ORIGINS OF THE MYTH

Testing the status of the screen was very much what the first Lumière films were all about. As Kevin Brownlow has observed, what struck the early cinema viewer most of all was ‘head-on’ movement, i.e. movement towards the camera.1 _{This movement was conceived at its potential extreme. The first viewers of}

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station [L’Arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat, 1895] were not sure where the limits of the space that the train intended to transcend really lay. For us the true meaning of The Arrival of a Train is lost for ever; it could be apprehended only by a viewer with no prior experience of cinema whatsoever, since its effect was wholly dependent on the unclear cognitive status of the screen.

With its habitual attention to origins, historiographical tradition highlights this film and dwells on the assumed panic it caused among those who first saw it. Tom Gunning was right to question the accuracy of this history-made ‘origin myth’ and the validity of its sources.2 _{There was probably no panic at seeing the}

train, although a British 1896 account published in The Sketch refers to the sense of a shared ‘uneasiness’:

In the distance there is some smoke, then the engine of the express is seen, and in a few seconds the train rushes in so quickly that, in common with most of the people in the front rows of the stalls, I shift uneasily in my seat and think of railway accidents.3

As Schivelbusch’s study observes, the fear of railway accidents was part of nineteenth-century cultural sensibility, so the anxiety cannot be categorised as ‘naive’.4 _{Perhaps there never was such a thing as a truly}

‘naive’ spectator. The fear the first viewers experienced was a sophisticated, ‘cultural’ kind of Angst prepared (as Gunning has shown) and mediated (as I am going to argue) by rich layers of pre-cinematic culture.

However, the historiographical origin myth persists, and one wonders where its own origins lie. To be more specific, when exactly did the train arriving at La Ciotat station become canonised as one of cinema’s central ‘unforgettable’ and ‘unrepeatable’ impressions? What was the effect of this ‘primal scene’ (to use Gunning’s term once again) on subsequent film practice?

Looking at Russian sources, The Arrival of a Train was singled out as epitomising cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ as early as 1907. The editorial printed on the first page of the first number of the first Russian cinema journal Cine-Phono clearly situates ‘the first picture ever made’ in a miraculous historical past:

It was about fifteen [sic!] years ago that moving pictures were shown for the first time and the impression they made was so great that everybody remembers the time when they first saw a train rushing across the white screen as something quite miraculous.5

While the motivation behind it was simple editorial rhetoric (‘Look, cinema already has its history, so why not publish a cinema magazine?’), the statement is important. All that a film history needs is there: its own existence is announced and the first film named. By 1913 the origin myth had already acquired its element of ‘hysteria’; a contributor to a theatre magazine (not a cinema journal) recalled:

I remember that evening very clearly: it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. When the train came rushing towards me from the screen, when three or four hundred people spilled out on to the station platform, and when the train pulled out again, I began to scream. No one hauled me up for disturbing the peace for the simple reason that everyone else was screaming too.6

Of course, the emotional tone of memoir texts depends primarily on the person who wrote them. However, if one discards this circumstance for a minute, one cannot help thinking that, as time goes by, the mythology surrounding The Arrival of a Train became more entrenched. Recollections written down in the early 1950s by the film director Yevgeni Ivanov-Barkov, who as a child visited a film booth in his native Kostroma, give a characteristically overstated scene, with the panic component already present:

The engine came nearer and nearer; it was rushing straight towards us… closer and closer!… A huge steel monster!… It was hurtling towards us! It was terrifying! Straight at us! AT US! A piercing scream, Oh!… OH! … Panic! People leaped up. Some rushed towards the exit. Total darkness.7

ANNA KARENINA AND THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION

Did the train myth affect film practice? In 1919 Ilya N.Ignatov, after closely following the progress of Russian cinema for ten years, recalled with some bewilderment the reaction of the Russian press to Gardin’s 1914 film version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He remarked that, if the papers were to be believed, ‘it was not only that the film marked a great step forward in the development of cinema, but that the film possessed certain special qualities that had a stronger influence on the viewer than even the novel itself had on its readers.’8 _{This was, indeed, an uncommon response, given the cult status that Tolstoy enjoyed in Russia,}

even among those who could not read.

Reviewers singled out Anna Karenina for its ‘psychology’, but of course this was not the quality that caused its contemporaries to rate the film as meriting comparison with the novel. On the contrary, it was precisely the psychological treatment of the role of Anna (played by the Moscow Art Theatre actress Maria Germanova) that provoked the greatest division of opinions. People within the Moscow Art Theatre called it sacrilege. Konstantin Stanislavsky’s wife, Maria Lilina, remarked somewhat ironically that Germanova was incomparably better in The Wanton Wife [Zhena vakkhanka, 1915] than in Anna Karenina,9 _{and Maria}

Kallash, in a letter to Olga Knipper-Chekhov dated 31 May 1914 that played up to rivalries within the theatre world, waxed indignant: ‘Anna Karenina comes across as being exactly like Vasilisa in Gorky’s

Lower Depths [Na dne]. I wasn’t expecting very much, but all the same I didn’t imagine that it would be such a mockery of Tolstoy.’10

The setting attracted similar criticism. Kallash’s letter refers to ‘such incongruities as a plush teddy bear and other ultra-modern toys that Anna brings for her son’.11 _{A review by the writer Dmitri Filosofov was,}

on the whole, sympathetic, but also drew attention to anachronism, this time of the gratuitously modern locomotive—Anna’s suicide weapon: ‘it was not at all like the engines of the late 1870s…they used to have huge funnels that widened out towards the top.’12

Where the film most notably parted company with Tolstoy’s novel was in Gardin’s treatment of Anna’s suicide, and it was this scene above all that seems to have persuaded critics that the film had some special quality that enabled it to bear comparison with the novel. Only the first reel of Anna Karenina survives, so we have to refer to production stills and contemporary descriptions in order to reconstruct the way the scene was staged. Fortunately, an article by a reporter present at the location shooting appeared in the Moscow theatre periodical Footlights and Life in 1914. The article was entitled ‘The Suicide of Anna Karenina’ and it explained to its readers what special effects had been used (dummy substitution plus reverse shooting) to make the suicide scene look real. Among other interesting technicalities the reporter mentioned that the film ended somewhat differently from the novel: in the novel Anna threw herself from the platform under the second carriage, not under the approaching engine as she did in the film. The reporter did not really object to this: ‘that is the way they do it in cinema.’13 _{Neither did any of the other reviewers find this a problem,}

not even those who were so alert to the non-period teddy bear and the anachronistic locomotive. Gardin’s ending must have been really effective to be able to justify the liberty the director had taken with the source in treating the novel’s crucial scene.

Can Gardin’s modification be identified as specifically cinematic? Technically speaking, it cannot. A similar treatment of the suicide scene had already been tested on the theatre stage before 1895. A poster advertising a stage production of Anna Karenina in the Moscow Skomorokh Theatre announced: ‘In the last act a railway engine (specially constructed in L.A.Fyodorov’s workshop) will cross the entire stage, and Anna Karenina will throw herself under it.’14 _{The necessary stage machinery for such thrilling effects had}

been developed for the nineteenth-century American melodrama, the genre that surely inspired the Skomorokh idea.15 _{Ivan Shcheglov, who had seen the performance, wrote:}

but it was Fyodorov’s engine that turned out to be the biggest disappointment for the audience. It not only failed to run Anna Karenina over (she let out a scream even before it appeared), but it did not even succeed in crossing the whole stage as promised; it got hopelessly stuck between the first stage wing and the garden table at which Levin, Kitty and their guests had been drinking toasts ‘To Russia’ at the beginning of the act.16

However, the iconography of the suicide mise-en-scène used in Gardin’s film was clearly not theatrical. A glance at the production still published by the illustrated weekly Sparks for 1914 17 _{shows the train in}

exactly the same position relative to the camera as in the Lumières’ The Arrival of a Train,

It darts like an arrow straight towards you—watch out! It seems as though it is about to rush into the darkness where you are sitting and reduce you to a mangled sack of skin, full of crumpled flesh and splintered bones, and destroy this hall and this building…and transform them into fragments and dust.18

Stasov was an art critic rather than a writer, and his description is not particularly colourful, but he does register the cultural analogy prompted by the effect. The reference Stasov makes is to Tolstoy’s novel,

naturally; permit me to cite again a passage from his enthusiastic letter written in 1896: ‘All of a sudden a whole railway train comes rushing out of the picture towards you; it gets bigger and bigger, and you think it’s going to run you over, just like in Anna Karenina—it’s incredible.’19 _{This association occurred despite the}

fact that the novel does not actually contain any image of an onrushing locomotive: as I have just mentioned, Tolstoy’s Anna throws herself under a passing carriage. It seems as though the Lumière film both evoked the scene and reshaped it in Stasov’s mind. The film and the ending of Anna Karenina became pseudomorphically related. Can we really associate a passing remark made in 1896 in a private letter with something that took 9 Anna Karenina [1914]: the tragic heroine contemplates her destiny (production still)

place in the film industry eighteen years later? Two considerations may help make the case look stronger. First, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina had been an immediate best-seller—the novel was even more successful than War and Peace. Given this, as well as the fact that everyone in Russia’s cities must have seen the Lumières’ film, we may surmise that Stasov’s reaction must have been shared by the public in general. Second, time does not seem to have dimmed the vividness of that initial shock. On the contrary, if someone remembering it in 1913 could say ‘I began to scream, and everyone else was screaming too’, it proves that by the time Anna Karenina was filmed, the emotional memory of being scared by The Arrival of a Train 10 Satirical views of cinema

(a) M.Mikhailov’s 1910 caricature of cinema’s ‘impossible juxtapositions’: Lev Tolstoy and Glupyshkin (the Russian name for the French comedian, André Deed)

(b) P.W.’s view of a ‘typical’ scene from a 1910 film, the ‘dance of the Apaches’

turned the past event into an image of collective hysteria. After the Lumières one might almost have been 11 ‘Cinema’s dispute with theatre’, from the journal Theatre and Art, 1914

(a) Theatre: In the theatre you can view beautiful shoulders. Cinema: But in the cinema, thanks to the darkness, you can put your arm round them.

able to predict that if Anna Karenina were ever to be made into a film the suicide scene would follow the Lumières rather than Tolstoy.

THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN: DISTORTED SPACE AND YAWNING