Phantom Ride

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Cameraman Billy Bitzer preparing for a Phantom Ride (publicity photo)

The Phantom Ride [ ˈfæntəm ɹaɪd ], so 'apparent or ghostly ride', is a genre of early film history that was particularly popular around 1900 in Great Britain and the United States . To create the Phantom Rides , a film camera was mounted at the top of a locomotive , which recorded the journey as a point-of-view shot .

The dynamic presentations of landscapes in the Phantom Rides were the first examples of tracking shots in film history. As a forerunner of travel films , they represent a pre-form of documentary films . A modern variant are the driver's cab rides , which have been broadcast on the night programs of some television stations since the 1990s.

The Phantom Rides are also important for the development of narrative film, as they contributed to the establishment of film editing as a means of artistic expression. Because they were marketed as an attraction in amusement parks from 1905 under the name Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World , they can also be viewed as models for driving simulators .

Origins

Views like this photograph from the 1880s were the model for the Phantom Rides .

The story of the origins of the cinema is closely linked to the first screenings of the Lumière brothers , whose film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat with the arrival of a train in a train station is one of the best-known examples of early cinema. The high popularity of the Lumière films led to numerous copies of the subject , which was used for screenings of the magic lantern even before the film was developed into a mass medium . Photographers such as Burton Holmes had integrated landscape views taken from moving trains into their travel presentations.

As early as 1896 - a few months after the screenings of the Cinématographe had become a sensational success in Paris - a film was made in Rennes in which the film camera was mounted on the cow catcher of a steam locomotive and thus - similar to the already known photos of the travel photographers  - the movement of the train through the landscape could be recorded directly. In a short time, the railway films recorded in this way developed into the most popular variants of documentary landscape views (usually referred to as panorama, pris d'un train ... 'panorama filmed from the train') and travel films, which are the main part of the films in the catalogs of the Lumière brothers made out.

Thanks to their worldwide distribution network for photographic accessories, the Lumière brothers managed to record and distribute views from all over the world. The French camera operator Alexandre Promio positioned the cinématographe in a Venetian vaporetto in the fall of 1896 and filmed the Grand Canal (Panorama du Grand Canal vu d'un bateau) analogous to the point-of-view shots of the railway films . Other modes of transport such as trams , underground trains or automobiles were also used and thus served as forerunners of today's camera cars .

At a time when the film camera was firmly on a tripod and camera pans were not yet used as a cinematic means, with these films the camera operators succeeded for the first time in not only recording movement from a rigid position, but also in generating movement themselves by means of a tracking shot . The panoramic view of the traveler, who had to accept the loss of the foreground of the picture due to the high speeds of the railroad while driving through the landscapes, carried over to the Phantom Rides . According to film historian Tom Gunning, the clearly perceptible subjective camera gives “the impression of an eye moving through space, making the act of seeing as clearly visible as the view shown.” The camera literally appears as a traveler itself.

Spread of the Phantom Rides

Excerpt from the British film View From An Engine Front - Ilfracombe

In 1897, the American Mutoscope Company imitated Lumière's railroad films for the first time with a filmed passage through the New York Haverstraw Tunnel. The term Phantom Ride was also coined here. In the summer of 1897, for example, the reviewer of the journal Phonoscope, watching the film The Haverstraw Tunnel , saw himself as a passenger on a phantom train ride that whirled him through space “at a speed of almost a mile per minute . . There was no smoke, no signs of a heritage reproduced chassis or wheels schmettender " Especially with the phantom ride , the initial technical superiority of the revealed biographer - film projector of the American Mutoscope Company against Edison Vitaskop films. Since the biographers used 70 mm film twice as wide, in contrast to the 35 mm film that was customary up to now, the landscapes had a clarity and abundance of detail that were previously unknown.

Demonstrations of The Haverstraw Tunnel in London made the Phantom Rides extremely popular in the UK in a short space of time. The theater magazine Era wrote enthusiastically that never before has the viewer been presented with such an exciting and sensational picture of reality. The satirical magazine Punch, on the other hand, caricatured the rush of speed that the spellbound viewers felt while watching the train journeys.

British filmmakers immediately started making their own Phantom Rides . Above all, the film pioneer Cecil Hepworth became the leading producer of this new genre . At the end of the decade, Hepworth developed a new camera with a particularly large film magazine to record trips lasting several minutes. In 1899 he produced Dalmeny to Dumfermline, Scotland, via the Firth of Forth Bridge, a twelve-minute film that was proudly advertised as "the longest, most picturesque and most interesting film ever made" . Previously, film series such as the Phantom Rides View From An Engine Front published by Charles Urbans Warwick Trading Company in 1898 were offered as a package, so that a continuous train journey between two stations could be shown. The American Mutoscope Company continued single, and one minute continuous films on a train in Brooklyn together so skillfully that the impression of continuous adjustment arose. So the Phantom Rides contributed to the development of longer films.

From phantom ride to narrative film

Phantom Rides also made important contributions to the development of the narrative film . In February 1899, the filmed Brighton film pioneer George Albert Smith in the studio a comical scene in which a well-dressed man with a woman in a train compartment flirting and eventually - passionate kisses - under cover of darkness when driving through a tunnel. He mounted this scene in a Phantom Ride by Cecil Hepworth, so that the seconds of the film in which the train drove through a tunnel could be filled with the newly filmed material. The resulting film The Kiss in the Tunnel is one of the earliest and most famous examples of scenic film editing .

Smith's film was a great success and helped establish invisible editing as the most important montage technique in classic film. Numerous other filmmakers copied the scene and developed their own variants, such as Ferdinand Zecca in Une idylle sous un tunnel (1901), Siegmund Lubin in Love in a Railroad Train (1903) and Edwin S. Porter in What Happened in the Tunnel (1903) . These films were shown by the projectionists to loosen up the Phantom Rides , so a set sequence of scenes was not yet available. This changed in 1903 when Edwin S. Porter made one of the first complex narrative films in which the railroad still played a major role, based on the experience of the film A Romance of the Rail with The Great Train Robbery, which was shot in several takes but no point-of-view shots were used.

Simulated train rides with Hale's Tours

Hale's Tours as a special form of film showing (around 1906)

At the beginning of the 1900s, the Phantom Rides were no longer a novelty and - like current documentary films in general - increasingly exposed to competition from fictional films. In order to be more attractive, more and more exotic locations were filmed and views of famous cities were recorded from trams and automobiles. With great effort, the audience was presented with unusual images in the Phantom Rides . Thus filmed in 1903, the German Mutoscope and Biograph in the style of a phantom ride the Irish motorist HHP Deasy as a Swiss Martini -Automobil the route of the cog railway of Glion for almost 2000 meter high mountain station on the Rochers de Naye sailed (Captain Deasy's Daring Drive) .

George C. Hale, who presented a novel concept of film screening at the World Exhibition in St. Louis in 1904 , in which Phantom Rides were presented in specially equipped wagons, took a different approach . A train ride was simulated through the use of sound and wind effects as well as shaking movements of the wagon , which intensified the kinesthetic effect of the Phantom Rides . To make the illusion perfect, a ticket for 10 cents was purchased instead of an entrance fee. Up to 72 people could attend the 10 to 20 minute long demonstrations. Models for this type of film showing were the Maréorama presented at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 and the myrioramas of the 19th century, in which landscapes painted on a canvas were drawn past the audience by means of a roller.

Promotional postcard for Hale's Tours in London: “ Ta Ta old sport. See yer when we return from our Continental Tour ” .

After the success at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition opened Hale on May 28, 1905 Amusement Park Electric Park of Kansas City with Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World an identical attraction. Hale's Tours became a big hit sold to licensees across the United States. Within a year, Hale's Tours existed in more than 500 venues in the United States, Canada and several European cities. At the London premiere, the British praised cinematographer and Lantern Weekly the Hale's Tours as "one of the smartest optical illusions of modern times" . As with the first presentations of the Phantom Rides eight years earlier , it was also described here how intense and realistic the feeling of actually being in motion was when watching the films.

Hale initially showed mostly older phantom rides in his tours , some of which were grouped thematically in order to particularly promote travel destinations such as China. During a “trip” to California in the summer of 1906, new photos of San Francisco after the great earthquake were shown in addition to railway lines . The operators of Hale's Tours rediscovered the old comic films as interludes with which they, like the projectionists, loosened up their phantom rides a few years earlier . Adolph Zukor , the future founder of Paramount Pictures , set Porters The Great Train Robbery in his New York Hale's-Tours OPERATION extremely successful one, after which new narrative films to complement the now again plentiful at Edison and Biograph turned phantom ride were produced. The most successful film that was shot exclusively for Hale's Tours was Biograph's The Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express , in which a story similar to the Great Train Heist was interrupted by longer sections of a train ride in the style of the Phantom Rides .

Within a few months, Hale's Tours became an international success that led to the revival of the Phantom Rides genre . But despite the attempts to loosen up the monotonous landscape shots of the train journeys through eventful films, the hustle and bustle around Hale's Tours quickly subsided . Some operators kept their attractions open until the beginning of the 1910s, but many switched to the Nickelodeon , which at the same time had established itself as a movie theater. With the end of Hale's Tours , the story of the Phantom Rides as an independent film genre also ends . New Phantom Rides were only occasionally produced on special occasions , for example when the Lötschbergbahn opened in 1913 or in a series of short films for Gaumont British on board an aircraft to demonstrate aerial photography in the late 1920s .

Modern variants

Cinematic implementations and adaptations

Even if the genre of phantom rides as a typical representative of the “ cinema of attractions ” was a thing of the past at the beginning of the 1910s , the idea of ​​depicting movement through point-of-view shots remained as a cinematic stylistic device in both documentary and fictional films Film received. Such settings were used particularly in the representation of car chases .

The chase was developing as early as 1905 when Tom Gunning believed it was the first genre of really narrative film. It became an integral part of the classic slapstick comedy and still finds its place in modern action films , where the Phantom Ride as a cinematic stylistic device underwent technical changes. The new design options through the introduction of digital effects led to the development of unusual point-of-view shots. In the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, for example, the sinking of the USS Arizona is shown from the "point of view" of a bomb that was dropped by a Japanese plane - an archetypal example of the director's computer game aesthetic in the opinion of British film critic David Thomson Michael Bay .

The documentary function of the Phantom Rides was incorporated into more complex travel films ( Travelogues ) , which represent a variant of ethnographic film . As early as 1904, in the film Living London , Charles Urban had selected views of a phantom ride as one of numerous settings that offered a versatile picture of the metropolis of London. In Walter Ruttmann's documentary Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City from 1927, longer passages of a phantom ride , in which the viewer slowly approaches the city of Berlin, form the prelude to the cinematic collage . Other experimental documentaries such as Harry Watts and Basil Wright's Night Mail also used short phantom ride- style shots .

Back to the unprocessed depiction of landscapes in long tracking shots, various television programs went around 1995 that closed the gaps in the night program. In its Swiss View series, for example, Swiss TV shows landscape views from a helicopter . For the show Straßenfeger in the ZDF night program , car journeys through the windshield were recorded between 1995 and 2001 , while Das Erste in the series The Most Beautiful Railway Lines , which has been produced since 1995, shows driver's cab rides . In contrast to the Phantom Rides , on these train rides , designed by the SFB for the first time , the camera is located inside the driver's cab .

In modern experimental films , the Phantom Rides were rediscovered in the form of found footage films . Ernie Gehr's 1979 film Eureka is based on a Phantom Ride from San Francisco that was produced for Hale's Tours in the mid-1900s . In the early 1990s, Ken Jacobs experimented with various phantom rides , which were processed in his films Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 from 1991 and The Georgetown Loop from 1996, among others . The Austrian experimental filmmaker Siegfried A. Fruhauf went one step further and edited newly filmed material to make it appear like a found footage film from the 1900s. The resulting unanimous trailer Phantom Ride was produced in 2004 for the Crossing Europe film festival . With the installation Overture by video artist Stan Douglas , Phantom Rides finally found their way into the visual arts . Douglas projected Edison films from 1899 and 1901 and played texts from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time , so that film and literature collided.

Simulations as attractions

Example of a vehicle simulator

As direct successors to the Phantom Rides , various attempts to revive the cinema can be seen as an attraction. The media scientist Erkki Huhtamo sees the attempts to captivate the audience with the widescreen formats of Cinerama and IMAX as a continuation of the marketing strategy of the Phantom Rides . In fact, the 1952 film This Is Cinerama began with a roller coaster ride captured from one of the wagons in the style of a Phantom Ride . Since the 1980s, the programs of the IMAX cinemas have included a series of films that continue the tradition of the Phantom Rides and present viewers with fast-paced point-of-view shots, for example as a helicopter flight in the Grand Canyon nature documentary - Hidden secrets from 1986, as an entertaining effect in the 3D film Das Geisterschloss 3D from 2001 or as pure speed frenzy in NASCAR 3D from 2004. Similar films have been shown in 180-degree cinemas since the late 1970s , where a curved cinema screen stretched over the entire field of vision of the audience.

The concept of Hale's Tours was also taken up again and again after the Second World War. Already at the opening of Disneyland in 1955 was one of the show A Flight to the Moon to the attractions. In this simulation of a space flight, the viewers were offered movable seats in the cinema so that the force of a meteor shower could be felt as realistically as possible.

Driving simulations were further perfected when special effects specialist Douglas Trumbull used his showscan method for the motion simulator film Tour of the Universe in 1985 . Trumballs design was adopted by Disney in 1987 for the Star Wars- based simulation Star Tours , and other attractions based on the Indiana Jones films and the Back-to-the-Future trilogy followed. The further development of computer-controlled simulators and advances in the design of computer-animated films made the attractions more and more flexible; Rides like the Venturer could also be shown at folk festivals , bringing the film back to its origins as a fairground attraction .

See also

literature

  • Christa Blümlinger: Lumière, the train and the avant-garde (PDF; 489 kB) . In: The trace through the mirror. The film in the culture of modernity (Eds. Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt and Michael Wedel). Bertz, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-86505-155-4 , pp. 27-41.
  • Tom Gunning: Before the documentary. Early non-fiction films and the 'view' aesthetic . In: Beginnings of Documentary Films , KINtop No. 4, 1995, pp. 111–121.
  • Charles Musser: The Emergence of Cinema. The American Screen to 1907 (= History of the American Cinema. Vol. 1). University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1994, ISBN 0-520-08533-7 .
  • Charles Musser: Moving towards fictional narratives . In: The Silent Cinema Reader (Eds. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer). Routledge, London 2004, ISBN 0-415-25284-9 , pp. 87-101.
  • Jeffrey Ruoff (Ed.): Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel . Duke University Press, Durham 2006, ISBN 0-8223-3713-4 .

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ Tom Gunning: "The Whole World Within Reach" - Travel Images without Borders . In: Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel , pp. 25-26.
  2. ↑ Stephen Bottomore: The Panicking Audience ?: early cinema and the 'train effect' . Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999, p. 208.
  3. ↑ Christa Blümlinger: Lumière, the train and the avant-garde , p. 28
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Schivelbusch: History of the railway journey: On the industrialization of space and time in the 19th century . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-548-35015-1 , p. 81.
  5. ↑ Tom Gunning: Before the Documentary , p. 115.
  6. ↑ quoted in: Charles Musser: Moving towards fictional narratives , p. 94.
  7. ^ Peter Zimmermann: History of documentary film in Germany: Volume 1 Kaiserreich 1895-1918 . Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-010584-6 , p. 84.
  8. ↑ quoted in: John Barnes: The Beginning of the Cinema in England 1894-1901. Volume 2: 1897 . University of Exeter Press, Exeter 1996, ISBN 0-85989-519-X , p. 145.
  9. ↑ quoted in: Stephen Bottomore: The Panicking Audience ?: early cinema and the 'train effect' . Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999, pp. 195-196.
  10. ↑ quoted in: John Barnes: The Beginning of the Cinema in England 1894-1901. Volume 4: 1899 . University of Exeter Press, Exeter 1996, ISBN 0-85989-521-1 , pp. 269-271.
  11. ^ David Robinson: From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film . Columbia University Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0-231-10338-7 , p. 75.
  12. ^ A b Frank Gray: The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). GA Smith and the emergence of the edited film in England . In: The Silent Cinema Reader (Eds. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer). Routledge, London 2004, ISBN 0-415-25284-9 , pp. 51-62.
  13. ^ Hans Beller: film spaces as free spaces. About the scope of the film montage ( Memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lmz-bw.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Onscreen / Offscreen. Boundaries, transitions and changes in the cinematic space (Eds. Hans Beller, Martin Emele, Michael Schuster). Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7757-9035-7 , pp. 11-49.
  14. ↑ Charles Musser: Moving towards fictional narratives , pp. 94–95.
  15. ^ Dorit Müller: Dangerous journeys: The automobile in literature and film around 1900 . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-8260-2672-1 , pp. 180-183.
  16. ^ Charles Musser: The Emergence of Cinema , p. 429.
  17. ^ David Robinson: From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film . Columbia University Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0-231-10338-7 , p. 95.
  18. ↑ analogous translation: “Bye, old boy. We'll see you again when we come back from our trip to Europe. "
  19. ↑ Lauren Rabinovitz: From Hale's Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real . In: Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel , p. 46.
  20. ↑ quoted in: David B. Clarke and Marcus A. Doel: From Flatland to Vernacular Relativity: The Genesis of early English Screenscapes . In: Landscape and Film (Ed. Martin Lefebvre). Routledge, New York 2006, ISBN 0-415-97555-7 , p. 228.
  21. ^ A b Charles Musser: The Emergence of Cinema , p. 430.
  22. ↑ Time : Paramount's Papa, January 14, 1929 (accessed May 28, 2009).
  23. ^ Nanna Verhoeff: The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006, ISBN 978-90-5356-832-3 , pp. 226-229.
  24. ^ A b Jennifer Lynn Peterson: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film: Education in the School of Dreams . In: American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Eds. Charlie Keil, Shelley Stamp). University of California Press, Berkeley 2004, ISBN 0-520-24027-8 , p. 205.
  25. ^ Rachael Low: The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930’s . George Allen & Unwin, London 1979, pp. 86-87.
  26. ↑ This term was coined by the film historians Tom Gunning and André Gaundreault, see Tom Gunning: An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In] Credulous Spectator . In: Viewing Positions (Ed. Linda Williams ). Rutgers, New Brunswick 1995, ISBN 0-8135-2133-5 , pp. 114-133.
  27. ^ Dorit Müller: Dangerous journeys: The automobile in literature and film around 1900 . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-8260-2672-1 , pp. 272-275.
  28. ↑ Tom Gunning: The Cinema of Attractions. The early film, its audience and the avant-garde . In: Meteor. Texts for moving picture No. 4, 1996, p. 32.
  29. ^ David Thomson: Zap happy: World War II revisited . In: Sight & Sound , No. 123, July 2001.
  30. ↑ Brigitta Wagner: New Old Visions: The 27th Giornate del Cinema Muto ( Memento of the original from July 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Senses of Cinema (accessed June 9, 2009).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.sensesofcinema.com
  31. ^ Nora M. Alter: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927): City, Image, Sound . In: Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (Ed. Noah Isenberg). Columbia University Press, New York, ISBN 978-0-231-13055-4 , pp. 199-200.
  32. ↑ Blick : The most beautiful film in the world from May 10, 2009 (accessed June 26, 2019).
  33. ↑ Die Zeit : Recipes for the night of June 27, 2002 (accessed June 24, 2009).
  34. ↑ James Peterson: Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse? In: Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll). University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1996, ISBN 0-299-14944-7 , pp. 113-114.
  35. ↑ Christa Blümlinger: Lumière, the train and the avant-garde , pp. 30–33.
  36. ↑ Description of Phantom Ride on crossingEurope.at (accessed on June 9, 2009).
  37. ↑ Hal Foster: Design and Crime (and other Diatribes) . Verso, London 2002, ISBN 1-85984-668-8 , pp. 140-141.
  38. ↑ Erkki Huhtamo: Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion . In: Critical Issues in Electronic Media (Ed. Simon Penny). State University of NEw York Press, Albany 1995, ISBN 0-7914-2318-2 , p. 170.
  39. ↑ Erkki Huhtamo: Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion . In: Critical Issues in Electronic Media (Ed. Simon Penny). State University of New York Press, Albany 1995, ISBN 0-7914-2318-2 , p. 163.
  40. ↑ Alison Griffiths: Time Traveling IMAX Style: Tales from the Giant Screen . In: Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel , p. 242.
  41. ^ Sacha-Roger Szabo: Rausch und Rummel: Attractions at fairs and in amusement parks; a sociological cultural history . transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-89942-566-9 , p. 124.
  42. ↑ Lauren Rabinovitz: From Hale's Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real . In: Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel , p. 43.
  43. ↑ Lauren Rabinovitz: From Hale's Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real . In: Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel , pp. 47-48.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on March 13, 2010 in this version .