The Train,
The Cinema
Curated and introduced by Daniel Fitzpatrick
6.30pm / Wednesday 19 March
Irish Film Institute - 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
All 16mm prints supplied by LightCone Paris
PLAYS OF REFLECTIONS AND SPEED, HENRI CHOMETTE, 1923–5, 6 MINS;
THE WONDER RING, STAN BRAKHAGE, 1955, 4 MINS;
DISORIENT EXPRESS, KEN JACOBS, 1996, 30 MINS;
L’ARRIVÉE, PETER TSCHERKASSKY, 1998, 3 MINS;
With Wind & White Cloud, Donal o'Ceilleachair, 2006, 3 mins
WRONG MOVES, PIP CHODOROV, 2006, 12 MINS.
Notes on The Train, The Cinema, an Experimental
Film Club screening at the IFI
In a recent
exchange between experimental filmmakers Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian LeCain,
Le Cain outlined the degree to which he now feels out of sync with a 21st
Century moving image culture. Le Cain continued to be engaged instead with what
he describes as a “very 19th century sense” of image culture; of the
train approaching the station and the original sensation of “cinema as
miracle”. Le Cain is referencing here the Lumiere’s film ‘Train Arriving at La
Ciotat” one of the most well known, and frequently revisited scenes in cinema
history. Many point to this as the key formative moment for the cinema, what Tom
Gunning refers to as its ‘primal myth’, alluding not just to the film itself
but to the frequently-cited image described in relation to early audiences and
their extreme reactions to the film. This image of audience members who became
so excited by the image of this approaching train that they either hid under
their chairs or ran screaming from the room has by now become all too familiar.
It provides us with a suitable distance for our more removed relationship to
the screen, to the moving-image, and to the naiveté of those audiences. Re-watching
this film now we are unlikely to experience these same hysterical reactions,
less likely to confuse an onscreen reality with our own everyday perpetual
reality. This distance between our current relationship with the screen, and with
cinema and the moving image, and the image of those first audiences
experiencing a mechanised moving-image for the first time is striking, but, as
is too often the case, there may be more to it than we think.
Gunning
outlines that scene as the first of many myths that would spring up around the
cinema throughout its history. As he acknowledges it is a scene that may never
have actually even taken place, at least not in the manner it is typically
described. Early accounts are hard to verify and the film is not believed to
have appeared among the Lumiere’s very first screenings, ‘Workers Leaving The
Factory’ is instead the film more typically cited as the first. As Gunning
acknowledges however this has done little to reduce the power or the longevity
of this mythic image, an image that gets to the heart of many of cinema’s
potentials and possibilities. In a famous essay entitled The Kingdom of Shadows Maxim Gorky offered his own impressions of
the scene-
"Suddenly something clicks, everything
vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch
out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit,
turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones,
and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building,
so full of women, wine, music and vice."
For the cinema to thrive this perceived threat
and potential would have to be reduced, diminished, domesticated. For its more
mainstream iterations, some of these rougher edges, and for some much of its
potential, would be reduced and managed. This cinema experience began to strive
for invisibility, attempting to create a closed, secure world which its
audiences could inhabit safely. Any techniques that disrupted this immersive illusion,
that reminded audiences that they were watching a film, were reduced and made
‘invisible’ in favour of a narrative form which audiences could comfortably
lose themselves in for a set period of time. This was a cinematic impression of
reality that carefully mirrored our own perceptions of reality and with these
changes in place the cinema could become a more pervasive force. It became inescapable
and it would help shape how the twentieth century was experienced. This was of
course however only one cinema, only one potential direction taken and an avant-garde
also emerged as a possible corrective to this more general tendency and a
reminder of some of cinema’s still uninhabited possibilities.
The Lumieres had succinctly grasped many of the
key potentialities of the moving-image at the moment when they placed their
camera to the right of an approaching train in the small French town of La Ciotat
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Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth
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Victor
Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive
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Peter
Tscherkassky’s L’Arivee
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The perceptual
experience of train travel in the 19th Century offered several parallels
to the cinema experience, an all too similar
uncanny combining of movement and stillness that mirrored the mechanics of
film. A steady rhythmic flickering of objects passing too close to a window that
stood in for the flicker of the screen, especially in those early days. An
invisible turning of cogs and wheels that mirrored the cinema’s own, rarely
visible, cogs and wheels and the views from a train, which upon entering a
tunnel for example, could suddenly shift from window to mirror, providing another
essential analogy for on the one hand cinema’s immersive/realist capacity and
the reflexive/reflective functions favoured by an emergent avant-garde.
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Henri Chomette Jeux des
Reflets et de la Vitesse
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Cinema history should never be conceived of as a straight
line, it should instead be thought of a plurality and it is full of divergent
paths and roads not taken, its progress was never predetermined. All of its
histories sit on top of each other and intersect in unexpected and surprising
ways, and the cinema’s forgotten pathways are frequently rediscovered and
unearthed. The train provided the cinema with a subject and a means through
which it could explore some of these divergent possibilities and the films
included in this programme present a number of potentialities in this regard.
Stan Brakhage’s Wonder Ring, a film
full of reflective surfaces which subtly warp and alter our perception, was
also an important document of impending obsolescence, recording a path through
the city by a Third Avenue elevated train that was soon to be destroyed.
Tscherkassky’s ‘found-footage’ film L’Arivee
returns us directly to the Lumiere’s origin point, only here everything is
visible, the scratches, pops and stabs of celluloid, even the ‘track’ along the
side of the celluloid strip, an aspect of the film machine designed to only
ever be heard and not seen. Eventually, after various manufactured collisions,
the film jumps to a close-up and suddenly from the film (the medium) and the
train (the machine) emerges Catherine Deneuve (‘the star’). Henri Chommette’s Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse (‘Games
of Reflection and of Speed’) also plays with reflective surfaces and
superimposition, only here we are placed in the subjective position of the
train, just as we were in the early ‘phantom ride’ films, we no longer watch
the train we are the train, we internalise its processes. Chomette described it
as a ‘pure cinema’, not images for images sake and a variety of techniques and
operations are on display here, double exposure, negative printing, accelerated
speeds, resulting in a ‘cinema of sensation’, freed from any of the bounds of
representation. Ken Jacobs takes us on a similar journey working with a 1906
film and using an optical printer and split screen processes to disrupt and
undermine any normative sense of space and time we might still retain. Donal O'Ceilleachair’s ‘single-frame’ film
returns us to Oscar Fischinger’s ‘city symphony’ films collapsing a journey
from Istanbul to Berlin , fourteen days, down to three breath-taking
minutes. Finally Pip Chodorov with Faux
Movements creates a sense of motion, of moving through space through what
are often unexpected means, yet another ‘phantom ride’.
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| Stan Brakhage The Wonder Ring |
This programme of films is the third to consider the train, others included James Benning’s farewell to the filmic medium RR and Sarah Turner’s attempt to update the train film for the digital age Perestroika. As Maximilian Le Cain’s comments acknowledge the train seemed to tie the cinema to a set of concerns inherited from the 19th Century. The degree to which these concerns can remain central to the moving-image culture of the twentieth century remains to be seen. There are also several other obsolescences on display here, most visibly that of the medium itself. The correlations between train and film outlined in these films and elsewhere will not necessarily continue into an age dominated by the digital image. In Tom Gunning’s essay on that early Lumiere screening of a train’s ‘Arrival’ he reminds that early audiences were likely far more aware of what they were experiencing than we care to admit. These audiences were not astounded and astonished by the train that was apparently about to burst through the wall and tear them asunder, in fact it was something far more remarkable. These early audiences remained fully aware that what they were watching was ‘cinema’, early screenings often began with a still projected photographic image, an image which slowly burst into life, introducing moving-image, movement and animation, were there had previously only been stasis. It was all the possibilities that this image/these images contained that filled these audiences with awe and wonder, as hard as it may be for us to now grasp this was in and of itself enough and it is this distance that we might now sharpen ourselves to in comparing ourselves to those early audiences, to think otherwise would present us as the only naïve participants within this exchange. – Daniel Fitzpatrick
