VISUAL CULTURE

Re-inventing the Wheel – Speed in Slow Motion: The London Eye (Millennium Wheel)

Visual Culture in Britain, Vol.4, No.2, 2003, pp.21-40.

by Paul Overy

[cont’d]

Undoubtedly the way the two Wheels move could be related to the technologies of representation of the periods when they were erected. The Riesenrad moves by discrete intervals, stopping regularly to take on passengers and then starting again like the film going through the gate of a cine camera or projector³². The Millennium Wheel moves smoothly and continuously, resembling the movement of magnetic tape past the recording head of a video recorder or a disk over the laser in a CD, CDROM or DVD player. Yet new technologies do not supplant and make obsolete the old but rather coexist and overlay one another. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century speed has continued to be depicted through reproductive systems such as photography and cinematography that ‘freeze’ speed, or represent it fragmentarily or in a disconnected manner. (‘The truth 24 times per second’, as Jean-Luc Godard said.) We have become attuned to devices of slow motion or freeze frame in the representation of speed and movement through film and video. These techniques are still employed to analyze movement and to make movement more apparent to the human eye by slowing it down to a speed that can be easily comprehended, or by stopping movement altogether. In the twenty-first century, we are accustomed to such techniques through video surveillance systems that record discontinuous rather than continuous movement, and by the use of freeze frames and replays in slow motion in the televising of football matches, horse racing and other sports events. Such devices have also been exploited by contemporary artists and avant-garde filmmakers to expose, critique, or comment upon the effects of time and speed, and modern methods of surveillance.

The original Great Wheels combined the ‘shock of the new’ – the fragmented vision of modernity that was both the subject and the formal means of much 20th-century modernism – with the centred and commanding overview of the pre-20th-century panoramic or panoptic gaze³³. The Ferris Wheel was a spectacular means of demonstrating the transition between the nineteenth-century world picture and the ‘modern’ or modernist world of the twentieth century. The Millennium Wheel demonstrates the persistence of this juxtaposition and layering of perceptual experiences that continued through the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first century.

By the end of the 19th century increasingly more complicated and disorienting ‘attractions’ featured at Great Exhibitions and World Fairs³⁴. These included roller coasters, flip-flops, the loop, the waterchute, and towers from which cage-like lifts plummeted to earth, their fall broken only during the last few seconds before smashing into the ground. In all these rides visitors were subjected to sensations of shock, vertigo, disorientation, and rapid acceleration and deceleration³⁵. The experiences they received were extreme manifestations and representations of the ‘series of shocks’ that Benjamin considered crucial to the experience of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. Leuven de Cauter has characterized these new kinds of spectacles and attractions as representing the perceptual shift that occurred around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘splintering of the panoramic gaze’, or the ‘splintering of surveyability’[36], a shift which was also represented by ‘the acceleration of perception’ through new means of transport such as the train, the bicycle and the motor car, and through new mediums such as the cinema. This is a claim familiar since the first Futurist manifestos and frequently repeated during the twentieth century by artists, writers, critics and cultural theorists³⁷. But as well as what De Cauter calls ‘vertigo machines’, an updated series of panorama-like spectacles also featured as ‘attractions’ at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Great Exhibitions³⁸. Both static panoramas and moving diorama-type displays underwent a revival in popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Paris 1900 Exhibition featured a plethora of complex mechanized panorama-type displays on travel themes such as the ‘Tour de Monde’ and the ‘Transibériene³⁹’. One way of seeing was not obliterated by the other⁴⁰. Both were available simultaneously, like the ‘village’ within the city⁴¹.

Just as the late nineteenth-century Ferris Wheels overlaid and juxtaposed a number of different ways of perceiving the city that were current in the nineteenth century and which persisted into the early twentieth century, so the Millennium Wheel overlays and juxtaposes different ways of perceiving the modern city that have persisted from the twentieth century into the first years of the twenty-first. Observation Wheels ingeniously synthesize such different means of viewing the city, providing a slowly but constantly changing series of both panoramic and dynamic viewpoints. These include on the one hand static but spectacular ‘bird’s-eye’ viewing positions from high vantage points and towers such as the Eiffel Tower (or more recent radio and telecommunications towers) and on the other hand the shifting viewpoints provided by trams, metropolitan railways, buses and cars, or by boats on the great rivers that run through so many of the major ‘cities of modernity’ like London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and New York. In Paris, for example, high view points can be obtained on the various platforms of the Eiffel Tower and from the top of the Tour Montparnasse and the Pompidou Centre, while moving viewing positions are provided by Bateaux Mouches on the Seine and parts of the Metro and RER which run above ground, as well as from buses and cars. In London open-topped tourist buses, suburban trains and a variety of pleasure boats on the Thames offer dynamic viewing positions, although the city lacks a high central viewpoint like the Eiffel Tower. (The Post Office Tower provided such a viewpoint before it was closed to the public in the 1970s after an IRA bomb attempt). However one of the main incoming flight paths to Heathrow brings aircraft in from the east above the Thames providing dramatic views of the city from above. For wealthier tourists there are trips over cities in low-flying helicopters, light aircraft or airships (dirigibles). An early publicity release for the Millennium Wheel described how it would give passengers ‘a birds-eye view usually accessible only by helicopter or plane’, drawing attention to the ‘flight-like’ character of the experience:

Spectacular, unencumbered panoramic views will be enjoyed from 32 fully enclosed, high-tech capsules, each accommodating up to 25 people. Visitors will be able to see for over 25 miles in each direction and will be guided through their airborne journey by an ‘in-flight’ commentary designed to enhance the experience⁴².

The flying or ascending subject became a powerful symbolic image from the last decades of the nineteenth century. The invention of the lift (or elevator) and the consequent possibilities of building skyscrapers in the United States, and very tall towers like the Eiffel Tower in Europe, made available the experience of ascension to a wide public in the 1880s and 1890s. Ascents in balloons had been possible since the late eighteenth century, although these remained the prerogative of the relatively rich. But photographs taken from balloons by photographers like Nadar made images of this experience available to many more people during the second half of the 19th century⁴³. The Great Wheels combined this ascensional viewpoint with more fragmented perceptual viewing positions to create a complex experience that still has the power to stimulate and exhilarate today. Imagery of ascension and flight dominated much twentieth-century art. That this imagery still remains vivid and evocative in the first years of the twenty-first century is witnessed by the success of the Millennium Wheel. Many people are now accustomed to flying as a result of the development of package holidays and cheap airfares. However the experience of travelling in a modern commercial airliner can provoke anxiety and claustrophobia while paradoxically offering few memorable images or sensations of ascension or flight. Hence the need to ‘re-invent the Wheel’ and to associate air travel with the more pleasurable and spectacular experience of a 30 minute flight on the London Eye. (Riding the Wheel is referred to as ‘flying’ in the British Airways sponsored publicity.)

The Concorde crash disaster in Paris in 2000 and the consequent doubts cast about the airworthiness of the plane served as a reminder that technology sometimes gets too far ahead of what is acceptable or commercially viable, while further anxieties about technology were engendered by the events of 11 September 2001. Supersonic flight remains a curiosity today and there may well be no new generation of supersonic airliners in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Subsonic air travel will remain the norm. With its bird-like profile and slim proportions, Concorde was a dramatic icon of speed and flight during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Yet, with its restricted accommodation and small windows it was even more claustrophobic than most subsonic airliners, conveying status while remaining cramped and uncomfortable and offering few perceptible sensations of the exhilaration of high-speed travel.

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Notes [cont’d]

³² In its early years the ‘Film Palas’ cinema was sited close to the Riesenrad in the Prater (shown in an undated watercolour by Richard Pokorny). The Wheel has also featured in a number of films apart from The Third Man. In 1914 the circus manager Madame Solange d’Atalide was filmed seated on a horse standing on one of the cabins of the turning Riesenrad as a stunt for a feature film set in Vienna. Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, Year 43, No.114, 26 April 1914, p.1, see Jahn and Petritsch, The Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel, p.10. In 1922 the New York Pathé News director George Ercole filmed the acrobats the Maringo brothers performing on the roof of the highest cabins in a film that was shown in 11,000 American cinemas. The Riesenrad also featured as a location in the fifteenth James Bond film The Living Daylights in 1986, starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond. Jahn and Petritsch, The Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel, p.17, p.26.

³³ A contemporary commentator wrote of a ride on the Chicago Ferris Wheel: ‘Then, slowly, with that subtle, growing sense, such as you experience as you stand before the canvas of a master, the whole majestic panorama is unrolled before you.’ See Snyder, ‘Engineer Ferris’, p.272.

³⁴ Leuven De Cauter has argued that: ‘The paradox of the world fairs lies in the fact that they were conceived as a spectacle visualizing progress through science, industry and production, but over the years they became the laboratories of exoticism, tourism and consumerism. Representation was replaced by attraction, meaning by fascination.’ Leuven de Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy: On World Exhibitions and the Disintegration of Experience’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol.10, No.4, November 1993, p.14.

³⁵ Modern versions of these rides are still to be found in the amusement park section of the Prater next to the more stately attraction of the Riesenrad.

³⁶ De Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy’, p.20.

³⁷ Among these Léger, El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and Paul Virilio.

³⁸ Panoramas and dioramas had first reached their peak of popularity in the early 19th century but had declined in the decades after the mid-century. In Paris for example by 1880 only a single panorama remained, that of the Siege of Paris of 1870 which had been on display in the Champs Elysées since 1872. But two years later in 1882 there were eleven and by the time of the 1889 Great Exhibition seventeen including those in the Exhibition itself. See Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, pp.149-150, citing François Robichon, Les panoramas en France au 19e siècle, thèse de IIIe cycle, Nanterre: Université de Paris, 1982, appendix.

³⁹ Le Tour du Monde was a ‘panorama-diorama animé’ sponsored by a steamship company where voyages around the world were simulated by three floors of moving panoramas on rolling canvases, complete with ‘real’ inhabitants (‘Hindus in India, real Chinese in China, real Japanese in Japan’) performing dances or making crafts in front of the canvas at the appropriate point. See De Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy’, p.15, citing F. Faideau, ‘Historiques des Expositions Universelles’, Encyclopédie du Siècle, Paris: Montgredin, 1900, VoI.1, p.143. Sponsored by the Compagnie internationale des Wagons-Lits, the Transibériene compressed a two-week journey on the Transiberian express from Moscow to Peking into a forty-five minute ride using four moving backdrops to emulate the illusion where objects at different distances appear to move at different speeds relative to each other when viewed from a train window.

⁴⁰ This argument contradicts that of De Cauter who claims that: ‘The panoramic ecstasy had to make way for the transport caused by transportation: the pleasure of speed. This acceleration (of transport, but also of information) unchained the collapse of a whole system of representation.’ De Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy’, 1993, p.17.

⁴¹ Another attraction, the ‘Grimoin-Sanson Cinéorama’, was a synthesis of the panorama and the cinema. From a balloon basket in the centre of a polygonal room spectators watched a filmed balloon ascent projected simultaneously by ten projectors onto ten screens to create a virtual 360-degree spectacle. De Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy’, p.15, citing ‘Journal illustrés des expositions, récits et témoignages’, in Le Livre des expositions universelle 1851-1989, exh. cat., Paris: Musée des arts décoratifs, 1983, p.110. According to Schwartz the Cinéorame never worked. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, p.171, citing Jean-Jaques Meusy, ‘L’énigme du cinéorama de l’exposition universelle de 1900’, Archives, No.3, January 1991. By all accounts the Great Wheel (La Grande Roue) erected for the Paris exhibition produced more successful sensations of ascension and flight.

⁴² ‘New Perspectives for a New Millennium from British Airways London Eye’, London: British Airways London Eye Press Release, October 1999.

⁴³ Riding on the 1893 Chicago Wheel was described at the time as ‘like going up in a balloon’: Shepp and Shepp, Shepp’s World Fair, p.502.

© Paul Overy 2003