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Excavating “Arrival of a Train”: A Swedish Mining Company's Useful Attractions

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/movingimage.20.1-2.0001

1542-4235

Fossås,

Cinema and Media Studies

Excavating "Arrival of a Train"A Swedish Mining Company's Useful Attractions Ole Johnny Fossås (bio) In the middle to late 1990s, digital automation had become an everyday part of mining in Northern Sweden. This was reflected in the videos they commissioned as well as their screenings. As part of the opening of a new digitally automated transport level on August 28, 1997, in the Kiruna Mine, owned by the state-owned iron ore company LKAB (Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB), the Digibeta production It All Starts Here … (Lars G. Karlsson, 1997) had its premiere in a ceremony at 1,045 meters belowground. The underground placement of the screening and the digital nature of the video production allowed for a synchronized display between human, machine, and digital automation. The weekly company journal LKAB Veckobladet (LKAB Weekly) describes a moment of the film screening: On the stage of the film hall, the pompous ceremony began with Anna Norberg playing flute at the same time as a newly produced film … started. When the film reached the section where a train comes running towards the audience, the picture was frozen and, well timed, a train drove forward at the side of the podium.1 Film historians no doubt recognize the odd similarity this description bears to accounts of the first Paris screenings of Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station (L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896). Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer's research has disrupted long-held confidence in the accounts of the brothers' first "attractions."2 This Lumière film, however, is generally thought to be an example of the cinema of attractions, a concept famously coined by Tom Gunning to explain and periodize early film.3 Although this historical concept would not place the above viewing situation in 1997 as part of a cinema of attractions, the moment of the train entering the viewing situation—echoing an early cinema attraction myth—may have attractional value to it. If this is the case, could the setup of the viewing situation that leads to such moments be understood as attractions that serve useful functions for the commissioner? Responding to Gunning's concept in the edited volume The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Frank Kessler suggests that through looking beyond the periodization and the text itself, we may better understand the mode of address and how attractions worked.4 Kessler's concept of dispositif approaches this through analyzing the setup of the viewing situation as part of the function of the apparatus. This analytic framework of the dispositif is used pragmatically by Kessler to contextualize the cinema of attractions as a cinema of attractional display. Kessler examines an extended "Amsterdam" print featuring thrilling staged scenes of firefighting from narrative films that are missing [End Page 2] from the "original" 1910 Gaumont Pathé film Incendie de l'Exposition de Bruxelles (The Brussels Exhibition fire). The film is understood to be a local adaptation of a film of a topical event by an anonymous exhibitor.5 Through having control of the viewing situation as well as knowledge of the local audience, the "Amsterdam" exhibitor could add these staged scenes to make it more of an attraction to local audiences. Crucially, these added attractions could, according to Kessler, also improve the narrative by presenting elements of the fire incident that were presented in newspaper reports but had not been filmed during the incident itself. In other words, adding the staged scenes could be attractional not only as exciting footage next to the footage from the actual event but also because they referred to plausible afilmic moments and as such gave an idea of how it would be to have been actually present at the incident.6 This last point of attractional displays possibly being informative suggests that they may serve a particular useful function in line with how useful is understood within studies of commissioned film. It also suggests that the text itself should be described to make sense of how a viewing setup could be useful. Attractional displays of productions commissioned by industry may then be analyzed as elements of so-called useful cinema. The term...