Toccata for Toy Trains vs. The Fountainhead

Watching Ray and Charles Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains (1957) and Ayn Rand & King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949), I noticed a strange dissonance between the two works. Apart from the obvious differences (that one is a short, the other feature length, one is experimental, the other Hollywood etc.), one particular anomaly seemed to stick out the most; that Toccata for Toy Trains was a far more enjoyable and human experience than The Fountainhead.

Toccata for Toy Trains is populated entirely by toys made of metal, wood and plastic, it has no dialogue, and no story to speak of. The Fountainhead is character-focused and dialogue heavy, and its cast is made up of popular, well known actors. Yet I found myself drawn towards the first film, and indifferent to the second. Somehow the two films seemed to have switched places, so that Toccata for Toy Trains feels as though it's filled with people, while The Fountainhead comes across as cold, mechanical and distant.

Toccata for Toy Trains achieves this humanising effect through movement, rapid editing, and its focus on the toys from an angle that makes them appear life-sized. Through this, the toys shed their appearance as mere commodities - as simple, lifeless objects - and are given the breath of life. In the world of Toccata for Toy Trains, where toys go about their business free of human influence and witnessed by us at eye-level, how could we imagine them as anything less than living?

As The Fountainhead begins, we are shown a montage of Howard Roark being scolded for his stubborn attitude by various figures of the establishment. This sequence - which is designed to immediately establish the ideas the film will present us - shows Roark only from behind. Throughout these opening shots we see only the back of his head; a shot that is replicated again as Roark sits in court, awaiting the results of his trial. In denying the audience a view of Roark's face, the filmmakers deny the audience any chance of connecting with his character. Without a face, we can't see how he feels about his situation, and so we are held back at a distance. Characters speak more like mouthpieces for Rand's philosophy than they would as real, and therefore emotional, human beings. Roark usually answers people with a cold "yes" or "no". He is blunt and all conversation is simply a way to further explain his attitude to life.

The Fountainhead's characters, who serve as examples to explain Rand's thinking, thus comes across as not only preachy, but as an attempt to educate, rather than entertain. Toccata for Toy Trains is pure enjoyment - it is playful and fun. Many people, especially as children, fantasize about their toys having lives of their own, of being real and alive, and the Eames' film is a realisation of this fantasy. It has a dreamlike quality to it, yet it is completely unaware of itself - the toys live as real people do, without irony or self-awareness.

Perhaps the two films, and the striking differences they suggest exist between people and commodities in the modern world, offers us an understanding of how much our relationship to our property has changed and of how we ourselves have changed because of this. We can easily imagine situations in which people say they love their phones, or where someone names their car. Products have become more than simple objects, as Toccata for Toy Trains suggests. We have given them their own lives by making them so important to us in ours, and, as The Fountainhead implies, we have lost something of ourselves because of this. No longer are people just people and things just things; throughout modernity, we find ourselves becoming united as a single entity, so that people without objects, are not fully human at all.

**** just in case things sounded muddled, I want to note here that in the last paragraph I'm not talking about the ideas in The Fountainhead, but rather the way in which the film expresses itself.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion effects feature throughout many of the films we have viewed during the course, and here I will talk about two specific cases: King Kong and Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair. Stop motion is created by taking still shots of an object, and slowly moving the object between each shot, so that when the film is played back at normal speed, it gives the appearance of movement. The simplicity of the process helped its widespread use throughout film history; from it's earliest stages, such as in Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), right through to today, in T.V. shows like Robot Chicken.

The process of stop motion itself is interesting in terms of its place in modernism. Firstly, it combines still photography with film; a series of frozen moments play out rapidly, creating the illusion of movement. I'd like to suggest that this relationship is akin to the relationship of pre-modern art, and art since the end of the 19th century. The still images are like paintings, while their rapid succession is like film*. At one point during Charles and Ray Eames' Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair (1960) we are shown a selection of their Molded Plastic Side Chairs (Model DSSN). The chairs grow in numbers, various coloured chairs move along rows of the DSSN, and the chairs are shown as if stacking themselves. Here we have a prime example of a modernist take on a traditional piece of furniture, already in itself a comment on the connection between the old and new worlds, which is then made to look as if it has it's own lifeforce - the static chair is made mobile, a part of the modernist push towards animation (pun intended) and movement.

Another aspect of stop motion that is notable for us is the way in which it manipulates miniatures to look like giant behemoth's onscreen. In King Kong (1933), a monstrously over-sized ape is captured and brought back to New York, where it runs amok before being killed on the streets below the Empire State Building. Kong, who appears enormous in the film, was in fact a tiny clay-molded miniature. So, stop motion presents us with an effect that is simultaneously on a micro (personal, individual) level and a macro (global) scale, much like the modern world, in which we live not only individual lives, but also global lives - thanks to the possibilities of airplanes, telephones (and after King Kong), television, satellite communication and the internet.

Although stop motion has been all but replaced by CGI in filmmaking, its significance in the birth and rise of cinema parallels the inherent duality of the format. As cinema helped usher in the modern world, stop motion brought the past into the present, frame by frame.

*well, it quite literally is film, but never mind that for now