8 This is not so much a reference to Heidegger’s ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, etc., as to the dilemmas presented to child-rearing households of moderate means by some contemporary cities, especially London.
9 At least in the West, the global consumer economy’s locations for production, distribution and consumption are typically suburban or ‘rural’, while global finance is increasingly centralised in the City of London and similar ‘world cities’.
10 See, for instance, Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), pp. 1, 3.
11 London’s City and South London Railway, which became part of the Northern Line.
12 The first network was in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. In the UK, electric trams date mostly from the early 1900s.
13 Such as, for instance, the Lumière company’s Panoramas pris du chemin de fer électrique, photographed from the Liverpool Dock Railway by Alexandre Promio in 1897.
14 For example, when the original Tate Gallery at Millbank opened in 1897, it had cost its patron, Sir Henry Tate, £105,000 to build. In a comparison based on retail prices, this is ‘equivalent’ to about £6 million today; in a comparison based on average wages and salaries, to about £20 million. Tate’s original gallery was only the first phase of the present gallery, about a fifth of its current area, but the recent refurbishment alone cost £30 million. In the early 1900s, a new three-bedroom house in a London suburb could be bought for about £300 – ‘equivalent’ to about £18,000 (prices) or £60,000 (wages) – of which about £50 would have been the cost of the site. In 1914, only 10 per cent of homes were owner-occupied.
15 A UK government-appointed task force headed by Sir John Egan, BAA chief executive, produced its report Rethinking Construction in July 1998, describing an industry that ‘produces poor profits, fails to invest, and treats its employees as a commodity to be hired and fired and given dirty, unsafe conditions to work in’. Construction was rated so poorly by the City that the stock market capitalisation of the entire quoted sector was only £12 billion – only 75 per cent of the (then) value of retailer Marks and Spencer.
16 A week’s wage for a bricklayer was just over £2 (40s7d) in 1914, £3.67 (73s5d) in 1924 – British Labour Statistics, Historical Abstract 1886–1968.
17 Reprinted in Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 29.
18 Lefebvre identifies a ‘conceptual triad’ of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces (‘the perceived—conceived—lived triad’). Spatial practice is ‘a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, “private” life and leisure)’. Representations of space are ‘conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent – all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’. Representational spaces are ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users”, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.’ The Production of Space, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 38–9. Lefebvre’s book was first published in 1974, and was quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, which appeared in 1990, and in which ‘representational spaces’ is translated as ‘spaces of representation’, and the three concepts are stated slightly differently (pp. 218–19).
19 Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 189–90.
20 Cinema, for example, conventionally represents city space with relatively low levels of traffic noise, if only so that the dialogue can be heard. The transformative effect of such changes in the actual aural environment can sometimes be noticed during road closures, political demonstrations, or other unusual circumstances.
21 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980); both passages are quoted on p. 278.
22 T. Jackson, N. Marks, J. Ralls and S. Stymne, Sustainable Economic Welfare in the UK, 1950–1996 (London: NEF, 1997), p. 28.
23 Or, as Stan Douglas writes: ‘That the stage for the global dominance of financial markets was abruptly set by the 1973 oil crisis – and fully dressed with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system shortly thereafter – is proof that, far from being a dead zone between the emancipatory utopias of the 1960s and the protectionist greed of the 1980s, the current distribution of power is the secret meaning of the 1970s.’ Journey into Fear (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2002), p. 136.
24 See, for instance, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 39, 54.
25 If.… was photographed by Miroslav Ondrícek.
11. Film as a Special Critique
1 For more on the implications of electronic media for experience of moving images, see Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2005).
2 By ‘film’, I mean film footage in which architecture and landscape are visible, rather than particular films about architecture and landscape. After about 1920, such footage is perhaps more widely encountered in feature narratives, especially after 1945, when location cinematography began to become more common.
3 The City of the Future, a research project (2002–05) based at the Royal College of Art, London. See vads.ac.uk.
4 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (with Adam Barker), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62.
5 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, p. 57.
6 See Tony Rayns, ‘Death at Work: Evolution and Entropy in Factory Films’, in Michael O’Pray, ed., Andy Warhol Film Factory (London: BFI, 1989), p. 164.
7 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 25.
8 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 266.
9 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 5.
10 John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’, The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969), p. 6.
11 Ibid., p. 5.
12 According to Kern, 30 million emigrants left Europe between 1890 and 1914. The Culture of Time and Space, p. 220.
13 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p. 14.
14 Ibid., p. 67.
15 Ibid., p. 317.
16 Ibid., p. 311.
17 Ibid., p. 66.
18 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 238.
19 Ibid., p. 228.
20 Average income in employment increased about three times as much as indices of retail prices. The cost of housing has generally increased more than average income.
21 See, for instance, Jackson et al., Sustainable Economic Welfare in the UK, 1950-1996, who report that the UK’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) peaked in 1976, and has since dropped by 25 per cent to the level of the 1950s, increases in GDP per head etc. having been offset by environmental decline, increased inequality and other factors. Similar patterns have been found in other advanced economies, notably the United States.
22 See Kern, Culture of Time and Space, p. 157.
23 Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, p. 276; see also Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (London: Phaidon, 1965), first published in Vienna in 1889.
24 Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, p. 276.
25 Ibid., p. 277.
26 See, for instance, Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality
and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 324–9. The essay was first published in 1903.
27 Among over fifty urban actuality films from the years 1895–1903, I have encountered only one in which cars appear: Busy London – Traffic Passing in Front of the Bank of England and Mansion House (Walturdaw, 1903), in which there are two cars, among a multitude of horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians. In contrast, the surviving incomplete print of Cecil Hepworth’s City of Westminster (1909) begins with a ninety-second moving-camera view photographed by Gaston Quiribet from a car that drives from the north end of Whitehall, up the east side of Trafalgar Square into St Martin’s Lane. The traffic includes cars, horse buses, horse-drawn carts and vans, bicycles, hackney cabs, motor taxis, a steam lorry, and many people crossing the road between them. After the mid 1900s, such shots are rare.
12. The Phantom Rides
1 Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone, 1997), pp. 314, 323, 325.
2 Ibid., pp. 66, 323, 340.
3 Charles Dickens, ‘The American Panorama’, Examiner, 16 December 1848, quoted in Oetterman, Panorama, p. 329. See also Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 63. Comment suggests that Banvard’s original panorama could not have measured much more than 400 metres (though further scenes were added later).
4 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 62.
5 Oetterman, Panorama, p. 179; Comment, Panorama, p. 74. The exhibit was funded by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.
6 Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Cassell, 1933), first published in 1922 as Brief einer Unbekannten.
7 See, for example, Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For more on early film see, for example, Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, eds, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey (London: British Film Institute, 1996) and the accompanying website at victorian-cinema.net; Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005); and Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: BBC/BFI, 1994).
8 Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 4: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 89–118, at p. 101.
9 Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train’, pp. 89–101.
10 According to the BFI’s database, this is Lumière catalogue no. 653. It also matches Loiperdinger’s description of no. 653. Loiperdinger mentions two other Lumière train arrivals, no. 8 (at Villefranche-sur-Saône) and no. 127 (at Lyon), and that three versions of L’Arrivée d’un train de La Ciotat are known to have existed, of which no. 653 is the latest. The La Ciotat train arrival captioned as Lumière no. 653 on many internet sites is not the film described by the BFI and Loiperdinger (there are, for instance, no female Lumière family members on the platform).
11 The cinematographers’ term ‘pan’ is an abbreviation of panorama, but a pan is usually the result of rotating the camera laterally whereas a ‘panorama’ is the result of sideways or other movement of the camera’s support.
12 In the CNC’s compilation in the BFI’s National Archive, the films are edited together in non-topographical order. They are views from southbound trains travelling from what was then the north end of the docks, passing Canada Dock (III), Sandon Dock (IV), Victoria, Waterloo and Prince’s Docks (II) and George’s, Canning, Salthouse and Albert Docks (I), so that the topographical order would be III, IV, II, I. By 1904, George’s Dock had been filled in. Promio’s other Liverpool films are Church Street, Lime Street, Entrée dans Clarence Dock and La Rade, a view across the river from a slow-moving viewpoint near the present pier head, with a ship moving slowly upstream.
13 The BFI’s National Archive holds five compilation reels of Lumière films, presented to the BFI in 1995 by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) on the occasion of the centenary of cinema, which are intended to include all extant films made by the company in the UK. One of the two films known as Pont de la tour is not included (a view from a boat moving downstream beneath Tower Bridge), perhaps because it was already held by the BFI (the Pont de la tour in the CNC compilation is a view of pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the bridge seen from the carriageway’s pavement).
14 One might be tempted to look for the landscape of ‘Bloom Cottage’, of the episode ‘Ithaca’, in Promio’s panoramas.
15 Nigel Kneale’s television series Quatermass and the Pit includes a reference to ‘the wild hunt … the phantom ride of witches and devils’.
16 British Biograph’s forward-facing tram ride through Ealing, for example, is called Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram (1901).
17 The Library of Congress’s memory.loc.gov offers the opportunity to compare twenty-five Biograph and twenty Edison films of New York in 1898–1906. Biograph’s films include some particularly successful depictions of spatial or architectural subjects (for example, Beginning a Skyscraper), while Edison’s often seem more interested in performance.
18 See Barry Anthony and Richard Brown, A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915 (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999).
19 American Biograph phantom rides in the BFI’s archive include Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899), The Crookedest Railroad Yard in the World (1897), From Vaudreuil to St Anne’s (1900), In the Canadian Rockies, near Banff (1899), Into the Catskills: a Race for a Siding (1906), Railway Trip through Mountain Scenery and Tunnels (1900), A Ride on a Switchback (1900, or c.1898), Victoria Jubilee Bridge, St Lawrence River, Canada (1900) and The Georgetown Loop (1901).
20 This seems to have been fairly widespread: in a Mitchell and Kenyon tram-ride film of Nottingham, the camera dwells on a wall of poster advertisements, the largest of which is for the North American Animated Photo Co., a UK company that commissioned many of Mitchell and Kenyon’s films. Another of Mitchell and Kenyon’s customers was A. D. Thomas, who traded as the Thomas-Edison Animated Photo Co. and sometimes billed himself as ‘Edison-Thomas’.
21 Urban’s intertitles refer to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, so must have been added later.
22 Many of the UK’s tram networks were electrified during the late 1890s and early 1900s. Horse trams had not offered such a steady movement, but the top of a tram was perhaps more accessible than the front of a locomotive, and the streets a more active camera subject, offering the possibility that people photographed would become the film’s paying customers.
23 For the distinction between the American and European pattern of railway carriage and the dangers of the latter, see Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, Chapter 5, ‘The Compartment’ (pp. 70–88) and Chapter 6, ‘The American Railroad’ (pp. 89–112), particularly ‘The New Type of Carriage’ (pp. 98–103) and ‘River Steamboat and Canal Packet as Models for the American Railroad Car’ (pp. 103–7).
24 See John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, Vol. 1: 1894–1896 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 38–41.
25 Hales Tours of the World Ltd was superseded by Hales Tours of the World (UK) Ltd, for which a receiver was appointed in 1908 (see Ian Christie et al. London Project, at londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk).
26 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Elsaesser and Barker, Early Cinema, pp. 56–62, at p. 58.
27 Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attractions’, pp. 56–62.
28 Ibid., p. 57.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)’ (1913), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Vintage, 2001), Vol. 12, pp. 123–44, at p. 135.
30 See Kern, Culture of Time and Spac
e, p. 43.
31 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, transl. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 150.
32 See, for example, Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 150: ‘Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements’, which might resemble duration’s fragmentation into individual frames of film, at odds with Bergson’s preceding affirmation of continuity on p. 149: ‘Either, then, you must suppose that this universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment of duration, or you must attribute to it that continuity of existence which you deny to consciousness, and make of its past a reality which endures and is prolonged into its present.’
33 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 25.
34 Perhaps not so much in terms of Bergson’s ‘gnawing’, but as a crucial step in the evolution of virtual space, and of Debord’s spectacle. Bernard Comment makes a similar observation about the panorama (Panorama, p. 132).
35 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 238.
13. Imaging
1 Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society Newsletter, February 2007, at glias.org.uk.
2 Karl-Artur Haag, at panoramio.com.
3 Robinson in Ruins, completed in 2010.
4 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome: Whose London?’, Art History, 22: 4 (1999), pp. 619–32.
5 The line connecting Stratford to the DLR at Canning Town opened in 2011.
6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in One-Way Street, pp. 225–39, at pp. 227, 229.
7 Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings 1913–1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), p. 36.
8 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, transl. John Moore (London/New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 103–29.
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