The subject of this post is, perhaps, just outside the self-declared remit of this blog. It is however, about a hybrid constructed with analogue means. While studying fine art in the mid-nineties, I was interested in film, interested in the moving image as a medium, but struggled to find ideas which would be best conveyed in the form, something in essence which I felt with the work I was making in general for most of my degree, but easier perhaps to disguise beneath technique and process in the prints that made up the bulk of my work then. I did however make a number of short video pieces, which I described at the time as animations, which isn't the best description for what they really were. These were all made with Adobe Photoshop 2.5 and Apple MoviePlayer, the forerunner to QuickTime Player, and originated with 8mm or Hi8 video footage, videoed projections of Super 8 film, or scanned photographs and drawings–such as the work I made using Muybridge's chronophotography, referenced in The Hand Inside the Frame.
One piece I made with this method was simply titled after when it was filmed: April 1996. This combined footage taken from a train on the main line railway into London Liverpool Street, some shots around Stratford, both on and off trains, then the actual approach to Liverpool Street itself, the Tate Gallery as it was then known, a street in Barking and a view on Wanstead Flats. A number of the static locations were also videoed in a plastic mirror to distort them. If there was any ostensible subject to the piece, it was a record of my journeys around London over Easter 1996, and, by implication, the transport network: the shots from Barking and Wanstead Flats both show distant trains (around the same time I made a set of screenprints collaging photographs taken on the London Underground, overlaid with typography and graphic design with elements of trompe l'oeil in the form of torn posters). If there was to be a soundtrack to this silent piece, it would be St Etienne's 'Railway Jam'.
Adobe Photoshop 2.5 was the release before Layers, and using it to make frame-by-frame animations was a challenge. Without Layers one could copy and paste from one image onto another, and, in the process of pasting, the floating selection could be blended with the image below, using blending options very much like those in the Layers panel, but once deselected, the floating selection and the image below were then became a single image. In addition, one could only Undo/Redo to the previous state; together, these forced both a definite and linear way of working. I mostly used this method to create transitions between different shots, and in other video pieces, combined these with text, copying and pasting frame by frame from short MoviePlayer files, low resolution (320x240 pixels), low frame rate (around 6 fps). The resulting MoviePlayer files were transferred to VHS, and the originals saved in sections over numerous floppy disks initially, before I invested in a 100mb Zip disk. In 1996 these methods were primitive and perverse at the time–much of the effects could have been achieved rather more easily in the college's conventional video editing suite, but I think I enjoyed working on my own, often on Saturday mornings in the college's small Mac suite (a couple of LC IIs and a Performa with the all-important video card; the college's digital studio was all PC), hidden in a room at the bottom of the old library, figuring out how to make this method work.
A strand that runs through a number of the works I've made in recent years is that of the particularity of location. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin describes the revolution that stems from the reproducibility of photography and film: no longer dependent on an original artefact being located in a particular time and place, every photographic print or print of a film being theoretically indistinguishable from the last, everyone can experience the work of art on a flat, democratic level. The loss of what Benjamin terms the original work of art's 'aura' is not to be something to be mourned: from a political perspective, it is a liberation. The footage from my journeys around London over Easter 1996, made into a low resolution, low frame rate video, was only ever shown to fellow students and staff at college, its ability to transport the viewers then to these locations was incredibly limited, about as far from an immersive experience as it's possible to be, even when experienced as a video projected onto a wall in a seminar room. Twenty-five years after I made April 1996, as a small performative gesture, I decided to return it to the specific location that it had originated from. There are a number of reasons for wanting to do this (the general principle of not leaving old work alone–even primitive juvenilia–being one), but the main reason was the simple fact of finding myself living not far from one of the locations used in the film.
The shot from Wanstead Flats shows a train passing on the Barking to Gospel Oak line, then part of the North London Line, now combined into the Overground, seen from the Harrow Road playing fields, looking in the direction of Acacia Road, E11. At the time, this particular branch line felt like one of the most unloved parts of the whole London transport system: old two-carriage, slam-door diesel trains in the old livery of Network SouthEast, which ran at a frequency of twice an hour, if I remember correctly. If one wants to get a feel for London in the mid-1990s, Patrick Keiller's London represents it best; much of the infrastructure felt underfunded, broken, uncared for. The GLC had been abolished a decade earlier, British Rail had been privatised, and London had to wait until New Labour to regain a distinct political authority–with oversight for public transport–once more.
Rather than through editing, a juxtaposition with contemporary footage that brought both together in a digital space, to return this shot of the film to its location, I wanted a physical artefact that I could take there and document it replaying. This could have been on some form of monitor, a projection perhaps, but in finding an appropriate form to do this, a flip book seemed to be ideal. Its simplicity mirrored that of the original video, as well as its poor resolution and low frame rate, but also its place in the prehistory of film. The flip book's origins are located in the period in the mid-nineteenth century to which numerous devices (the phenakisticope and zoetrope, notably) designed to produce the illusion of movement date: it was patented as the Kineograph by John Barnes Linnett in 1868. Unlike those other devices, the flip book is linear, not circular, in its sequencing of motion, and, in that particular fact, foreshadowed the form that cinema would take–and indeed was a form that some of its pioneers–such as Max Skladanowsky–utilised, and, through the Mutoscope, also evaded Edison's patents. Although predating cinema, the German term for flip book is Daumenkino, literally and descriptively 'thumb cinema'. That the motion in this particular sequence in my video features a train is a fortuitous association, unintended at the time, with the birth of cinema, and the Lumières' famous train; the close-up, too, emerges with the invention of cinema (the single, short static shot that I used for this documentation is also similar to the duration of the Lumières' first films; there is also, intriguingly, a wisp of smoke alongside the bridge, no doubt from from the kind of business that inhabits a railway arch, smoke, along with water, was the kind of evanescent and ephemeral incidental subject that fascinated the Lumières). Even at its very low frame rate, it was impractical to turn the whole of April 1996 into a flip book. I took the original .mov file, imported this into a rather more recent version of Photoshop, and exported the frames from layers into individual files to print. From the start of the film, through the transition into the section shot on Wanstead Flats, then its transition into its distorting mirror image, made eighty-something pages.
It might have been more exact to have made this over Easter this year, a neat twenty-five years on, but as my life is still shaped by the academic calendar, October half-term would do. The two tower blocks in the original footage were demolished many years ago gone. These stood on Cathall Road, once overlooking over St Patrick's Catholic cemetery and the Central Line in Leyton. There is now a small park on their footprint. In the original footage, the angle of view–and also the image's aspect ratio–crop out the nearby John Walsh tower, seen on the right above, although its edge intrudes into the distorted mirror image footage in the original video. The sports pavilion on the left has also been rebuilt in the intervening years. The trees, still in leaf, obscure the railway line more than they once did.
I recorded the short sequence with my Olympus Pen EPL1, using a manual focus Canon 28mm FD lens and a close up filter to achieve the close focus on the flip book. This meant some compromises: the angle of view is different from the original, taken from much further back, but along roughly the same axis; more importantly, I wanted to make this in one single shot, observing some notion of dramatic unity or fidelity to the event: operating the camera myself, and 'operating' the flip book too, I couldn't easily refocus the lens before and after holding the flip book in front of the lens. However, the 'real' shot of the scene is not sufficiently out of focus so as to be unintelligible–and one can discern both the moving figures in the distance and the train crossing the bridge. I did multiple takes: getting the the flip book right in the frame, in focus, then flipping through it sufficiently well wasn't always easy to achieve. The flip book itself really required tighter binding as well as a deeper spine to make the pages flip with greater regularity. As it exists, some of the pages bunch together, and the animation as a result is insufficiently smooth to achieve the illusion of motion, but in the take I used as 'Thumb Cinema', the middle section with the train passing is legible–and is followed shortly after by the contemporary train, travelling in the opposite direction, now electrified, four carriages long, four trains an hour during the day.
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