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Railway Anxiety: Daniel Crooks |
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Introduction
2025. The following essay was
commissioned for the handsome book-catalogue of Daniel Crooks’ art exhibition, everywhere
instantly, held at Christchurch Art
Gallery (New Zealand) in July-November 2008. It was proposed that I
write mainly on cinema (which happens to be a major influence and
reference point for this artist), and only a little on the art in
question. That sounded good to me, as it is the way I like to work – not to have to simply say (unless I
want to), as in a promotional pitch, that the artist and the art are
fantastic – which is the great weight of obligation (and/or habit) that sinks
most art criticism today and always. Eventually – and not for the first or last time
in my personal experience – the
institution in question decided that, after all, it needed a text
mainly about the art, and a lot less about cinema; two further drafts
ensued. Here is the original, hitherto unpublished version, my
preferred ‘parallel
text’ to
the art. Can
we still imagine the uncanny pleasure of seeing pictures in motion
for the first time? If that pleasure lives on anywhere, it is in
contemporary art, which seems compelled to spiral back to the
beginnings of cinema. Indeed the theorist and curator Raymond Bellour
has spoken of a ‘Lumière
drive' in much recent film and video art, with its preference for the
long take, simple apparatus and almost forensic attention to duration
and movement. In the earliest days of cinema, films – not yet divided into shorts or features, fictions or documentaries – were frequently classified into views: family views, mealtime views, factory views. Train views were particularly popular then, and have remained so, for every type of cinema – as if, from the very beginning, some profound link had been spontaneously intuited between the train apparatus and the cinematic apparatus. (2) Consider these perennial views. View 1: Inside a Train. The camera stands at the end of a carriage, looking straight down the centre. Outside, the landscape streams past – precisely framed by a receding succession of windows that act as small frames within the master frame of the film itself. The train can be empty, or full of static, self-absorbed passengers, or – a popular option – inhabited by only one or just a few bodies. This view is particularly current among avant-garde or experimental audiovisual practitioners. Hou Hsiao-hsien gives us this train view, in a magisterial fashion, at the start of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996); Jim Jarmusch places it at the centre of his first, non-narrative feature Permanent Vacation (1980); and it marks the entire career of James Benning, from its start (8½ X 11, 1974) to maturity (RR, 2007). (“Yeah, I like trains a lot”, says Benning. “When I was a kid I had a little model train, an American Flyer …”.) (3) View 2: Outside a Train. The camera is, again, static. It looks at a train – usually passing – from a ninety-degree angle. The windows, once more, ‘cut out’ the landscape – but in a more kinetic, hard to grasp, even hallucinatory fashion (often complicated by the simultaneous movement, perhaps in the opposite direction, of other, hidden trains). John-Dunkley Smith made a structuralist piece (black & white, silent, ten minutes long) called Train Fixation (1977), and described it thus: “Four parallel train tracks – the urban landscape beyond is ‘masked’ and ‘re-framed’ by the doors, windows, gaps between cars, of the passing trains. Camera runs only as train passes – time is re-constituted according to railway schedules”. (4) Chantal Akerman (filmmaker of modern impermanence) has often returned to his view, in Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) and D’Est (1993); and so has – in a hyper-kinetic fashion – Brian De Palma (filmmaker of modern chaos) in Dressed to Kill (1980) and Carlito’s Way (1993). View 3: Train in a Landscape. From a distance, an aerial or low-angle position: the train cuts a line in the picture, entering or exiting a tunnel, traverses the diagram of a landscape. Terrence Malick’s trains in Days of Heaven (1978); the Tokyo train network in Hou’s Café Lumière (2003); Alfred Hitchcock’s entire career from the crime intrigue of The Lady Vanishes (1938) to the famous Freudian ‘train entering a tunnel’ that closes North by Northwest (1958). View 4: From a Moving Train. It can be easily faked – the train substituted by another vehicle in motion – especially when there is no framing window, and yet the view of a landscape or cityscape from a moving train is so familiar in our audiovisual culture that it has the certain feeling of an ontological reality. The sun through the trees; the succession of tall buildings (and what can be glimpsed behind and between them) streaming by; the fleeting rural views of people or animals in fields: this has long been the cinema of everyday life (designating a sweet moment of oblivion, escape, getting outside oneself and into the world), as defined by the train system. So cinema itself, in turn, seizes and abstracts this view, inserting it with lyrical suddenness everywhere: again in the films of Hou; in the work of Philippe Grandrieux, passing from his documentary Return to Sarajevo (1996) to his experimental features Sombre (1998) and La Vie nouvelle (2003); in the early, loose-limbed road (and rail) films of Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1975) … … And, very swiftly, these views (individually or in concert) generate favoured fictions. The train as the site for passionate, driven, mainly masculine power plays: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938) and its American remake by Fritz Lang, Human Desire (1954); John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), begun by Arthur Penn; Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North (1973) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985) from a story by Akira Kurosawa. The technical logistics of these classical-era train films must have been daunting; so De Palma creates, for the digital era, the fantastically catastrophic meeting of a helicopter and a super-fast train in a tunnel in Mission: Impossible (1996). Nouvelle Roman flame Alain Robbe-Grillet made the modern 1960s train the privileged site for his fertile and zany erotic imagination in Trans-Europ-Express (1966), at the same time that Constantin Costa-Gavras sharpened the contemporary crime-thriller in The Sleeping Car Murders (1966), adapted from a novel by Sebastien Japrisot. The intimate complications of daily train travel – those stiff bodies pushed together in a public space that denies the reality of desiring gazes or thrilling split-seconds of contact – become the stock-in-trade for marital dramas, romantic comedies and urban vignettes, from Ulu Grosbard’s Falling in Love (1984) and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) to Mikael Håfström’s Derailed (2005) and the sketches gathered by producer Jonathan Demme in Subway Stories (1997), especially Abel Ferrara’s Love on the A Train. The train is a privileged cinematic figure for many filmmakers – those who seize upon what Bellour (in reference to Hitchcock) called the ‘paradigm of locomotion’ so central to this medium invented in and for the twentieth century. (5) In Gloria (1980), John Cassavetes casts New York City as a labyrinth of pursuit; at the core of this maze, a woman will protect a child from the Mob, situated precisely within the door of a train, wielding her gun as the carriage closes and the gangsters are left scowling on the crowded platform. Near the end of The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Wes Anderson clinches the significance of his train fetish by showing various characters – some only tangentially related to the plot, or long dropped by it – each in their own compartment (a variation on View 2), their own world, their own fiction: a perfect meeting of New-Old Hollywood and Old-New Structuralism. Sergio Leone is yet another director whose career can be defined in terms of its range of train depictions: from the carriage as the site of tricky action (from above, through the windows) in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), to the melancholic departure of a train that carries away lost love in Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Although the train – like the bus or that cinematic speciality, the tramcar – is still in daily use in many countries, its associations come to us today swathed in romance, poetry and nostalgia, as if removed from the coinage of everyday mundanity. Trains in contemporary cinema frequently carry Old World associations – of the kind immortalised, well over half-a-century ago, in the spectacle of the static mock-train, with its laboriously turned backdrop of exotic, painted locations, in Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Today we speak of plane travel as the locus of globalisation: enormous displacements of geography, massive re-alignments in mood, momentous transportation of money, goods or drugs. Plane travel (in the popular as in the theoretical imagination) is dramatic, destabilising, erotic; and the kind of popular culture represented by television is obsessed with the airport as the crucial site of border control in the post-9/11 world. But we forget how much similar drama was involved in the incursion of train tracks into the supposedly uncivilised landscapes of Westerns (as in Once Upon a Time in the West) – and how, still today in an animation for children like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), a real, heroic, indigenous horse can be pitted against the demonic, mechanical Iron Horse of early industrialism. Sigmund Freud himself had a thing for trains. In the historic Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he linked the invention of the train to modes of sexual excitation: “The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway-travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman … A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.” (6) This was so much the case that Freud – in a gesture that Peter Wollen has designated as secretly autobiographical (7) – came to the conclusion that, when sexual repression takes hold of the (male) child in puberty, a new kind of collective sickness or disquiet is quickly and dramatically born: railway anxiety. Both the old-fashionedness of that thrill and its making-new are evident in Daniel Crooks’ digitally generated videos Train No. 1 (2003) and Train No. 8 (2005). Where the former corresponds to our View 2 (view of a passing train, from a fixed position), the latter attacks View 4 (view of a suburb from a moving train). The visual patterning of Train No. 1 takes its cue from that other ultra-cinematic (and, for Freud, ultra-hypnotic) aspect of traditional train travel: its characteristic pulsing, chugging sound. The image itself – the orderly, linear layout of windows, doors and carriages – is subject to a discreet but pulsed division of parts, cut-up and multiplied in that cubist-but-still-continuous way that Crooks has so painstakingly made his artistic signature. Train No. 8 is even more spectacular: the view from the train is differentially warped – foreground, mid-ground and background pulled apart and articulated separately, as if the elements of an old 3D colour photograph had been set into variable vibrations. Crooks is an important modern artist because, in the accumulative gesture of his uncannily animated works, he reconciles Bellour’s notion of the ‘Lumière drive’ – the hunger to return to static, long-take, unadorned, hyper-realist views of landscape, nature or city – with the highest artifice that tinkering with today’s digital tools allow. At this point of his career, Crooks still leans more towards the side of the various views in their purity: that avant-garde train fixation which can be accommodated (even spectacularly so) by the gallery set-up, and resists the pull of filmic or novelistic train fiction. This parti pris is signalled by his soundtracks: ambient beds of noise à la Brian Eno, rather than mischievous punctuations of information or enigma à la Michael Snow (with whom Crooks can, on so many levels, be richly compared). In a striking passage of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze, beginning from a meditation on Wenders, recalls how part of Franz Kafka’s response to the modern world was to imagine, for the first time, strange “mixtures” or “phantom machines” that are today commonplace: “a telephone in a train, post-boxes on a boat, cinema in an aeroplane”. (8) At stake is the growing, incessant translatability and interpenetration of two great mechanical/industrial systems of the twentieth century: the system of transportation on the one hand, and the system of recording apparatuses (photography, TV, film) on the other. “Is this not the whole history of cinema?”, asks Deleuze: to knit together these phantom machines, these hybrid monsters of movement – summed up in the fact that a tracking shot, which usually involves the laying of rails, is also known as a travelling shot. But, for Deleuze, this initial burst of industrial genius was not enough. The collapse of train into audio-visual, of travelling into tracking, too swiftly and easily became a kind of prison for the senses, an ersatz emotion, as well as an artistic cliché. The powerful affects, the surprising feelings and sensations, started to go missing. What was needed at that moment? … the affects would need to form singular, ambiguous combinations which were always recreated, in such a way that the related faces are turned away from each other just enough not to be dissolved and effaced. And movement in its turn would need to go beyond the states of things, to trace lines of flight, just enough to open up in space a discussion of another order favourable to these compositions of affects. (9) It
is what Deleuze calls the “compound
affect of desire and of astonishment” – coupled with a new space for thought about
our old and new worlds – which
Daniel Crooks’ work
today achieves. NOTES 2. See Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Duke University Press, 1996); and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (University of California Press, 1987). back 3. Mark Peranson, “Trainspotting with James Benning”, Cinema Scope, no. 34 (2008). back 4. “Train Fixation”, entry in Film-Makers’ Cooperative Collection (no longer online). back 5. See Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film (Indiana University Press, 2000). back 6. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: The Pelican Freud Library Volume 7 (Penguin, 1977), p. 121. back 7. Peter Wollen, “Freud as Adventurer”, in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (Verso, 2002), pp. 105-122. back 8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 101. back 9. Ibid. back
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