The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  12

  Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film

  In his history of the panorama, Stephan Oetterman quotes a report that, in 1834, a panorama of the railway between Liverpool and Manchester was exhibited in Brooklyn, having been previously exhibited in England. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, generally regarded as the first regular city-to-city passenger railway service, had opened in 1830. Oetterman writes that panoramas simulating movement through landscape became popular in the English-speaking countries from the 1820s, suggesting that ‘the moving panorama anticipated, in art, the speed of travel which the railroads would soon make a reality’. He notes a connection with migration, and that the panorama ‘proved highly successful … in motivating prospective settlers to consider California’.1

  Moving or extended panoramas were popular in Britain, as well as in the United States, where the static panorama seems not to have caught on to the extent that it did in Europe. Views of landscape painted on lengths of canvas were rolled between two cylinders, one on each side of a stage or similar field of view, so that the landscape appeared to pass by, as if the audience were travelling in a vehicle or on a boat. A Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage Round the World was first exhibited in New Bedford in 1848.2 In the same year, Charles Dickens described the exhibition in London of Banvard’s Geographical Panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. Banvard’s panorama depicted a journey of 1,200 miles, was claimed in its early publicity to be three miles long, and took two hours to pass before the audience.3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that the decline of the panorama coincides with the growth of the railway;4 but the panorama enjoyed a second popularity after about 1880, and moving panoramas were still being produced as late as 1900, when a Trans-Siberian Express was exhibited in the Paris Universal Exposition.5

  Moving panoramas were more portable and perhaps easier to reduce in scale than static 360-degree panoramas, which were conventionally exhibited in purpose-built rotundas. In the famous sequence in Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), set in Vienna in ‘about 1900’, the characters played by Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan visit the Prater, its Riesenrad (erected in 1897) in the background, where they linger in a fairground panorama fitted out as a compartment of a railway carriage, past the window of which endless but rather soon repeated views of landscapes – Venice, Switzerland – are moved by pedal power. ‘We have no more countries’ says the operator after a while. ‘Then we’ll begin again,’ says Jourdan, ‘we’ll revisit the scenes of our youth’. This scene, in which the mechanism is very clearly demonstrated, is not part of Stefan Zweig’s original story.6

  Both cinema and the railway offer more or less predetermined and repeatable spatio-temporal continuities, so that it is perhaps not surprising that railways crop up in cinema as often as they do. Films even physically resemble railway tracks – long, parallel-sided strips divided laterally by frame lines and perforations, as is the railway by sleepers. Cinema is one of the technologies that developed during the period of rapid globalisation between 1880 and 1918, and is associated with electrification, but neither cine cameras nor projectors were necessarily electric.7 The possibility of projecting moving pictures depended finally on the development of photographic material flexible and strong enough to withstand transport through the various machines involved, the mechanisms of which were similar to those of other, older machines: the transport mechanism of the Lumières’ Cinématographe was suggested by the shuttle of the sewing machine. Film is moved through cameras and projectors by mechanisms that convert the rotation of a motor or crank into the reciprocating movement of a pin or claw, so as to register duration as, and subsequently reconstruct it from, a series of still photographs. In a steam locomotive, the reciprocating movement of the pistons is converted into the rotation of the wheels, and hence into linear movement and the possibility of panoramic views from railway carriage windows. Photography and the passenger railway both date from the same period in the early nineteenth century: the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, Joseph Niépce’s photograph in 1826. One might see cinema as their belated combination.

  The first of the various Lumière films known as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare was photographed in 1895 or early 1896. This film was not among those shown at the Lumières’ first public screening in Paris, on 28 December 1895, at the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capucines. The first mention of such a film, described as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare d’un chemin de fer, dates from 26 January 1896.8 Several Lumière films of train arrivals are known to have been photographed with static cameras placed on station platforms, including Lumière catalogue no. 653, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1897, or possibly late 1896), with which the earlier film is often confused. Whether or not L’Arrivée d’un train en gare really did disconcert audiences to the extent suggested by ‘cinema’s founding myth’ – which seems unlikely9 – the version in the British Film Institute’s National Archive10 is slightly unsettling. The camera is perhaps nearer to the edge of the platform than in similar films, and the approaching locomotive leans towards it, as if it might topple and crush the cinematographer.

  In early cinema, movement of the camera relative to its tripod was unusual. There are a few films that comprise or include pans,11 of which The Great Ottawa Fire (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1900) and Clifton Suspension Bridge (British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1900) are examples. It must have been difficult to achieve a smooth movement, especially if the camera was cranked by hand, but cinematographers were quick to grasp the possibility of placing their otherwise static cameras on things that moved: boats, trains, trams and, later, motor cars. In this way, it was possible to extend the spectacle of a film a long way beyond what was visible in a static frame. The first moving-camera film is supposed to have been a view of Venice photographed from a moving gondola by Alexandre Promio (1868–1926) for the Lumière company in September or October 1896, and the first film made by placing a camera on a train was probably the Lumières’ Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer, photographed by Promio in January or February 1897 – an oblique rearward view of a station platform from a departing train. Like many of Promio’s films, it offers a glimpse of a space that would subsequently undergo considerable transformation. Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire. People on the platform watch the train depart, perhaps attracted by the camera. As the platform slips away, some of them raise their hats and wave.

  Promio’s travels for the Lumière company included two visits to the UK – in 1896, to London, and again in 1897 to London, Liverpool and Ireland. There are eight films of Liverpool, four of these – Panoramas pris du chemin de fer électrique I–IV12 – a series of spectacular views of the docks photographed from the Liverpool Overhead Railway – the first elevated electric metropolitan railway in the world, which had opened in February 1893 and ran along the landward side of the docks until 1957. The films are especially striking in that they show to what extent large ocean-going sailing ships were still in everyday commercial operation. In this, they demonstrate what might be described as the temporal heterogeneity of the spaces glimpsed. The films are striking perhaps because they make this heterogeneity, unusually, very visible, and in doing so subvert the tendency of images, and films perhaps in particular, to offer illusory homogeneity, especially when depicting the spaces of the past. The railway’s moving, cinematic view of the docks appears very modern, and the docks themselves were undergoing continual, mechanised development, but the ships convey the spatial experiences of an earlier, different time.

  Seven of the twenty-five extant films13 photographed by Promio in Ireland are of cavalry exercises. Of the remaining eighteen, eleven are railway panoramas photographed in urban, suburban and rural landscapes along the lines between Belfast and Dublin and from Dublin to Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), from which the mail-boats departed for Holyhead. The films are Panorama de l’arrivée à Belfast, Panorama du
départ de Belfast, Départ de Dammurey (Dunmurry), Lisburn, Départ de Surgan (Lurgan), Ligne de Belfast à Kingston I, II & III, Départ de la gare, panorama (Dublin), Soundy Mounts (Sandymount) and Arrivée à Kingston. If the landscapes glimpsed in these films appear more familiar than the static-camera street scenes Promio photographed in Belfast and Dublin (as I would suggest they do), this is perhaps a consequence of both the moving-camera viewpoint and the modernity of some of their locations, the suburbs in particular. Some of the landscapes Promio photographed in Ireland are not far from those of Joyce’s Ulysses,14 which is set in 1904.

  These Lumière films are panoramas – views resembling those of passengers from railway carriage windows (or panoramas that simulated them). In the evolution of the moving-camera film, the railway panorama was superseded by the phantom ride. Unlike panorama, the term phantom ride does not seem to have existed prior to its use to describe a certain kind of film, though it has since diffused into the language of horror fiction.15 One might understand phantom merely as a modifier, meaning illusory, in which case railway panoramas can be and sometimes are described as phantom rides, but the term is more specific to a view in a direction close to that of the line of travel. In its strictest sense, a phantom ride is a film that looks forward from the front of a moving railway engine – a view then seldom encountered in ordinary experience, even by an engine driver. The combination of the camera’s ‘subjective’ view and its conventionally inaccessible position suggests disembodied consciousness, though no one seems to know if this was a factor in the naming of the phantom ride, or when the term was first used, and by whom. In any case, in other variations of the moving-camera film the view is similarly oneiric, so that films in which the camera is looking backwards, or is located in a wagon halfway along the train, as well as films photographed from trams and cars in which the forward-facing view was unexceptional, have also been described as phantom rides, though perhaps not at the time they were first exhibited.16

  On this basis, the earliest phantom ride was Promio’s Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer, but the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) seems to have been the first film photographed from the front of a locomotive, and the first of many such rides produced by the Biograph companies. One of Biograph’s four founders was William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson (1860–1935), who had previously developed and designed much of Thomas Edison’s moving picture technology, and who in his work for Biograph became one of the most accomplished cinematographers of early cinema. The companies’ films were photographed and exhibited in a large format of 68mm, as distinct from the usual 35mm: the ‘Biograph’ was an electric camera that, together with its stand and batteries, weighed over 2,000 pounds and ran at forty frames per second. It seems unlikely that it could have been mounted on the locomotive itself, but was perhaps instead placed in a wagon in front. Many of Biograph’s films of this period offer a spatial quality not found in those of other producers,17 so that one wonders if this was a characteristic of Dickson’s approach.

  Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L & NW Railway (1898)

  Dickson, born in Brittany to British parents, had emigrated to the United States in 1879, joining Edison in 1883. In May 1897, he returned to Europe as the technical manager and cinematographer of the newly formed British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate (later Company),18 travelling in the UK and Europe, and in South Africa during the Boer War. The British Biograph Company’s films include Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L & NW Railway (1898) and Irish Mail – L & NW Railway – Taking Up Water at Full Speed (1898), the southbound Holyhead-to-Euston boat train photographed passing through Bushey station from the rear of a train on a parallel track, which is overtaken by the express towards the end of the film. These films would have required extensive, precise collaboration with the railway company: the London and North Western appear to have been more often involved in early films than other railway companies. Another Biograph film was photographed on the same route – Menai Bridge – The Irish Day Mail from Euston Entering the Tubular Bridge Over the Menai Straits (1898) – and Charles Goodwin Norton’s Railway Traffic on the LNWR (c.1897) was photographed from the platform of what was then Sudbury and Wembley station (now Wembley Central).

  All these films survive in the collection of the British Film Institute’s National Archive. There are other Biograph railway rides in the BFI’s archive, most of them American Biograph titles.19 If these were exhibited in the UK, as seems likely, this is one example among many of the transatlantic, westward orientation of much early cinema, at least in the UK,20 which suggests a relationship between film and the prospect of emigration reminiscent of the role claimed by Oetterman for the moving panorama in the settlement of California. In American Biograph phantom rides such as In the Canadian Rockies, near Banff (1899) and Railway Trip through Mountain Scenery and Tunnels (1900), the movement of the trains suggests an anticipation one might imagine as characteristic of nearing the Pacific coast. Perhaps Biograph’s international spread and Dickson’s transatlantic journey were factors in Biograph’s interest in the railway between Holyhead and London. A clue as to why this was the subject of so much attention – another film, Phantom Ride: Menai Straits (anon., c.1904), begins at about the same place as Biograph’s Conway Castle – is offered by a remark of Charles Urban, an American film producer active in the UK: in an intertitle in The Old Mauretania (Charles Urban Trading Company, c.1910)21 he writes that, when crossing the Atlantic, ‘we usually took advantage of the Kingston–Holyhead route to reach London more quickly, by boarding a tender off Queenstown’ (the port of Cork, now Cobh); i.e. he took a train to Dublin, the mailboat to Holyhead and the Irish Mail to Euston, suggesting that the train may have derived its status at least in part from its being patronised by transatlantic commuters. A comparable evocation of elsewhere was offered by British Biograph’s Through Miller’s Dale (near Buxton, Derbyshire) Midland Rail (1899), also known as Through the Chee Tor Tunnel in Derbyshire, a three-take view from the front of a Midland Railway train as it passes though and beyond Miller’s Dale Junction, where the branch to Buxton left the main Midland route between Derby and Manchester. Both the location and the railway journey were celebrated for touristic qualities that derived in part from the supposed resemblance of this and other places in Derbyshire to painterly landscapes in Italy.

  Through Miller’s Dale (near Buxton, Derbyshire) Midland Rail (1899)

  The majority of UK railway rides date from before 1900, after which the electric tram was more often employed as a moving-camera platform.22 All the British Biograph railway titles in the BFI’s archive were photographed before Dickson left for South Africa in 1899. The only British Biograph moving-camera film in the archive that dates from after his return is Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram (July 1901), which was probably photographed by Dickson. By about 1903 he had left Biograph, returning to his profession as an electrical engineer. There are later American Biograph railway rides, including The Georgetown Loop (1901), photographed by Billy Bitzer, who later became D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer.

  Other film companies made phantom rides, though few are as spectacular as the large-format films produced by the Biograph companies. In the UK, both Cecil Hepworth’s Hepwix and the Warwick Trading Company (the European branch of Maguire and Baucus set up by Urban) produced a number of examples. In Hepworth’s Through Three Reigns (1922), a retrospective compilation of his early films, he refers (like Urban, in an intertitle) to ‘stereoscopic cinema’, meaning a feature of moving-camera films in which differential parallax suggests the illusion of depth. The film so introduced is Thames River Scene (1899), a panoramic, sideways view from a launch travelling downstream among other craft on the river at Henley, but the ‘stereoscopic effect’ is also characteristic of phantom rides. The stereoscope was one of the entertainments that preceded cinema, a competing medium which offered a three-dimensionality that cinema conventionally lacked, so that there w
ould have been a potentially commercial aspect to Hepworth’s interest in and realisation of ‘stereoscopic’ cinema.

  Railway actualities are among the forms most closely associated with the period of early cinema. Their production declined with the development of narrative cinema, but the phantom ride played a significant role in this development. One of Hepworth’s railway rides is View from an Engine Front – Train Leaving Tunnel (1899), which survives both as a film in its own right and as two of the three shots that comprise G. A. Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (also 1899). This was not the first film to attempt continuity editing, but is among the earliest successful examples in that it creates a convincing continuity from two quite separate camera subjects seen from different viewpoints. Smith made a studio shot in which a couple are seen in side view in a railway carriage compartment (like that of the fairground ride in Letter from an Unknown Woman). The window is dark, as if the train is in a tunnel, and the couple (Smith and his wife Laura) take the opportunity to embrace and kiss. As far as anyone knows, the scene survives only in combination with Hepworth’s film, but it was advertised for sale as a potential addition to any phantom ride in which a train passed through a tunnel. Hepworth’s film begins with a view from a stationary locomotive facing a tunnel entrance. A train emerges from the tunnel and passes the locomotive with the camera, which advances into the tunnel until the screen is entirely dark. At this point, Smith cut in his railway compartment scene, which is followed by the remainder of Hepworth’s film – a moment of darkness in which a point of light appears and widens until the train emerges into daylight. The film’s publicity took care to assert the propriety of the scene depicted, though viewers must surely have been aware of the dangers, real and imagined, that accompanied travel in isolated railway compartments.23 There is another three-shot Kiss in the Tunnel made by the Riley Brothers and Bamforth companies in 1899 or 1900, in which the first and third shots are views of the train from beside the track. If this is a less successful example of film construction, it is perhaps because the forward movement in the first shot in the Hepworth/Smith film suggests that the carriage interior of the second shot is really in motion. Smith’s insert functions as what became known as a cutaway, whereas the Riley/Bamforth film appears as three shots rather awkwardly joined together.