Panoramic Travel

Last Week (Central points!)

• Our engagment with media often renders them invisible (we become "habituated" to them).
• Media are defined by their technological forms (which are historically changing) and by the protocols or rules that are attached to different technological forms. At the same time, media are produced socially - how they change and evolve over time exceeds simple innovations in technology.
• Studying the history of media is a way of illuminating how media have been shaped by social, economic, and political forces, as well as the similarities and differences between today's "new media" and older media forms.

"...looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped" (Lisa Gitelman 1).

This week: How did transformations in perception that accompanied the emergence of new technologies (the railway, the panorama, etc) shape the emergence of the cinema?

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century

Central Questions

How does the technology of the railway enable altered modes of perception?

How do these modes produce transformed experiences of vision, time, and space?

"The speed and mathematical directness with which the railroad proceeds through the terrain destroy the close relationship between the traveler and the traveled space" (53).

Landscape becomes "geographical space"

From an attention to the details and connections among different landscapes to "geographical space," which depends only on a sense of the whole

From Place to Space

The development of the railway requires the development of new modes of perception capable of dealing with the rapid onslaught of stimuli and shocks

In groups of four-five people.

Close reading of p.61-64:

What are the distinct features of what Schivelbusch calls "panoramic perception"?

Prior to the railway, the traveler "saw himself as part of the foreground, and that perception joined him to the landscape, included him in it, regardless of all further distant views that the landscape presented. Now velocity dissolved the foreground and the traveler lost that aspect" (63).

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steel and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844)

"Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception: thus he could only see things in motion" (64).

Panorama

Robert Barker, 1787

360-degree painting hung along the circumference of an interior wall of a specially designed circular building.

Spectators view the panorama from a special platform

Virtual Travel: Transporting viewers to the countryside and so-called "exotic" distant places

Section of a panorama of Constantinople (Istanbul), 1813

Battle Scenes: Bringing the past to the present

Section of a panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, Louis Dumoulin, 1912

The railway was "a panorama that could be experienced" (62).

"...the diorama fad died out in Paris around 1840, more or less at the same time that the first railways were opened" (62).

Great Siberian Railway Panorama, Paris Universal Exposition, 1900

"Canada Far and Wide," Circle Vision 360, Epcot Centre, 2020

ScreenX and 4DX, made by South Korean company CGV

Panoramic view and special effects in the theatre itself that enhance the viewing experience, such as moving seats

Hale's Tours

c. 1905

Simulated a train carriage that screened films depicting a "phantom train ride"

Modernity, Mobility, and Vision

Panorama, 1787

Promenades Aériennes in Paris, first modern Roller Coaster, 1817

1836, first steam railway in Canada

Lumière brothers, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896

"cinema of attractions"

"...looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped" (Lisa Gitelman 1).

novelty, transition, crisis -> new habits

New technologies produce new habits or transformations in habit

Media respond to and are shaped by broader social and technological upheavals of modernity

"The emergence of the habit of reading while traveling was not only a result of the dissolution and panoramization of the outside landscape due to velocity, but also a result of the situation inside the train compartment" (67).

* Disruptive of social relations and traditional bonds

* Produced a feeling of alienation from other people, an inability for deeper engagement

* Experiences of travel heavily tied to social class

Deconcentration and dispersed attention

The idea of media transforming our daily habits is not new but a central facet of the history of media

New media, whether in 1850 or today, conjure similar, though not identical, anxieties about their impact on our perception and attention