![]() These earliest audiences, when met with the image of an approaching train in the Lumieres’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (1895), allegedly found themselves unable to distinguish clearly between the reality of what was appearing on screen and their own everyday perceptual reality. The dramatic impact of the shift in perceptual understanding that occurred with the introduction of film is typically contained in shorthand within the unreliable image of the cinema’s first spectators. Benning’s film acknowledges the scope of this shared history by returning us to the cinema’s starting point, its ‘primal scene’, inviting us to fill in the gaps of the history that has existed between this scene and our current vantage point. The perceptual correlations between train and film are contained most obviously in their twin ability to mechanically combine movement and stillness, yet their histories are more deeply connected than we might first imagine. Lynne Kirby expands further - “the phenomenon of railway travel made deception easier…in part through high-speed, physical displacement” (1997 : 25), a disorientation that would later be extended within the processes of the cinema “where it translates into a visual questioning of what is true and false”. ![]() Wolfgang Schivelbsuch describes how, for early travellers, the world came to be seen “through the apparatus” of the train (1986: 57), the train representing a dramatic shift in spatial and temporal understanding. ![]() The train was the first reflexive tool for the cinema, providing a means by which it could marvel at the miracle of its own processes and stare aghast at a spectacle of mechanised movement. ![]() The film, the author’s last shot to be shot on 16mm stock, makes a fitting swansong to the medium’s history and should this history ever need a full stop this would probably suffice. Perhaps revolutions are the reaching of humanity traveling in this train for the emergency brake.’Walter BenjaminIt is difficult to divest ourselves of the feeling, while watch James Benning’s 2007 film RR, that we are bearing witness to the death of a medium. “As a machine of vision and in instrument for conquering space and time, the train is a mechanical double for the cinema” Lynne Kirby ‘Marx says that revolutions are ‘the locomotives of world history’ Things are entirely different. As of 2014, he is a visiting scholar at the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars.Our Experimental Film Club will be a screening of Benning's RR on Wednesday, January 19th. Since 1974, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has been dividing his time between New York and Berlin. His numerous and award-winning publications, many translated into several languages, include The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1988), Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (1992), In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948 (1998), The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (2003), and Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (2006). Between 20, he was a frequent visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. From 1995 to 2000, he was a project collaborator at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch studied comparative literature, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt and Berlin and received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 1972.
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