A Collection of Places
I would like to make a film that deals with the niche hobby of model railroading and investigate the many overlooked theoretical concepts attached to this hobby and linked to mass culture in previously unthought-of ways. Model railroading is typically not a hobby that the majority of people are remotely familiar with despite dealing with similar experiences on a daily basis, experiences that are in fact integral to human culture. I will use the documentary form to begin this investigation but very quickly it will become apparent that this is only a documentary on the surface, but more of a categorical essay film done in the style of a documentary. Let me explain the topics I will cover and the means by which I plan to lace them together in a lyrical fashion.
Firstly, model railroading serves as an interesting jumping off point because it is a niche hobby with attractive aesthetics and colourful and obsessive individuals who give their entire lives and livelihoods over to it. It is a hobby that deals with meticulous and elaborate recreations and constructions, the entire premise of my theoretical framework. The investigation is actually about the human obsession of re-enactment and fictionalization and the required interplay between the two in human narrative. This is a practice that can be witnessed cross-culturally and cross-generationally and it pervades all narratives of all mediums, model railroading is just a vessel for the investigation that has been previously untapped. The next obvious connection to be drawn is to the cinema and its practice of re-enactment and fictionalization, and this can be seen across all genres from historical period pieces to biopics and especially in the documentary format which preaches to hold the most truth value of all film forms (film also preaches to contain the most truth value out of all art forms, due to its mechanically mediated/photographic nature). The fact that photography and cinematography require a pro-filmic event (something has to actually occur in reality in front of the camera to be recorded. And this is constantly being challenged especially by photorealistic CGI) creates an illusion that the cinema is especially enabled to reveal and communicate the truth and reality better than any other forms.
Model railroading has similar theoretical pretexts such as the attempt to create the most realistic layout possible complete with the most minute detail. The reality that such an extreme model attempts to mimic is the profilmic event to the model railroad. Both in the cinema and in the model railroad can we observe the practice of recreation and re-enactment, but also fictionalization occurs within the model railroad as hobbyists always instil their own tyranny over the model, and imbue it with their own narrative, and this is often seen in fictional towns they construct or even in the miniature details of a family on a picnic or a fire at the hardware store. In fact, once we look more closely we will learn that modelling and filmmaking have always gone hand in hand. Pre CGI special effects were usually created with physical models, an attempt to fictionalize photo realistically through miniaturization. The cinema is in itself a miniaturization that masks this through the illusion of a grand scale. Human figures may be blown up to the scale of the silver screen, yet vast amounts of times are condensed into a few hours or less. Thousands of years can be made into three hours in the case of Stanely Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey or an entire city can be made to fit in one basement in the case of your typical model railroad. In both cases, there is shrinkage for the sake of transmitibility and ownership.
The practice of re-enactment and fictionalization miniaturized is a form of colonialism, and attempt to own the alien and internalize the alien so that it is not alien anymore. The real TransCanada railway served the same colonial purposes, to familiarize settlers with the alien and dangerous landscape. It was a form of technological tyranny, to control the landscape that was bigger than ourselves. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both the cinema and the railroad were held in high esteem as the peak of scientific and technological achievement, and until today both industries employ the very latest in technological advancement. Both the cinema and the railroad serves to shrink time and space. In the case of the railroad, the difference between Berlin and Paris became a mere hours rather than days and with the cinema, due to the Lumiere Brothers Travelogues, India and Japan were brought in front of audiences who had previously never imaged such shockingly different environments than their own. Both the cinema and the railroad made the world more accessible. The practice of parallel editing in the cinema, as pioneered by American filmmaker D.W. Griffith mirrored the new mindset of the world who, thanks to the advent of time zones, invented for the railway by Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming, could now imagine themselves in multiple places at once. The act of riding on a train and looking out the window paralleled the act of watching a film, both consisted of framed mobile images of exotic worlds. The accessibility of such images and landscapes enabled a new set of power relations with our world, one which the railroad enforced through its submission of the environment to the will of man. This desire translated to the cinema, to make the unknown submit to us. The cinematic historical epic makes our unattainable and unknowable history known, or at least the illusion thereof. To re-enact is to control, and so is to record. Miniaturization is another form of control, it literally places the modeller above the world he creates. Even cinematic history reveals this, with film villains often fantasizing their plans coming to fruition over a model town. Re-enactment is an attempt to know the unknowable, whilst fictionalization is an attempt to control the uncontrollable.
This film, hiding within a documentary about model railroading, will trace all these links between the narrative cinema and documentary cinema and model railroading and the real railroad. It will employ various generic devices such as voice over interviews with model railroaders, landscape films of trains cutting through the landscape and special effects film using models filmed to appear life size intercut with the real. It will essentially be a film about its own making, about miniaturizing its own subject matter, the practice of filmmaking, of revealing the truth versus fictionalizing it. It will be an investigation into the documentary form itself as it is common practice for documentaries to employ dramatizations/re-enactments and fictionalizations. In essence the film is a continuation of the ongoing investigation of reality versus illusion which so preoccupies many artists and art forms. However, this film will propose an answer. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has already informed us that the cinema is so alluring a medium because of scopophelia, that is, we derive pleasure merely from looking. The act of looking is inherently pleasurable to us because moving images are stimulating and train our cognitive system. This film will extend this theory to cover all narrative forms. Narratives are inherently alluring to humans because of this interplay between reality and fiction, it is a psychological game that we play and just like moving images occupy our cognitions, narratives occupy our psyche, they train us for our daily lives. By subjecting reality to our control within narratives, through re-enactment, fictionalization and miniaturization, we train ourselves to do the same on the micro scale, with our daily experiences, interactions and dramas, and on the macro societal scale. The narrative system is a self propagating system, reality and fiction perpetually feed themselves, on both sides of the mirror. Reality feeds re-enactment, it is the profilmic event. We recreate reality in our narratives, yet fictionalization is the added ingredient which symbolizes our lust for controlling reality, yet the fiction in our narratives feed the reality that we so badly want to recreate. If narratives train us for reality, then logically it follows that we shape our realities according to our narratives which are instilled with fiction. Fictionalization is thus a form of war game, it's a training event we put in our media first to try to predict what will come of it before we try it for real. Miniaturization shrinks it all down into a manageable scale. Model railroading is thus the exact same practice as filmmaking which is all training us for our lives, to gain control over an existence we cannot possibly control. Control, like the cinema is all just an illusion, but we can prepare for it, by training our minds with narratives. This film will lyrically reveal all of this by investigating the hobby of model railroading and its historical relationship to the cinema.