famous Nord Express poster from 1927.
I was just sorting some postcards this morning, and found this one of Rouen station in France. So, this is a post about the art nouveau railway station in France.
Anyone who has built a train set knows that, whatever its extent, the lay-out is built up of standard parts. You can get whole catalogues of this stuff and they’re quite interesting in themselves.
Big railway systems are made in the same way! The smaller stations are generic and have the standard buildings and the usual arrangements of platforms and track etc. Things get more interesting when the the train arrives at the larger provincial cities.
In France the railway was laid out at a slightly later time than in the UK. Accordingly, the style of architecture is from both a different tradition and from a different period of design history…
The bigger railway stations are significant civic buildings. Probably only second in importance to the town hall in the projection of civic identity. Whereas the town hall generally addresses itself to the inhabitants of the city; the railway station is aimed at impressing visitors.
The station at Rouen was designed by Adolphe Devaux and built between 1913 and 1928. The hiatus of the Great War 1914-1918 obviously interrupted and delayed proceedings. The building is interesting because, nothwithstanding its eccentric style, it was constructed of steel frame and reinforced concrete.
The use of reinforced concrete allowed the concourse area at Rouen to be placed above the platform and tracks. The foot-print of the station was, in consequence, greatly reduced. Implicit in the reduced foot-print of the building is the speed, convenience and efficiency of the system – for both railway and passengers. You can sense that time is money.
Rouen was a tentative kind of prototype of the vertically integrated stack stations of modernist imagination. The vertical integration of transport infrastructure was first proposed by the Italian Futurist architect, Antonio Sant’Elia in 1907.
You can read about these developments in Steven Parissien’s history of railway architecture Station to Station (1997).
What is art nouveau? Well, it’s an architectural and design style. It comes in the second half of the 19C. The style uses modern materials and engineering to push the limits of gothic style elongation. At the same time the style incorporates the sinuous forms of the organic. These are further exaggerated through the asymmetric arrangements of mass and decoration. The style was widely understood, in its extreme forms, as transgressive of the classical “norms” of architectural good taste…
Of course, the station at Rouen is a good deal later than the high-point of art nouveau. Accordingly, it’s representative of a style that’s been assimilated into the civic mainstream.
In London, the Horniman museum and the Whitechapel Gallery are representative of this style of building.
If you want to see what art nouveau station architecture looks like, go to Limoges or to Paris. In Paris, the metro station openings by Hector Guimard are the best example of this.
Guimard conceptualised an integrated system of glass, metal and typographic elements that could be assembled to provide consistent, but individual, stations.
You can see the same logic, but bigger, in the metal and glass canopy of the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale , Paris.
The most interesting contemporary example of vertical integration is in Berlin’s new main line railway station. The Berlin station combines the vertical arrangement of moderist proposals with the scale Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, of 1851, and with the parabolic complexity of the Bibliotheque Nationale. A great contemporary synthesis.
Here is a photograph of a railway crossing. This is where two sets of track cross over each other. This is a bit unusual as there isn’t a junction in the cross-over. The result is that there the rails have a very pleasing, sharp, geometry. Also, this geometry gives the railway a sort of sparkle, or dazzle.
This is exactly like the optical effects favoured by the Futurist and Vorticist artists at the beginning of the 20C.
Implicit in the low point-of-view is a visual reference to Cassandre’s famous poster.
The most famous cross-over in britain is just outside Newcastle station. here’s a postcard view
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!
