panoramic vision in the railway journey schivelbusch

#Panoramic vision in the railway journey schivelbusch series#

In this language, a political economy of the image ties, and has tied, the spectacle of the industrial object and the capacity to access industrial space together for promotional effect. Equally, Blomkamp’s advertisements and the Transformers franchise that later reflected them, both fit into a much wider visual language of spectacular industrial promotion that has been emerging for over a century and more certainly long before digital effects emerged as a dominant paradigm. For one, they cannot have gone unnoticed by Michael Bay and the studio heads responsible for green-lighting the first Transformers (2007) movie.

(3) In this dynamic, the line between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between object and subject was constantly crossed as the car onscreen and the camera capturing it tended towards a constant degree of fluidity.Ī number of observations can be made about these commercials aside from the fact that they were directed and constructed by a director who subsequently made his way into Hollywood.

#Panoramic vision in the railway journey schivelbusch series#

Thirdly and finally there was an arresting spatial dynamic that played out within the advert and across subsequent follow up adverts in the series that revolved around the transforming industrial object. Secondly, the uncanny nature of the motion-captured human movement in this mechanical robot only added to the arresting combination of fantastic spectacle and oddly everyday context. Firstly, the visual pleasure of the seemingly magical transformation of the everyday object (the automobile) into an animated, anthropomorphised figure was reason enough to garner spectacular commercial attention.

The illusory power that this advert held lay not simply in the spectacle of a dancing figure (as was the case with the early cinematic attractions it reflected) (2), but was also located in a convergent set of dynamics typical of the digital attraction. The commercial, to borrow Tom Gunning’s phraseology, gained great traction as a digital spectacle, interesting for its “illusory power” (1), clocking up views in the millions. In 2005, shortly after the commercial was made, YouTube was launched and the site’s function in leveraging the popularity of digital video attractions ensured that Alive with Technology, along with its sequels, saw a high volume of traffic. The commercial was directed by a then unknown director Neill Blomkamp for Citroën to advertise their new C4 car and featured the tagline and title Alive with Technology. At thirty seconds in length and powerfully reminiscent of the filmed vaudeville attractions of dancing men and women that characterised early cinema, this commercial reflected what I have described elsewhere as the “cinemas of transactions”. In 2004 an advertisement featuring a car that transformed into a dancing robot appeared on US and European television.