The View From the Train (21 page)

Both early films and these more recent examples differ from what became the dominant form in the way they represent space on a screen. In films constructed as montage, space is assembled in time, as an implied continuity of fragments. In most early films, space is represented within a single frame, either static or moving. Early films are also less likely to direct the viewer's attention to a single subject in the frame: one's eye can more easily wander in their spaces, and because of this they invite (or even require) repeated viewing. Moving-camera films often create a striking illusion of three-dimensionality, which early film-makers sometimes referred to explicitly as ‘the stereoscopic effect'.

Between the mid 1900s and the outbreak of the First World War, the spaces and spatial experiences characteristic of industrialised economies appear to have undergone significant transformation. These transitions have been described in a variety of ways: for example, in his afterword to the English translation of Henri Lefebvre's definitive
La Production de l'espace
, first published in 1974, but in English only in 1991, the geographer David Harvey quoted a passage in Lefebvre's opening chapter:

Lister Gate, Nottingham in 2003, with inset from
Tram Rides Through Nottingham, Liser Gate
, Mitchell and Kenyon (1902)

Harvey had already quoted from this passage in his
The Condition of Postmodernity
(1990), following mention of ‘the incredible confusions
and oppositions across a spectrum of possible reactions to the growing sense of crisis in the experience of time and space, that had been gathering since 1848 and seemed to come to a head just before the First World War', and noted ‘that 1910–14 is roughly the period that many historians of modernism (beginning with Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence) point to as crucial in the evolution of modernist thinking'.
⁸

For Harvey, the crisis was one ‘of technological innovation, of capitalist dynamics across space [and] cultural production'. He notes the slightly different emphasis of Stephen Kern who, in
The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918
(1983), offered ‘generalizations about the essential cultural developments of the period'.
⁹
Other writers have dealt with these in detail: for John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism' was the period between 1907 and 1914, and during the period 1900–14 ‘the developments which converged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe changed the meaning of time and space'.
¹⁰
Berger listed these as:

More recent writing (including that of Kern and Harvey) has stressed the role of telecommunications; others mention emigration, both within and away from Europe.
¹²
Some of these developments suggest comparisons with the present.

At about the same time, architectural theorists began to develop new concepts of architectural space. For Reyner Banham, in
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(1960), ‘a series of revolutionary gestures around 1910, largely connected with the Cubist
and Futurist movements, were the main point of departure for the development of Modern architecture'.
¹³
Banham's narrative is that of evolving concepts of space, specifically ‘the change-over from the Lippsian idea of space, as
felt volume
[my emphasis] … to the later concept of space as a three-dimensional continuum, capable of metrical subdivision, without sacrifice of its continuity'.
¹⁴
The idea of space as volume enclosed by solid surfaces (characteristic of early modern architects such as Voysey or Berlage, and of Cerdà's Barcelona) began to give way to concepts in which the solidity of matter was less certain, just as the early modernist city, with its bicycles and electric trams, would give way to the city of the motor car. By 1929 László Moholy-Nagy was able to formulate the minimum definition – ‘space is the relation between the position of bodies'
¹⁵
– which for Banham confirmed ‘the whole revolution in architectural theory that had been going on since 1908'.
¹⁶
One of Moholy-Nagy's earlier spatial expositions was his 1921–22 proposal for a film,
Dynamic of the Metropolis
, which somewhat anticipates Dziga Vertov's 1929
Man with a Movie Camera. Dynamic of the Metropolis
was never realised, but by 1929 Moholy-Nagy had made
Berliner Stilleben
(1926) and perhaps also
Marseille, Vieux-Port
(1929), so that the ‘minimum definition' of modernist space was put forward by a theorist who was also an experienced film-maker.

Banham saw the distinction between Theodor Lipps's and Moholy-Nagy's spatial concepts as sequential, but the idea of space as ‘felt volume' only slightly pre-dated the subsequent, more abstract formulation – it appears that the word ‘space' (
raum
) was not used in Lipps's (or any other architectural) sense before about 1900
¹⁷
– and Lipps's concept never really went away. The distinction between the two spatial concepts is very like that between Gunning's two kinds of cinema, and the spatiality of the early films – their depiction of architectural space within a single frame, their uninterrupted, lengthy spatio-temporal continuities (the tram rides especially) and the ‘stereoscopic effect' – is easy to identify with Lipps's formulation. Banham's
Theory and Design
was published in 1960, before the revival of urbanism in architectural theory in the
mid 1970s, since when architects and others have attempted to revive this early modernist space, just as film-makers have revived some of the forms of early cinema. Both Lipps's space and the ‘cinema of attractions' might be seen as early modernist forms which were eclipsed in the late 1900s, as part of a wider cultural transformation, but have since re-emerged, usually in opposition to the mainstream architectures and cinemas of Western and other capitalist cultures.

In
The Condition of Postmodernity
, Harvey also quoted the famous passage from Walter Benjamin's ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936):

Benjamin's ‘now' refers to film as it had evolved after the mid 1900s – his essay, published in 1936, mentions nothing earlier than the films of Abel Gance, Vertov and Joris Ivens – but it is not entirely clear at what date ‘came the film and burst this prison-world asunder'. If the development of cinema was a significant factor in the transformation of urban and other space during the 1900s, one wonders whether this was the development of cinema per se, or the development of cinema with editing, narrative and close-up as it was undertaken after the middle of the decade. The fragmentation Benjamin describes can be identified in post-1910 experience as a breaking up of space into individual shots, in which case ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second' is the interval between the end of one shot and the beginning of the next, rather than the medium's primary fragmentation of continuous duration into the discontinuous individual frames of a single shot. But the essay also famously stresses ‘the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets',
¹⁹
and it
might seem to us (over seventy years later) that in some ways one could ‘calmly and adventurously go travelling' (even) more easily in the early 1900s than in the period of Gance and Vertov.

Whatever the date of the films that Benjamin had in mind, something happened to the medium in the mid 1900s. The change that Gunning identified seems to have followed a distinct lull in output, during or soon after which many of the pioneers ceased production. After the mid 1900s, films are generally longer but with shorter shots, close-ups and, increasingly, fiction and studio sets; few of them show very much of ordinary landscapes. When they do, the shots are usually so short as to permit relatively little exploration, even when examined frame-by-frame. In contrast, the brief, continuous or near-continuous films of spatial subjects made by the Lumière and Biograph companies and their contemporaries before about 1903 accumulate an extensive document of ordinary, everyday spaces of their period: the spaces that Lefebvre and others suggest were radically transformed soon afterwards. In enabling us to see so much of this landscape, these early films are truly extraordinary, as they offer the most extensive views of the landscape of another time at or just before the moment of that landscape's transformation – a transformation brought about (at least in part) by the development of the very medium in which the opportunity to explore these long-lost spaces was constructed.

What do these films mean for us? On looking at them, what struck me first was a contrast between their often familiar-looking landscapes and the unfamiliarity of the society glimpsed in them. In the last hundred years, the material and other circumstances of the UK's population have altered enormously,
²⁰
but much of the urban fabric of the 1900s survives, often – like so much of the built environment – in a surprisingly dilapidated condition. In terms of life expectancy, physical health, income, mobility and so on, we are far better off than our predecessors of a hundred years ago: developed economies experience unprecedented levels of consumption and GDP per head, but in other respects – especially when measured in terms of social, cultural and environmental assets – wealth has not increased anything like as much. In some
ways, in some places, it has probably decreased.
²¹
In emphasising this, the films might be thought subversive.

Walking in the streets of UK towns and cities today, the decline of what Lefebvre described as ‘the environment of and channel for communications … in the form of the city and the town' is easily recognised. One often detects a sense of absence, even in the centre of London. The spatial qualities suggested by many early films are very like some of those that attract tourists to less advanced or (some) socialist economies – to places where artisanal production or its past products survive, where domesticity is still found in city centres, and where there are fewer cars, or at least less traffic engineering. In advanced economies, such environmental qualities are typically achieved or retained through socialist (as in, say, Barcelona) or social-democratic (as in the Netherlands) politics.

In this context, Lefebvre's shattered ‘space of common sense' suggests both the spatial concepts of Lipps and the urban design of Camillo Sitte. In 1903, Lipps ‘argued that our bodies unconsciously empathised with architectural form',
²²
and Sitte,

Such ideas re-emerged in the postmodern urbanism of the 1970s, for which early films might initially seem to offer some support, with their depiction of what to us appear ‘traditional' urban spaces in which we might imagine we could be ‘secure and happy', spaces which ‘would promote the preservation and even re-creation of a sense of community'. Sitte's polemic, however, was not in favour of the actually-existing spaces of the 1900s – the spaces that appear in the films – but against them, ‘abhorring the narrow and technical functionalism that seemed to attach to the lust for commercial profit', and seeking ‘to overcome fragmentation and provide a
“community life-outlook” ',
²⁴
rather as we might today. Also, though Sitte is popular with present-day urban designers, his desire for spaces that he believed would promote ‘community' was not unproblematic. As Harvey writes: