Transients, punks and hobos: rethinking the history of train hopping through experimental film

ABSTRACT

While in social history and mobilities research, the study of railway mobility is becoming increasingly popular, offering new insights into (trans)national railway cultures, there is less interest in illicit mobility, unconventional modes of travel and non-regulated, irregular patterns of movement, such as train hopping, and the way they function in experimental film. To fill this gap, I build on the recent mobilities literature to discuss two stylistically distinct experimental films, Reading Canada Backwards (Steve Topping, 1995) and Portland (Greta Snider, 1996), which offer a social commentary on train hopping, typically associated with the history and material conditions of North American railway travels. Challenging the larger freighthopping mobilities discourse, both films confront the historical legacy of the hobo, as reimagined by occasional transients and punk drifters, as a product of capitalist enterprise, railroad transportation services and failed bourgeois masculinity. While in narrative and documentary films, hobo culture often emerges as an alternative, intrepid lifestyle and a personal philosophy based on economic or environmental concerns, Reading Canada Backwards and Portland take a more critical and ironic take on riding the rails, highlighting its casual spontaneity, playful creativity and affective potential, which questions the drifter as an active agent of marginal mobility practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Train hopping
• experimental film
• hobo
• social history
• illicit mobility
• railway mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Reading Canada Backwards is available on Steve Topping’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4LX52AGy5g. Steve Topping is a Canadian artist and filmmaker who lives in Montreal. Mostly associated with the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde cinema, Topping’s multidisciplinary practice has resulted in the creation of several Super 8 films, which use found materials to explore the physical representation of urban and rural landscapes, time, space and the specificity of the site of the film medium.

2. Portland is available on Greta Snider’s Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/79935794. Greta Snider is a San Francisco-based filmmaker. Since the late 1980s, Snider has made several 16 mm essay films, in which she combines the original and archival footage or uses stereoscopic, 3D, AR and hand-processed images. Her work ranges from autoethnographies and found footage films to 3D video collages, which focus on non-fiction and documentary forms of storytelling, human rights, oppressive structures, women’s issues, family history, document and the body.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, under the project Lost highways, forgotten travels: The road movie in the post-war American avant-garde and experimental film through the lens of women and men filmmakers (grant no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).

Notes on contributors

Kornelia Boczkowska

Kornelia Boczkowska is an Assistant Professor at the AMU Faculty of English. She has received several research grants and is the author of two books and over 40 other publications on independent, experimental and documentary films.