Travel's Disciplines

Abstract

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. (Benjamin 1968, 236) Certainly we are moving faster than before. Or, more correctly, we are being moved faster. (Ford 1926, 4) Introduction In 1904, a cinematic attraction called Hale's Tours debuted to great acclaim at the Saint Louis Exposition; over the next two years, it took the U. S. movie-viewing public by storm.1 Miriam Hansen tells us that "designed like a railroad car, complete with conductor and simulated sways and jolts, clickety-clack and brake sounds, this theater projected scenic views taken from a moving train" (1991, 32). Marshalling the hypnotic bond between travel and cinema, Hale's Tours rendered rail, the great nineteenth-century motor of system and industry, a simulacral commodity realized between motion and stasis, mediation and immediacy. Celluloid limned the repertoire of the written travelogue even as, by the same logic, it encroached on conventional travelling practice. This is one way for capitalism to keep bodies in their proper place, spending money to remain stock still—transfixed by recorded movement. And kinesthesis makes it happen, holding viewers in thrall not only with a simulation of travel, an illusion of motion through space, but indeed with the very fact of motion from reel to reel.2