Cow Catching – Keaton and Babbage and the War Machine

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This will be a post about Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, war, silent cinema, and the machine; oh, and the railway! I’ll build it all up over a few days.

The image is from Buster Keaton’s film The General (1926). Orson Welles once said thatThe General is the greatest comedy film ever made, the greatest train film ever made and possibly the greatest film ever made. That’s high praise indeed, as Welles often tops any list of the greatest film directors ever. Citizen Kane (1941) by Welles, is usually acknowledged as the best film ever.

The General combines Keaton’s famous dead-pan approach to physical comedy with his love of trains. There’s an extended sequence, in the film, of Keaton riding on the cow-catcher at the front of the engine.

You can watch the whole film on the internet and there are many clips from it. There are specialist entries on Keaton and the film too.

The cow-catcher, or railway pilot, was a distinctive feature of wild-west engines. It was designed to deflect bison and cattle that had strayed onto the line. It had two main purposes; the first was to avoid serious injury to the animal and the second was keep the engine moving. So, it was an entirely practical and safety orientated addition to the train.

Obviously and in the context of the great plains of the American mid-west, cattle and livestock were quite a likely to stand on the tracks. This was especially the case when the tracks weren’t fenced off. The cow-catcher implicitly reflected the relative value of cattle, bison and livestock to the economy of the mid-west and to the railroad companies.

In fact, the cow-catcher was invented by Charles Babbage; mathematician, logician and pioneer of computing machines and system design! Babbage was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University. That’s the same as Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.

Babbage is best known, nowadays, as a pioneer of mechanical computing. The development of his engines remained largely theoretical during his won lifetime. Babbage was a difficult personality and the close engineering required for his machines was beyond the scope of most of the workshops he sub-contracted. In the end, the absence of agreed standards and specifications for small, but accurately, machined parts proved insurmountable.

Joseph Whitworth eventually proposed a series of “standards” for machining and engineering in the 1840s. The agreement of consistent standards is a characteristic of the organisation of modern life. This is as true in graphic design and typography as in engineering and manufacturing.

The practical difficulties of accurate manufacturing, caused Babbage to reflect upon the logical and most efficient organisation for workshops and factory labour. The consideration of the factory and workshop as a complete system of interactions made Babbage a pioneer of system design. It was natural, in the circumstances, for Babbage to be appointed as a director of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

The Liverpool and Manchester provided the first commercial railway service in the world when it opened in 1830. The opening of railway was also the site of the first railway accident when William Huskisson. MP for Liverpool, was fatally struck by the train. It’s possible that Babbage’s mind turned to safety, and the cow-catcher, or pilot, proposal, as a result of this accident.

Keaton’s film is a romantic comedy where the usual romantic confusion is played out against the chaotic circumstances of the American Civil War. A train engineer is wrongly thought a coward by his fiance. He has to win her back and, in the process, reveals himself to be a brave and selfless hero. His beloved railway engine provides a dynamic and hilarious backdrop for his adventure.

The romantic confusion is based, partly at least, on a misunderstanding of the strategic significance and importance of railway logistics in war. For the Confederate forces, the role of railway engineer was understood as a reserved occupation.

The strategic significance of the railways became quickly evident to the military command. The new machines were both a system of logistic and an engine of war. The railway could provide mobile artillery platforms of a size, and range, hitherto impossible. The railways could also be used to transport men and arms at speed and over great distance. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first in which the new theories of mechanised war could be played out.

The story of The General is loosely  based on the history of the war. The Union forces were served by a railway engineer, Herman Haupt, who intuitively understood the military applications of railway logistics and planning. The Confederacy was undermined by its fractured and mis-aligned railway system. After Haupt, there was always an antagonism between railway and military professionals.

The railways were just one element in the industrialisation of war. New mechanical arms were conceived each with greater accuracy and deadlier firepower. The military-industrial complex emerged, during the American Civil War, as a strategic entity and with the railway network as an important part of its supporting infrastructure.

The efficiency gains theorised by Babbage through the co-ordination of the system were evidenced by the very much larger casualties of war thereafter. Daniel Pick and Christian Wolmar, amongst others, have written about all this.

It wasn’t just military mobility that was transformed by the railway. Up to the mechanisation of the military, over half of military logistic capacity was devoted to animal welfare. The reduction in horses allowed for a greater concentration of arms and men. So, the decisive force of military power became much more brutally focussed.

This is the strategy of the machine sentinals in the Matrix.

AJP Taylor took the combination of efficiency and supply to its logical conclusion by suggesting that WW1 was, in fact, a war between the time-tables of military railway deployment. Although Taylor overstates the case, it is certain that military planning, supported by techniques of scientific management and operational research, has tended to see the railway timetable as a form of implacable algorithm of force. The scenario-planning of modern warfare and capital markets is entirely derived from this algorithm.

Helmuth von Moltke, Joseph Joffre and Leon Trotsky were all pioneers of railways. warfare. The brutality of mechanical point-of-attack is expressed visually in El Lissitsky’s Red Wedge poster from 1919.

The American Civil War was also one of the first to be photographed. Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner recorded the American Civil War. The conjunction of military and observational technologies evidenced by these developments provided for an especially brutal evolution of economy, military technology and perception.

Bibliography

de Landa M (1991) War in the Age of Intelligent Machines NYC, Zone

Pick D (1993) War Machine (Rationalisation of Slaughter) New Haven CT, YUP

Schaffer S (1994) Babbage’s Intelligence (Calculating Machines and the Factory System) Critical Inquiry 21

Virilio P (1989) War and Cinema (Logistics of Perception) London, Verso

Wolmar C (2010) Engines of War London, Atlantic

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Image et Son (Mitry Honneger)

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Paul Rennie
YouTube Preview Image

Here is a fabulous film by Jean Mitry called Pacific 231. It’s a film sequence of trains edited to the music of Arthur Honneger. The film is from 1949.

This film essay is in two main parts.

The introduction has scenes of make-ready with engines and rolling-stock being moved about against the background sounds of metal, steam and machine. The industrial noises of the machinery are a kind of music. There’s a wonderful sequence of images of the engine on a turntable.

The second part of the film is of the engine at speed and its journey. The train leaves from the Gare du Nord and is the northern express towards Lille. I’m guessing that, based on my knowledge of the shape of the train shed canopy in the film.

The second part has the musical soundtrack by Honneger. Honneger’s music is an orchestral evocation of the power and speed of the train. It’s the music of industry and engineering and speed…

You can find out more about Honneger, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Honegger

and about Pacific 231, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_231

It turns out that Jean Mitry was one of the first people to write about film and cinema in a seriously academic way. His work covers aesthetics, psychology, semiotics and analysis. There’s a little about Mitry, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mitry

Honneger was not the only person to be thinking of the musical quality of industrial noise. The connection goes right back to the beginnings of the avant-garde and the willingness to interrogate the formal and structural qualities of art, music and literature.

The poetic experiments of the Italian Futurists kick it all off with Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). The experiments of concrete poetry and everything else followed.

It wasn’t long before the musical avant-garde adopted the Dada strategy of making art with whatever was to hand. That opened the door, so to speak, for a repertoire beyond the established instruments.

It’s amazing how difficult people find it to accept “noise,” or even silence, as music. In the end, it comes down to a kind of political tolerance.

In the UK, this gave us the experimental music movement of the 1960s and the “scratch orchestra.” This was a kind of musical “flash-mob.” In Germany, Kraftwerk recorded a piece of music called Kling-Klang (1972) and gave the name to their recording studio.

If you watch the Mitry film titles, you’ll see that the sound recording is by “Klang-Film.” So, “Klang” is a sound that’s loaded with meanings.

I’ll be posting more about art, films, trains, music and sounds…There’s more of it than you think.

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No One Got On, No One Got Off (Railway Poetry)

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Paul Rennie
Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontendly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came (no one got on, no one got off)
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Edward Thomas 1917


Thomas is one of a group of poets associated with WW1. Perhaps less widely known than Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sassoon.
This poem was written in 1917 and recalled an unscheduled stop at a small country station… we’re all familiar with that, although most of the small country stations have gone.

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Railway Propylaeum – The Euston Arch

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about the Euston Arch.

The Arch was the gateway to the old Euston Station and, in the other direction, to London. Here it is, in 1955; black and impressive. It no longer stands.

The Arch was pulled down in 1962 as part of a scheme to redevelop and modernise Euston Station. This was interpreted as an act of spiteful administrative and political vandalism. This kick-started the popular architectural conservation movement in Britain.

Recently, there have been plans to rebuild the Arch and integrate it into the proposed improvements to Euston. See http://www.eustonarch.org/

So, the Arch was both a bit of architecture and a symbol…and it became the symbol of something else too. Its destruction set a fault-line for British architectural debate for the next 50 years!

You can interpret the story of the Arch as a series of shifts in its meanings. First, as a symbolic gateway. Second as a symbol of the old and, in its absence after its demolition, as a symbol of modernisation, progress and a movement forward. Thirdly, as a sign of synthesis and compromise between past and present.

Background and Geography – The Old Euston

Euston station was the conceived as the London terminal of the London and Birmingham Railway Company. The station opened in 1837.

The LBR was the first major railway into London.  The scheme was constrained by the difficulties of access to the metropolis, the political problems of redevelopment, and the costs of compulsory purchase etc. These issues forced the railway to approach London obliquely and from the west and to use tunnels under the London hills. This line of approach provided a severe limitation on the possible choices of site for the station.

In the event, the site for the station was distinguished by its small size and the narrowness of its approach. Accordingly, the railway architects were obliged to scatter facilities where they could. In the end, the station was developed as a series of separate facilities laid out along the line – the entrance, the waiting room and the train shed.

The engine shed, where engines were steamed-up and made ready, was located some distance north of all this, at Chalk Farm, Camden. This is now called the Roundhouse.

Furthermore, the immediate exit from the station forced the trains up quite a steep incline. In the first instance, engines had to be pulled out of the station on ropes and chains! Later, engines would double-up. By the 20C, powerful steam engines could slowly make the climb; but only by blowing out lots of steam and soot! This was all very dramatic, but it reduced the surrounding area to slums. Drummond Street, Camden, Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill were only rehabilitated after the clean-air act and the electrification of the railway during the early 1960s.

It’s amazing to think of these areas of London as so recently blighted. The first people to move into the area were media professionals from journalism, TV and the stage.

The Arch

The Propylaeum is a special kind of monumental arch associated with the classical architecture of ancient Greece. It’s big and it’s usually the doorway to something important.

It was entirely appropriate that, given the tastes of early Victorian England, the Directors of the London and Birmingham Railway should choose this kind of structure to be the gateway of their railway and to the metropolis.

Reyner Banham described it thus.. (Philip) Hardwick’s Propylaeum, completed 1839, is very Early Victorian and represents an attempt to express a progressive theme, the London-Birmingham Railway, in an idiom of an accepted high style of architecture, Greek Doric. The structure served no operational railway function but gave monumental form to an impressive sentiment.


As an exercise in style it was faultless. It’s giant scale gave it a gravitas that grew daily more austere (and) commanding as the soot settled blacker on the stone. One could say that it was more perfect even than the Parthenon – a mortuary perfection.

The Arch was one of those building that got better with age. As it got dirtier, the hulk of the structure became more imposing. The gilded sans-serif letters of the inscription became more impressive against this sooty backdrop.


The Demolition

The scheme to redevelop Euston involved pulling everything down and starting again with shops, offices and a station combined.  The opportunity to link the redevelopment of the station to commercial property development transformed the project. The project got hi-jacked by the special interests of the property speculators. In the circumstances, the Arch was never going to survive.

The demolition has passed into folklore. The contractor, Frank Valori, was so upset by this destruction that he offered to rebuild the arch. Although his offer was rebuffed, he numbered each piece anyway. Eventually, the stones were dumped in the River Lea. Dan Cruickshank found the stones in 1994.

The New Euston

The new station was conceptualised as an office development fronting the Euston Road with a functionally designed, international style, train shed behind. In principle, the narrowness of the site required that the station facilities be stacked one-on-top-of-the-other. The engineering complexity of this, expressed as costs, meant that the station remained a long, flat shed. All the money went on the offices. It was entirely appropriate that, some 40 years later. the privatised railway company, Railtrack, had its offices there.

There’s a wonderful document about the new station, here

http://www.eustonarch.org/britishrail1968.pdf

Anyone who is familiar with Euston, as is, will be struck by the fantasy of this shiny future. It’s a kind of airport – without the glamour and style. However, the redevelopment was instrumental in bringing together a number of architects – amonst them Theo Crosby and the founders of Archigram.

You can see what a properly vertically-integrated transport hub look like in Berlin. I posted about it, here http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2010/09/18/moscow-berlin-paris-and-new-york-cities-and-people-9415018/

The Debate

The decision to pull down the Arch was roundly condemned. John Betjeman became a sort of spokesperson for the conservationist movement. Many architects also opposed the scheme. Alison and Peter Smithson published a book as a memento mori of the Arch.

The debate became polarised between traditionalists and modernisers. In the context of the 1950s and 1960s this was described by Michael Frayn as a battle between herbivores and carnivores. It’s not always as simple as that though – some modernisers are roundheads and some are cavaliers. Some of the rationalists are gentle herbivores and some are brutal and puritanical carnivores. These cultural labels cut across the usual class and political demographics of British society.

To their credit, the next generation of modernist architects embraced the sense that buildings were about feelings as much as function. The puritan business culture of Britain remained suspicious of the hedonistic feelings associated with the counter-culture. In this context, the ideas of Archigram were rejected in favour of a disciplined, but generic, form of commerical development. Mostly, this expressed itself as a kind of shopping mall.

The ideas of Archigram, expressed theoretically through the fun palace, were eventually realised in the Beaubourg Centre in Paris, France, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Elsewhere, these ideas were theorised in Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi.

Bibliography

Banham, Barker, Lyall and Price (1996) A Critic Writes – Essays by Reyner Banham Berkley CA, UCP                                                                                                                                   see Carbonorific p.79-80 reproduced from the New Statesman 1962

Betjeman J (1972) London’s Historic Railway Stations London, John Murray

Sissons M & French P (1964) The Age of Austerity London, Penguin                               see Frayn M Festival p.330-352

Smithson Alison and Peter (1968) The Euston Arch London, T&H

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Flying Scotsman LNER 4472

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a coloured photo-litho print of the LNER A3 Pacific Class Flying Scotsman.

I think this was made as a carriage print – it’s about the right size in landscape format.

The engine was built at Doncaster in 1923. You can find out all about it on the www and from the National Railway Museum in York. The engine has been restored and is currently painted in matte black, as during WW2. It’s quite impressive like that.


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Over the Points

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Paul Rennie

Here’s the cover of the Southern Railway staff magazine from 1935. The design is signed with the initials VR. That’s Victor Reinganum. You can find out about him, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Reinganum

I bought this in a second-hand bookshop. It was really inexpensive, but I liked the integration of image and typography in the design. The gothic tracery of the rails is terrific.

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Train Time

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is post about trains and time.

We’re all familiar with the idea of time as an expression of position, movement and speed. In fact, the whole universe is defined by its expansion over time. The big bang theorises the connection between time and space. This is one of the reasons that Einstein’s Special Theory is so important. It’s no coincidence that Einstein’s ideas are always presented by analogy to train, or tram, travel.

The railways were the mechanical and engineering expression of the increasingly regimented and relentlessly time-driven society that is characteristic of industrial economies. Nowadays, we can theorise this kind of timekeeping as one of the formal constructs of Modernity.

The sociological and philosophical consequences of this technological system of thinking have been described by Walter Banjamin, Paul Virilio and Giles Deleuze amongst others. They’re not good, and I’ll post about it all later. You can probably guess where this ends!

Adam Curtis has made a series of films about this too. You can get to them here

http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2011/05/07/adam-curtis-11115722/

In the context of railways, time is defined through punctuality. This is understood as an expression of consistency and reliability. We find this a useful measure of railway service. In addition, we comprehend the smooth running of the railway system as a meaningful expression of the general reliability and discipline of society. Accordingly, the consequence of railway systems is greater than the sum of their parts.

Clocks

Railway stations always have clocks prominently displayed. You can’t really separate the idea of time from that of the railway system. In fact, the railway system can be said to have extended the concept of time, expressed consistently and precisely through hours and minutes, across the whole of the country and society. Because of the extension of the railway, its mechanical and systemic organisation can provide a very accurate measure of people and resources in movement.

This doesn’t mean that, before the railways, time didn’t exist. It just means that most peoples’ concept of time was defined by daybreak and dusk. In this context, public clocks were quite rare – usually attached to the church tower. The railway station added another visible clock into each community.

Nowadays and because we have conceived of the railway as an integrated system of machine, environment and service, we see the modernist clockface everywhere. It’s become the standardised expression of the concept. The default image for this signifier is the Mondaine clock for the Swiss Railways. You may know that Switzerland has one of the most reliable train services in the world. That can’t be a coincidence. Switzerland and clocks; it’s uncanny!

Italy has had a reputation for the opposite. It’s often said the dictator, Mussolini’s, great achievement was to get the Italian trains running on time. Maybe, but at what cost!

In the old days, each railway terminus displayed a massive clock that said something about the ethos of the company (that’s semiotics again). Here’s the clock at St Pancras

And here’s the clock at the old Gare D’Orsay in Paris

Train Time

The standardisation of railway time is quite an interesting story. Wolmar (2007.104) describes it briefly.

The proliferation of railway companies during the 1820s and 1830s produced a series of practical complications where routes crossed. It was difficult, in the first instance, to convince different companies of their mutual dependency above their individual self-interest. Accordingly, there were problems relating to the sharing of information, accounting and reporting standards and in allocation of revenues. The Railway Clearing House was established in 1842 as an attempt to coordinate and standardise the work of all these different companies. The standardisation of time, based on Greenwich Mean Time, was finally agreed in 1851 and enshrined in law in 1880.

The standardisation of railway time, so as to facilitate the integration of services between the different services, was a significant step forward in the provision of a consistent and convenient service. The standardisation of time tended to promote a coordination of service so that travellers could jump from one service to another. Indeed, the benefits of standards, consistency and co-ordination were so evident, that they were extended internationally in 1884.

Timetables

George Bradshaw (1801-1853), cartographer and publisher, conceived the idea of a fully ingrated timetable of railways for the whole of Britain. Bradshaw was a Quaker and follower of Swedenborg. His association with Nonconformist thinking probably made him aware of the Utilitarian school of philosophy. Bradshaw’s idea of increasing the general utility of the railway service beyond the provision of a specific service was a completely utilitarian improvement. The same may be said of several standardisations of the 1840s.

The speed of railway evolution in the 1840s made the frequent publication of his guide a necessity. The guide was conceptualised as a monthly publication to ensure that the published information was as up-to-date and accurate as possible.  Bradshaw began publication of his guide in 1842. The project was fraught with difficulty.

Quite apart from the political and business issues of sharing information, the printing of timetable information provided for a number of technical challenges. The neat tabulation of numbers, in small format, required very careful typesetting in letterpress. Also, the repetition of numbers required a disproportionate volume of particular symbols. The advent of commercial lithography, where letters and numbers could be drawn on to stone, eventually resolved some of these practical problems.

Design

The close-setting of many small numbers also proved difficult to read. This difficulty tended to compromise the stated purpose of the timetable. Accordingly, the printing of timetables also raised a number of issues relating to aesthetics, legibility, form and function.

The University of Reading has a big collection of bits of paper. In the academy, bits of paper are called ephemera. Railway ephemera is a a big sub-group of this category. Some of this material, along with its historical and technical evolution, has been presented in their Designing Information before Designers (2010) research project.

Tufte (1990.46) has described some of the ways in which the display of this kind of numerical information can be improved. Implicit in the visual presentation of this numerical data are a number of assumptions about resources and demand. Tufte wants the form and function of these charts to be integrated.

Robin Kinross, who is an expert on typography, has written about timetables as a kind of exemplar of Modernist thinking in information design. Paradoxically, the minute you begin to think about timetables as an integrated expression of form and function through rational design (like Tufte) you understand that this is an impossible ideal. The design can never be neutral, it’s always charged with meaning. So, the intellectual neutrality of Modernity (presented through the appeal to scientific methodology and to the purity of numbers) is a a kind of fantasy.

There’s a book about the the idea of objectivity as a methodological construct in science. It’s listed below. I’ve also added a book about observation; because observation and objectivity are conceptually associated.

In the 1960s, the British Railways identity was turned into a consistent system of expression by the Design Research Unit (DRU). You can read about this stage in standardisation on my friend, David Preston’s, blog

http://designcoordination.wordpress.com/

Actually, David has just posted about the standardisation of LNER type in the 1930s.

That’s Eric Gill, sculptor and type designer, in the beret.

Bibliography

Crary J (2001) Suspensions of Perception Cambridge MA, MITP

Daston L & Galison P (2010) Objectivity Cambridge MA, MITP

Kinross R (1985) The Rhetoric of Neutrality Design Issues No 2

Stiff P, Dobraszczyk & Esbester M (2010)

Designing Information before Designers – Print in Everyday Life Reading and London, St Bride’s Library

Tufte E (1990) Envisioning Information Cheshire CT, Graphics Press

Verilio P (1986) Speed and Politics Cambridge MA, MITP

Wolmar C (2007) Fire and Steam London, Atlantic

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African Railway

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Paul Rennie

There was a charming TV film last night about the Tanzania and Zambia Railroad Authority. You can watch it here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s6bgw/African_Railway/

The systemic dysfunction revealed in this good-natured film is testimony to the difficulties of railway planning. It’s not just people, it’s the culture that is required.

The TZRA is a freight line that ships copper from its land-locked origin to the ocean. It is now an entirely owned subsidiary of the Chinese government. They buy all the copper.

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The Trains of Alfred Hitchcock

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about Hitchcock and trains. It is also a post about Hitchcock and psychoanalysis, and also about psychoanalysis, cinema and trains. The link between cinema and psychoanalysis has been described by Christian Metz and others.

Cinema was born on the station platform. The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1896), 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. It was natural, in the darkened cinema, to associate the flickering images on screen with the recall of dreams and the associated feelings of pleasure, anxiety and guilt.

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.

Hitchcock’s arrival in the USA, during 1939, gave him access to greater resources and to a global cinema audience. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hitchcock observed America as an economic system and social organisation that promoted freedom but was, at the same time, deeply conservative and anxious. In addition, he observed that American mass-media provided a back-drop of justification for the American-way-of-life by constant appeal to Cold-War paranoia and psychoanalytical ideas derived from Freud. Hitchcock described these cultural polarities through the production of exaggerated feelings of fear and desire.

The concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis were incorporated into the world of US consumerism by Edward Bernays. Co-incidentally, Bernays was a member of Freud’s extended family.

During the 1950s, the idea of reality was re-conceptualised as a social and psychological construct. Academic research, Freudian psychoanalysis and the developing mass media combined, in America, to create a powerful force of normative formation.

The nascent US advertising industry used its influence, characterised as hidden persuasion, to fuel the development of consumer culture through emotional appeal. This association was promoted by the normative connection between products and feelings. The advertising industry became increasingly skillful in its manipulation of consumers by appeal to feelings of pleasure, desire, anxiety and guilt.

Hitchcock exploited the voyeuristic potential of film. The erotic potential associated with Hitchcock’s exploration of suspense was heightened by the director’s use of cool, elegant and blond-tinted actresses. Laura Mulvey has described the profound consequences of this alignment between psychoanalysis and the formal qualities of film.

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.

A number of constants emerge from Hitchcock’s career. This is a post about trains and Hitchcock. The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951) and North by Northwest (1959), each make significant use of trains.

The idea of the train was useful to Hitchcock as a visual symbol for a number of reasons. 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. The expression train of thought, gives credence to the associations between train travel, movement and feeling.

The established punctuality of railway services provided a readily understandable timeframe against which the action of the film could be played out. The time-pressure implicit in this sense of an unalterable timetable was 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.

In addition to these possible meanings and associations, there are all of those usually associated with speed and large machines. The opulent luxury of the train, evident in the appointment of carriages, and the quality of service is implicit to the idea to international express travel. All this positions the protagonists within a narrative of money, power and politics. That’s sexy; which brings us back to Freud again.

The sleeping car, implicit in the experience of overnight travel, also provides a context of exciting pyjama-clad proximity for the personalities of the action. This is certainly the sub-text to the end of North by Northwest when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint retire to their sleeping compartment. The train enters a tunnel, as the end titles begin, to make the Freudian connection to sexual desire explicit.

Indeed, the subconscious associations between train travel and desire is always being emphasised by Hitchcock. The close-proximity of passengers and overheard conversation seem to allow for unusually relaxed behaviour amongst the passengers. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, for example, there is a sequence where two traveling salesmen begin to discus the ladies’ underwear samples. In The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train the relaxed informality of the train provides a disturbing counterpoint to the narratives of abduction and murder.

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 these machines are 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.

If you’re interested in any of this, you should begin by watching the films. You can buy an enormous boxed-set of Hitchcock very cheaply.

Then, you can move on to the books. There are hundreds about Hitchcock. The place to start is the book of interviews between Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut. You can then move on to the theoretical association between between psychoanalysis and cinema. Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey are the names to look-out for there. For Hitchcock and psychoanalysis, look at Slajov Zizek.

If you want to find out about advertising and desire (Madmen) look at Vance Packard and JK Galbraith.

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Trans Europe Express

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Paul Rennie

I have decided to focus this blog so that its theme is the cultural history of railways. We’ll begin in Europe and see how we go. Hopefully, it will become a kind of “Rail-Rover” excursion.

Most people will know that I’m mad about vintage posters. This one’s by Cassandre from 1927. It’s for an international service between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The idea of international travel was pretty special in the 1920s. The word “Pullman” comes from George Pullman who made the most luxurious and comfortable trains. So, the idea of travel and sophistication is implicit in this image, even though nothing is shown.

The low point-of-view exaggerates the perspective of the tracks disappearing to the horizon. That gives the poster a sense of scale and speed. Brilliant.

There are other names associated with international train travel: La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, Mitropa and Trans Europe Express. Now, you can travel to Paris from London, St Pancras, on Eurostar.

The TEE trains were streamlined services. I remember using a TEE to get from paris to Toulouse at the end of the 1970s. The corridor express had compartments separated by glass walls and the train had double-glazed windows with internal blinds. It was all very Catherine Deneuve. That’s cockney rhyming-slang for sophisticated.

The German electronic music combo, Kraftwerk, did an LP called “Trans-Europe-Express” (1977).

There we are – railways, posters, film and music. That was quite a trip.

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