As will have been clear from our screening on Tuesday, trains are a particular fascination of early cinema. Both Walter Ruttman’s Symphony of a Great City and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera include shots of trains within their opening scenes. Vertov’s depiction of the cameraman struggling to set up his camera in time to film the rushing train (which recalls images of the damsel in distress tied to the railway line by baddies) highlights the fact that ingenuity had to go into this process of using one new technology to film another. We’ll talk more about trains in film (and fiction) on Thursday, but in the meantime, have a look at this piece of film history – the Lumiere brothers’ 1895 The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
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And speaking of trains and the obsession with, here’s a short quotation from Thomas Wolfe’s “You can’t go home again”:
“one of the most wonderful things in the world is the experience of being on a train. The train is a miracle of man’s handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction. One’s own sense of manhood and of mastery is heightened by being on a train.”