Early cinema held an instant fascination with the train, as is evident from
the numerous actualities of engines entering and leaving stations, including the
famous Lumière brothers film L'Arrivée d'un Train (1896). In the train, cinema found a
technology to rival its own wonders, and early train films are often records of
one modern technology marvelling at the other. It was a relationship that in a
way began decades earlier; through the train carriage window, passengers were
offered a cinematic experience years before the emergence of cinema itself. With
the 'phantom ride', these two technologies were fused together to produce an
all-new cinema spectacle.
Phantom rides were films shot from the very front of moving trains. The films
would present the journey from the train's perspective, capturing the
approaching track, surrounding landscape and the passage through tunnels. To
obtain these films, cameramen would literally tie themselves and their cameras
to the buffer of a speeding train. From this position, the film would appear to
be moving by aid of an invisible force, hence the name 'phantom ride' by which
they soon came to be known. The first phantom ride, The Haverstraw Tunnel, was
made in America in 1897. The concept quickly caught on in Britain and would
become one of the most popular forms of early cinema.
Since the camera in early films was usually stationary, phantom rides
presented a dynamic new style of filmmaking. Although it was the speed, motion
and unique perspective that were the primary pleasures of the phantom ride, the
films' exotic subjects offered up a secondary thrill for audiences. Early
British phantom rides were filmed along local tracks, but filmmakers soon became
more ambitious and British cameramen were deployed around the world to film
rides through foreign lands. In the same way, filmmakers came from overseas to
Britain to record the exotic lands on our own doorstep.
From the safety of a seat in the music hall, fairground or church hall that
was the common home of early films, a British viewer could not only observe the
world, he or she could also experience the unique sensation of travelling while
sitting still. This, we can imagine, would have been particularly exciting when
the train headed towards a tunnel, when the viewer would have experienced the
thrill of rushing through darkness and bursting into daylight.
As was standard practice at the time, the films would only last a few minutes
at most, and would have been part of a programme of similarly short actualities,
comedies and trick-films. But in 1906 a number of specialised cinemas, under the
banner 'Hale's Tours of the World', opened across Britain, styling themselves in
the manner of a train carriage and offering trips to 'the Colonies or any part
of the world (without luggage!)' for sixpence. These cinemas took the realism of
phantom rides to another level: the benches would shake and the images would be
accompanied by the sounds of hissing steam and train whistles. In effect, the
Hale's Tour is an ancestor of the sophisticated rides simulating space travel or
flight in many fairgrounds and amusement parks today. There were four of these
cinemas in London (two of them on Oxford Street), while others appeared in
Nottingham, Manchester, Blackpool, Leeds, Liverpool and Bristol.
As early as 1899, the single-shot form of the phantom ride was being edited
into multi-shot films. G.A. Smith inserted a single shot of a man kissing a
woman in a train compartment into Hepworth's View From an Engine Front - Train
Leaving Tunnel (1899), to create the three-shot A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). The
phantom ride concept was soon extended to other forms of transport, such as
ships and trams, as in Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram (1901). Although
single-shot phantom rides continued into the 20th Century, the phantom ride
became commonly applied as one technique of many in edited films such as Scenes
in the Cornish Riviera (1904) or the excellent A Trip on the Metropolitan
Railway from Baker St to Uxbridge and Aylesbury (1910). In the cutting, however,
the phantom ride lost some of the intensity of its original single-shot form.
All the same, by 1910 the phantom ride was out of step with an ever
more complex film style and, perhaps, with less easily impressed
audiences.
Christian Hayes
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