Katie McNeil & Magdalen R. Stanley

Position Paper

“Inventors and Hysterics: The Train in the Prehistory and Early History of Cinema”

in Lynne KirbyÂ’s Parallel Tracks.

 

In Parallel Tracks: Railroad and the Silent Cinema Lynne Kirby explores the analogous relationship between the rise of the railroad and the emergence of early cinema at the end of the nineteenth century.  Kirby strives to create a linkage between the film and the train on levels both literal-historical and aesthetic, providing readers with examples of ‘direct collisions’ of railroad and cinema as well as more conceptualized alternatives.  Essentially, this interconnectivity is based on the Marxian idea of the modernist upheaval of the spatial and the temporal.  Kirby writes:

 

The “annihilation of space and time”: the notion that conceptually links the railroad and the cinema…was not merely an abstract response to the compressive effects of mechanical speed…..both the railroad and the cinema wiped out preexisting ideas and experiences of time and space and substituted their own as new sociocultural norms.  The perceptual reorientation of both the railroad and the cinema entailed a new temporal reorientation as well. (48) 

 

Initially, Kirby traces an economic and aesthetic relationship between the railroad and the cinema, pointing to the common appearance of trains and train travel in early films.  This aesthetic use of the train not only benefited filmmakers, who relied upon people’s fascination with the new mode of transportation to gain an audience, but also the railroad industry, who made use of this new medium to legitimate their new technology in society.  Many of these films were partially or fully financed by the railroad companies, but their advertising function was in large part masked behind their aesthetic qualities, as they joined the genre of travel art that was popular at the time.  Kirby explains that the link between the railroad and the cinema served to bolster pubic opinion of both technologies, as reactions to these machines remained ambivalent in both Europe and the United States.

 

Supporters of the railroad and the cinema argued that these technologies were instruments for democratization and national unity.  The railroad linked diverse geographical regions that were previously disconnected, and was open to people of all classes, thus “bring[ing] people together both spatially and socially” (26).  The cinema was seen to accomplish a similar dissolution of social and spatial boundaries, as it carried the same stories, actors and scenes to diverse groups of people and joined audiences of all backgrounds under one roof.  Kirby provides evidence that a degree of new social circulation was in fact brought about by these technologies, as they both accompanied and furthered the growth of the tourism industry.  Film, continuing the tradition established in earlier media, thematized travel and introduced people to faraway places to which they previously had no access.  The railroad, on the other hand, provided the actual possibility of visiting such places in person.

 

Critics of the two technologies, however, feared their negative effects on moral and social traditions, as well as on nature.  The railroad disturbed both rural and urban landscapes, and was seen to cause a breakdown of traditional social relations, as “total strangers were forced to stare at each other silently” as they traveled together in one compartment (29).  Critics of the cinema pointed to a similar situation in the theater, as people mingled in the dark next to complete strangers while they watched the film.  In addition, the railroad and the cinema were seen as health risks, from the ever increasing number of accidents on the tracks to the nervous disorders and sexual perversion caused by watching films.  Although Kirby does not argue whether such fears were warranted, she does point out that both the railroad and the cinema had a physical/psychological effect on people, as it led to a reorganization of time and space and furthered the development of a new panoramic perception.

           

In the second half of the chapter, Kirby draws on this notion of an altered perspective to illustrate the parallel consequences of “temporal reorientation” and wider awareness of simultaneity for the modern individual: a “hyperconsciousness of time” and a newly gendered form of hysteria (57). 

 

Kirby alludes to the concept of the “the culture of time and space” and much of the same historical territory found in Kern’s work when she outlines the American conversion to “railroad time” in 1883 and its ramifications.  This, together with the 1880 introduction of the Waterbury, the first watch affordable to the general public, argues Kirby, transformed cinema into a “leisure pursuit made possible by rationalized time” (53).   In contrast to the previous model of films as drop-in affairs, the new schedule system, which made into films discreet units, became a new force to be negotiated, not unlike a train timetable.  Also, a new awareness of “simultaneity” and “synchronicity” a la Proust emerged (53).  This “wider social synchronicity” was mirrored in films such as American filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s 1911 The Lonedale Operator (51).  Here, the film alternates between four different physical spaces thus “accelerating the temporality” of an essentially Dickensian conceit (56).

 

Parallel Tracks seems to follow Benjamin’s view of modernity as a series of shocks, particularly in “Shock and Subjectivity in Early Cinema”.  Kirby argues film and the railroad intermingle in their ability to offer expanded opportunities for the modern individual, already desensitized, to be continually shocked, creating an “imagination of disaster” and eventually expanding the view of hysteria (61).  The public became obsessed with the idea of disaster, a phenomenon which manifested itself in a wide-ranging manner, from the near ghost-like quality of picture postcards of families in front of the train wreck they had just experienced to the large cache of staged film crashes or near-crashes and rescues.  Film audiences clamored to escape from oncoming shots of locomotives, an image which became the subject of film itself.  In Edison/Porter’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) audiences watched as a popular rube character of the time is seen panicking while watching an train rush towards him on the screen-within-a-screen.  This, writes Kirby, “is not only a train phobia, but a cinematic hysteria” (68).  She continues that this “aggression of the apparatus,” the effects of which were recorded by the medical community as “railway spine,” “railway brain” or “traumatic neurosis” (58) creates, as she argues, an “emasculated” male (67).  This change, Kirby suggests, from the Victorian hysteria, an exclusively female disease, to a male variant puts into question the definition of femininity.  Loosely, she connects these shifting gender perceptions to the “institutionalization of a male perspective, as the institutionalization of the female spectator” (72).

 

Kirby’s work allows the modern reader to envision the newness of the developments surrounding cinema and the railroad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century:  the film spectator en route to The Great Train Robbery, taking the train and then perhaps the streetcar, always consulting in turn train timetable, cinema schedule and watch.  Kirby creates a valid connection between early cinema and railroad, as both establish themselves as institutions in the discontinuous landscape of modernity.  The comparison, however, is necessarily visual.  According to Kirby, the “shock” that both procure is one specific to the visual observer.  What about the pure physicality and motion present on the train, but missing in the cinema?  Where do silent film and the cacophony that railroad, in its invasion of both city- and landscape, diverge?  Certainly, cinema and railroad were not alone development of a desensitized modern individual, but rather, two major and closely related factors in a much larger scope of defining intellectual and mechanical innovations.