The View From the Train Read Online Free Page B

conditions:firstly, that the realisation of each individual subjectivity will either take place in a collective form or it will not take place at all; and, secondly, that ‘To tell the truth, the only reason anyone fights is for what they love. Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence’ (Saint-Just). 20
    Transformations of everyday space are subjective, but they are not delusions, simply glimpses of what could happen, and indeed does happen at moments of intense collectivity, during demonstrations, revolutions and wars. It is this realisation, together with that of the individual’s predicament, ‘his desperate desire to flee from the prison of his subjectivity, his furious longing to find some escape from the ugliness of modem life’, 21 that set up a dialectic that can inform an outlook on the townscape and landscape that constitute our surroundings, which are, as Georges Bataille points out, the physiognomy of our society. 22

2
Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape
    I don’t suppose I can have missed a single episode in the first year of
Z Cars
, but I can’t remember any of them. In fact I don’t think I can remember in detail anything that I ever saw on television apart from a few oft-repeated items, and I suspect that such lack of retention is general.
    This is a pity, for apparently only two episodes of
Z Cars
survive from the first six months of the series. I mention this having seen them (again?) at the NFT last September, this time on the cinema screen, where they were revealed as examples of a hitherto unknown and rather timeless genre. (Although there were elements of nostalgia: the cars, for instance – there were always an awful lot of Fords. Perhaps the BBC had done a deal.)
    ‘They fight crime on wheels in a new series beginning tonight’, said the
Radio Times
on 28 December 1961. Fighting crime on wheels has got itself a bad name in the period since, but in those days the lads in the cars were cast as more or less sophisticated social workers, imbued albeit with the extra moral authority of the law, who cruised from domestic disturbance to truant shoplifter distributing a positive understanding over the public-sector suburban desolation of (Kirkby) Newtown. It is this desolation that hasn’t dated: it’s all still there, and it still appears on television, in the work of Alan Bleasdale et al., though for my money a low-key
Z Cars
beats their didactic tear-jerking any day. The difference is that in 1961 thingswere considered to be capable of getting better, whereas now everyone thinks they’re getting worse. Both the episodes shown took a ‘social problem’ as their theme rather than any crime. The first had Jock Weir and Fancy Smith (‘Z Victor 1’) trying to prevent the biggest of a shipload of hard-drinking just-got-paid Norwegian whalers from being fleeced by a girl desperate for money (the ‘social problem’), posing as a waterfront prostitute. All the action takes place inside a pub, which is just as well as the surviving print is re-filmed from a video monitor and is not very sharp.
    The other episode (‘People’s Property’, 15 May 1962) was mostly the original, probably 35mm, film, but parts of this have evidently gone missing and been replaced by sections re-filmed from a video monitor, which are inserted quite uninhibitedly, the change often occurring in mid-scene. The original photography is very good, and when seen on the screen is reminiscent of later Ealing films. This is an observation one could never make seeing it on television, and which quite undermined my vague memories of the series. The episode makes ‘much use of atmospheric locations’, which probably also did not come across on television, the landscape locations suffering most of all. It is not, however, my intention to make a polemic on television versus cinema or video versus film, by suggesting that revelatory experience when seeing a twenty-one-year-old television