AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

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.

Truffaut wrote he was determined to use the suspended metro in his film, and remarked that even though it seemed out of date compared to the neighbouring high speed Aérotrain experiments it was still a glimpse into a future that otherwise pretty much resembled contemporary England.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).

For those not yet following us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/autopsiesgroup), or for those are and would like an overview of our recent 'tweeting' activity, thoughts and discoveries, here is a digest of some recent postings and links from the last fortnight.

Our search for blogs that take our interest continued this month, and the group found the following favourites. The bioscope blog (http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/) provides detailed news and information on all aspects of early and silent cinema, including pre-cinema techniques. Luke McKernan recently launched his British Library Moving Image Blog, which replaces his popular and now missed Screen Research site. All the best, Luke. (http://bit.ly/9JhE3n). And as a literal echo to our own project, looking at the places we put the dead, cemeteryscapes (http://cemeteryscapes.blogspot.com/) 'is a blog about the material and visual culture of cemeteries in the past, present and future.'

Dead media, it seems, sometimes struggles to stay alive against the odds. The BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped project shows the incredible efforts made to save Britain's audiovisual heritage. Discovering of a battered old video, they attempted to save the only surviving copy of Pink Floyd’s debut on Top of the Pops (http://bit.ly/a9SNC3). Wired.co.uk, meanwhile, reported on the upcoming auction of a Giroux 1839 Daguerreotype camera. Does the oldest extant camera still work, we wonder? (http://bit.ly/9TfggQ).

On the exhibition front, Christian Boltanski raises questions of memory, monuments and death in his exhibition entitled Personnes, part of Monumenta 2010 at the Nef du Grand Palais in Paris, on show until 21 February (http://bit.ly/aIgs7o). Meanwhile, photographer William Eggleston shows interest in dead objects in his exhibition 21st Century, held at Victoria Miro Gallery in London (http://bit.ly/9pmNHg).

Finally, group members highlighted a number of important campaigns. Bristol's Cube Microplex launched an appeal for help and donations for their Haiti Kids Kino Project (http://bit.ly/b9DVUT). Henry Jenkins's blog reported on the threatened closure of the University of Iowa Cinema Studies PhD Programme (http://bit.ly/5gpCtr). The Autopsies Group is also very concerned about cuts to UK Universities (http://bit.ly/dd12Ay), and no doubt there will be more on this soon.

Digest compiled by Jacob Paskins from material posted by members of the Autopsies Group to http://twitter.com/autopsiesgroup

The new year marked the 10th anniversary of the Longplayer project, a musical composition that is intended to play for 1000 years. A mind boggling thought.

http://longplayer.org/what/overview.php

So far so good, but the developers of the project are concerned about the long term continuation of the piece of never repeating music. Although a computer is currently performing Longplayer, the project developers are aware present day technology will one day be obsolete. For this reason, they are seeking a non-technological and nondigital way of ensuring the survival of the composition for the next 990 years. The developers are experimenting with alternative performance methods from mechanical, non-electrical devices to human performance.

In its section of 'Survival Strategies', http://longplayer.org/what/survival/future.php the Longplayer project website asks, 'How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium?'

Beyond suggesting a number of mechanical and technological possibilities, the developers believe Longplayer will only survive if people are interested in the survival of this ambitious scheme, akin to launching a probe deep into space on an unknown journey. With it being nearly impossible to predict how technology will change within even the next ten years, live human performance may be the only way of guaranteeing the continuation of Longplayer through the millennium. The first live performance of Longplayer was held in London's Roundhouse in September 2009.

Jacob Paskins

2nd December 2009

The Autopsies’ museum roundtable (with guest speakers Oliver Winchester from the V&A and Alexandra Goddard from the Geffrye) engaged with some of the research group’s key concerns, namely when/how we talk about ‘things’ or ‘objects’ and the ways in which film can be used to preserve them.

With Jann Matlock chairing and contributing as a panellist, our guests were asked to discuss the various similarities and differences between their museums in the processes of curating and collating information.  The Geffrye Museum, Goddard told us, acquired supporting documentation to create a ‘mise-en-scene of the object.’  This documentation included oral and written histories of the objects, as well as photographs. 

Film had yet to enter their remit as a medium of preservation.  At the V&A, however, Winchester described film’s utility in demonstrating to visitors how objects actually work (both panellists agreed that they dealt with ‘objects,’ although these were once people’s ‘things’). 

I found this use of film fascinating.  Film was not a necessary tool in the preservation of the object per se – the object itself existed within the museum space – but visitors could only understand the application of the object through moving images.  The way in which museums display objects divorces them from utility.  Film can help museums to design an experience of the object that gives life to what would otherwise be  dead or static.

One has to consider whether it is possible to understand any object without first comprehending its ‘thing-ness.’   The iPod was used as an example: without touching it, playing with it or glancing through its menus, does it really make sense as a technology?  Is there any point in simply looking at a dead object and can film help rescue it from the after-world that is the museum display?  Could film help items retain their essence of ‘thing-ness’ in the face of museum objectivity?

Perhaps these are some of the questions we can take forward into the new year and put to our next selection of museum panellists. 


Rebecca Harrison

‘A bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm’ is Siegfried Kracauer’s description of a UFA film studio in Germany, in his essay entitled ‘Calico-World. The UFA City in Neubabelsberg’. The film studio offers a mixture of  both old and new objects, stacked in a disorganised fashion, waiting to be used. Kracauer questions the authenticity of these objects that he sees on set that construct the make-belief world of cinema. Astonished by the fickleness of these objects’s lives that can be destroyed, disposed of, at any time a specific film requires it, or just ends, Kracauer remarks how objects created for the cinema are not meant to last, and yet when projected on screen these same objects attain such an immortal status.

A museum’s collection can never be exhaustive: there is only so much space, money and information one can acquire in order to display and understand one’s objects. How does a museum decide what is worth acquiring, keeping or disposing of? A team of curators for the UCL collections decided to ask just that, throwing open the debate to students, staff and the general public.

Housed in the Chadwick building, the Object Disposal project mounted its own museum collection of objects that might be considered for disposal. From plastic dinosaurs to Agatha Christie’s picnic basket, cowboy boots to soil samples, the collection displayed objects that were either too large or expensive to store; replicated objects within UCL’s wider collections; or what to the untrained eye might be considered ‘trash.’

On entering the building, visitors were asked to identify themselves as staff, student, or other. This was recorded against a number, which in turn was written onto two stickers – one red, one orange. Visitors were then asked to consider five objects (slides of planets, a rhinoceros skull, a picnic basket, soil samples and medical equipment). They stuck their orange sticker next to the object they considered the most appropriate for disposal. Before leaving the display, they reconsidered and used the red sticker to indicate if they had changed their mind.

This was a fantastic way of demonstrating to the visitor the difficulties involved in the elimination process. Why was one object more worthy than another? How should one try to understand these objects comparatively when they were so different contextually? I particularly enjoyed reading visitors comments in a display dedicated to public opinion. This ranged from ‘Get rid of the dinosaurs!’ to ‘Get rid of everything!’ (a comment which provoked both laughter and fear on my part). One hopes they could keep everything, or at least give it to a deserving and appreciative home.

The project’s organiser, curator Jayne Dunn, expressed the hope that this interactive display would help the UCL collections to update and regenerate their manifestos on object disposal. Asking the public to become involved in the decision making process ensured that questions about what we deem to be representative of ‘us’ both culturally and socially were fixed firmly on the agenda.

The statistics collected from the sticker exercise should be collated and published on the UCl website in due course. I wonder if the curators will keep the sticker sheets and comments as objects in their own right, as records of an event that has potentially shaped UCL museums’ disposal policy. In any event, I’d love to see which object got ‘voted out.’ My money’s on the medical equipment. Not the planet slides, surely?

- Rebecca Harrison

To put you in the mood for the upcoming Found Footage Film Night, hosted by the Autopsies group on 9 December, don't miss Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'Enfer), currently showing in selected cinemas.

Began in 1964, l'Enfer had an unlimited budget, an all star cast, and Clouzot as a director obsessed with creating a new visual language for cinema. After scores of screen tests and three weeks of location shooting the film was never completed, and the 185 reels of film produced were left abandoned for decades. The present release is a documentary that tells the story of the film that never was, and mixes interviews with the original crew with a montage of Clouzot's 35mm rushes.

The story line of the intended is film was never going to change the course of cinema history, but the visual treatment may have, as the quite extraordinary sequence of experiments with colour and sound shows. The documentary's reconstruction of the film, occasionally adding sound to the rushes, and recreating key dialogue with actors reading the original script, is subtle and well judged, leaving the shimmering found film footage to take centre stage.

Further information from BFI Southbank: http://bit.ly/8MbTef

Jacob Paskins

"Object Retrieval was a mass participation art project that took place from 15-21 October 2009 on a converted Routemaster bus in the main UCL (University College London) Quad on Gower Street, London. A single object from the UCL Pathology Collection was exhibited on the bus and explored by thousands of people from their own personal or professional perspective for 7 days, 24 hours a day. The response was extraordinary as you can see for yourself from the enormous amount of information uploaded on the Object Biography page. Contributions ranged from the hyper-scientific to childhood memories via the Gospels, Jack Kerouac, Psychoanalysis and pretty much everything in between. While Object Retrieval has finished, the website will remain open to your further contributions surrounding this simple object, this toy car that once belonged to a 4 year old boy."

This is the description by the curator and artist of the Object Retrieval Project on the website devoted to the project,
http://www.objectretrieval.com/

The Autopsies Group took up the invitation to research and think about the little car exhibited in this project.  That car, depicted above and below in photographs taken by Jann Matlock during our work sessions at the Routemaster bus , on 21 October 2009, was a tiny toy car, modelled after the Ford Galaxie Sunliner, that entered the UCL Pathology Collection in 1963 in relation to a case of lead poisoning involving a 4 year-old boy.  The case notes are reproduced here:
http://www.objectretrieval.com/node/59
In these case notes, that justify the "appropriation" of the object today in the Object Retrieval Project, and its display in the Pathology Collection that originally housed it, the little boy was diagnosed in three ways: as a "case of mental retardation" (possibly relating to his lead poisoning as Rebecca Harrison notes in her contribution), as having "pica"--or the propensity to eat things that were not destined to be eaten--not so much a disease as a symptom, but at the very least an attribute that was part of a strange discourse of blaming victims as both Karolina Kendall-Bush and Harrison dicuss below; and being different, in this case, of "non-European extraction."  Despite our best efforts, we do not know what happened to the child or even whether follow-up studies were done on any of the children studied by Dr. Moncrieff in 1963 about whom he published an article reproduced on the Object Retrieval site.  We do know that this little boy was not one of the specific cases detailed in that study.  We can also assume, from the evidence of his lead poisoning levels, and the diagnosis of severe learning disabilities, that he may not have had the future that other children born in 1959 would today enjoy.  If he is alive today, he would be 50.  In the year that he entered the Greater Ormond Street Hospital, Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" (on 28 August 1963).  Also that fall, on 23 october 1963, Bob Dylan recorded an important political ballad, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."  That song, which told the story of one of the most tragic injustices of the civil rights era in the U.S., detailed how the scion of wealthy tobacco farmers killed a black woman with his cane because she was slow in bringing him a drink--and then was given the minimal penalty of only six months in jail for manslaughter:

"William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears."

Dylan tells the whole story, in his way, almost as if he's providing a newspaper account of the murder that occurred in February 1963.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4n-vL65dDM
The version below is from a public domain appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1964.

Zantzinger's story is relevant to the Object Retrieval Project for two reasons: first because his victim, like the little boy in the Object Retrieval Project, was of another background than European and justice was dispensed on the basis of that racial, ethnic difference. Second, because Zantzinger left jail to become a major slumlord in Maryland and in the Washington D.C. area.
See this account in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/feb/25/bobdylan
(and in some slightly more anecdotal accounts here:
http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=47133&messages=50  )

Arrested in 1991 on charges of fraud and deceptive business practices, Zantzinger was like the slumlords who in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even today, refused to do anything about the lead paint in the apartments they rent.  He was also like the lead paint companies that have fought tooth and nail all attempts to force them to indemnify their victims for pretending--well into the 1970s--that lead paint was safe and for claiming, even today, that their paint was no more to blame than other things in the environment.  See these examples from Life Magazine:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RUgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&dq=lead+paint&as_pt=MAGAZINES#v=onepage&q=lead%20paint&f=false 
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=AU0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=RA1-PT89&dq=lead+paint&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=0&as_pt=MAGAZINES#v=onepage&q=lead%20paint&f=false
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=GlYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA94-IA5&dq=lead+paint&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=0&as_pt=MAGAZINES#v=onepage&q=lead%20paint&f=false (1967!)
Pencils, pottery, and yes, little toy cars, have taken the fall for an industry that has chosen not to participate in the clean-up of the home environments they promised to make sparkling and safe.

William Zantzinger died in January 2009
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=6618219
For a contemporary activist's account of the era, read:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheila-weller/post_263_b_156996.html

Tragically enough, in 2009 as well, on July 2, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed a legal decision that would have forced the three big lead paint firms to pay to help clean up the housing that their paint has made toxic.  After more than 30 years of hiding the health risks of their lead paint, Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Milennial Holdings were set to begin paying billions to repair the damage to housing where lead paint risks still persist.  Cases are pending in California and Ohio, where courts could still make the lead firms share in the cost of making homes safe.  Until then, justice for the millions of children who suffer from lead paint poisoning, will remain as elusive as for Hattie Carroll.

This is why the Autopsies Research Group played Bob Dylan's song at the end of our research visit to the Routemaster bus in the UCL quad on 21 October 2009.  While we would rather remember 1963 for Martin Luther King's dreams, we also want to remember the injustices committed by slumlords like Zantzinger and by the lead paint companies both of whom profited from little boys such as the one who once loved a little toy Ford Galaxie Sunliner.

Wherever he is, we hope he is not alone.
--Jann Matlock