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The suspended metro in Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
While carrying out research into Paris transport networks I recently came across an image that seemed strangely familiar. Illustrating one of the many proposed transport projects for the Paris region during the 1960s was a photo of a suspended metro train. The project has now been completely forgotten and despite lengthy development and testing the technology was never adopted in France. And yet the suspended metro is known the world over for it is immortalised in François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451. In the film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel, the suspended metro appears in the daily commute between the city centre and the residential suburbs. On board, Clarisse notices her neighbour Montag, and the two establish a friendship on the daily commute to their respective jobs in the fire station and school.

Truffaut made the suspended metro sequences on a location shoot near Orléans in France. In 1959, engineering film SAFEGE built a 1370 metre track at Châteauneuf sur Loire to conduct tests for a new form of rapid and silent public transport. The project generated much interest from abroad but before the company could sell the technology it would first have to build a working system in France. When Truffaut's team arrived for filming at the test track in March 1966 development for the SAFEGE metro was at its height, and the system seemed likely to be rolled out imminently for commercial operations. At least two proposals were developed for the Parisian suburbs, but the first was rejected due to technical difficulties, and the second abandoned in October 1966 for financial reasons.

A few years later the test track was dismantled and the carriage was sold for scrap. By chance, however, the unit immortalised on film by Fahrenheit 451 escaped the smelter and after providing a home for the iron merchant's son it was used as a chicken hut. Discovered in a field in 1991, the carriage was bought by members of a local association (ARSATI) interested in the history of the Aérotrain - another experimental transport system developed near Orléans in the 1960s and 70s. After restoring the carriage in 1994, ARSATI planned to display the SAFEGE metro in a museum dedicated to innovative transport, but sadly the unique metro was vandalised and the project abandoned.
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The vandalised SAFEGE carriage (image reproduced with permission from http://safege.free.fr)

Truffaut wrote he was determined to use the suspended metro in his film, and remarked that even though it seemed out of date compared to the neighbouring high speed Aérotrain experiments it was still a glimpse into a future that otherwise pretty much resembled contemporary England. Over forty years after the release of Fahrenheit 451, the suspended metro of the film still seems strikingly modern - or at least timeless compared to the brick houses of Montag's street, resembling the London outer-suburban commuter belt of the 1960s, and the sea of rooftop television aerials in the title sequence. The film remains the last resting place of a transport system out of its time.


Jacob Paskins


References to the SAFEGE suspended metro from Le Métro Suspendu website (in French).
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The commute to work in Fahrenheit 451
 
 
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When is a thing an object? Or rather, when does an object become a thing?

Bill Brown, in his seminal essay, "Thing Theory," argues that "We look through objects because they are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful." Thus objects are imbued with meaning that is relevant to the objects’ owner/s. By contrast, "we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us." (Critical Inquiry 28, no.1, Autumn [2001], 1-22). Things are dead objects.

Something about this analysis troubles me. This feeling of unease stems from a semantic disagreement between Brown’s use of the terms "object" and "thing" and our everyday deployment of the terms in the English language. When was the last time you told someone that you had remembered to bring your "objects" with you?

"It’s okay, I have my things with me."

"Put it with the other things over there."

"I don’t want to leave my things lying around."

We play with things, use things, buy things, worry about things. We own things. At the point of ownership, the object undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a thing.

The object is the mass-produced Polaroid camera made by a corporate retailer with a nation-wide chain of stores. The object is boxed and packaged to look like a million of the same, identical objects. It sits on a shelf in a store and we, the customers, are objective to it. It is just another Polaroid camera.

Someone buys a Polaroid camera. It is no longer a camera but their camera, the camera which will travel with them on holiday, catch fleeting moments at parties, remind them of the time they visited such-and-such for Christmas.

"I’ve had this thing for ages, I hope this bit doesn’t come off. It would be such a shame if it broke."

"I wonder why she hasn’t swapped to digital? I guess using Polaroid is just her thing."

The thing is an object imbued with life, meaning and personality. The thing is an individual; the object is one of many. The poet Charles Baudelaire describes how ‘the overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys" (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, New York: De Capo Press, 1994). This is what we do when we use our things, as their proximity and familiarity to us slowly reveals them.

When their lives are over, our things become objects once more. They are thrown out, burnt, destroyed, ripped up, sold on. Our things become dead objects. In second-hand shops, our things become objects become things again. In museums, things are taken to represent entire cultures or societies. They are stripped of their individuality. They are made anonymous, generalised and objectified in glass cases and displays.

Curators say: "I have a wonderful collection of objects."

But what of stuff? Is stuff going to be the next big thing?
     --Rebecca Harrison