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AIR TRAVEL IN ART, MUSIC, AND FILM

Air travel is such a visual thing. Take a look some time at the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903. The image, captured by bystander John T. Daniels and since reproduced millions of times, is about the most beautiful photograph in all of 20th century iconography. Daniels had been put in charge of a cloth-draped 5 X 7 glass plate camera stuck into Outer Banks sand by Orville Wright. He was instructed to squeeze the shutter bulb if “anything interesting” happened. The camera was aimed at the space of sky — if a dozen feet of altitude can be called such — where, if things went right, the Wright’s plane, the Flyer, would emerge in its first moment of flight.

Things did go right. The contraption rose into view and Daniels squeezed the bulb. We see Orville, visible as a black slab, more at the mercy of the plane than controlling it. Beneath him Wilbur keeps pace, as if to capture or tame the strange machine should it decide to flail or aim for the ground. You cannot see their faces; much of the photo’s beauty is not needing to. It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world, one flying, the other watching. We see centuries worth of imagination brought to a bleak, almost completely anonymous fruition. Which is probably how it works — how it has to work — with many of history’s more pivotal moments. This one, though, we’ve got on film.

The world's first powered flight, 1903, captured by John T. Daniels

With popular culture, I figure movies are the place to find the most meaningful and impressionistic tributes. One might parallel the 1950′s dawn of the Jet Age with the realized potential of Hollywood — the turbine and Cinemascope as archetypal tools of promise. Decades later there’s till a cordial symbiosis at work: a lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies.

The crash plot is the easy and obvious device, but the most thoughtful moments are when planes appear incidentally: the requisite farewell airport scene (always departing, never arriving); the propeller plane dropping the spy in some godforsaken battle zone, or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52′s tail snared along the riverbank in Apocalypse Now; the Polish jetliners roaring in the backdrop of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalog, part IV. For most of us, airplanes are a means to an end, and often enough the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, or otherwise life-changing journeys we tend to embark on. The furtive glimpses portray them best, far more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script.

When it comes to music, I think of a United Airlines TV ad that ran briefly in the mid 1990s — a plug for their new Latin American destinations. The commercial starred a parrot, who proceeds to peck out several seconds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on a piano. “Rhapsody” was United’s corporate theme for several years — a stirring accompaniment to the shot of a 777 set against the sky.

The Boeing family seems more musically inclined than most, and I know of at least three songs mentioning 747s, though we shouldn’t forget the late Joe Strummer’s reference to the DC-10 in the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs.” Somehow the Airbus brand doesn’t lend itself lyrically, though Kinito Mendez, a merengue songwriter, paid a sadly foreboding tribute to the A300 with “El Avion,” in 1996. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” sings Mendez, immortalizing American Airlines’ popular morning nonstop between New York and Santo Domingo. Flight 587 was well known among the city’s Dominicans, familiar as any local bus. In November, 2001, five years after “El Avion,” the flight crashed after takeoff from Kennedy airport killing 265 people.

My formative years, musically speaking, hail from the underground rock scene covering a span from about 1981 through 1986. This might not seem a particularly rich genre from which to mine out lyrical links to flight, but the task proves easier than you might expect. “Airplanes are fallin’ out of the sky…” sings Grant Hart on a song from Hüsker Dü’s 1984 masterpiece, Zen Arcade, and three albums later his colleague Bob Mould would shout of a man “sucked out of the first class window!” Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record featured a back cover graphic of a Douglas DC-8, while the Beastie Boys’ 1986 album Licensed to Ill depicted an airbrushed American Airlines 727 as its cover art.

The well-known Congolese painter Cheri Cherin is one of very few artists to commemorate a plane crash on canvas. His “Catastrophe de Ndolo,” seen below, depicts a 1996 incident in Zaire, as it was known at the time, in which an overloaded Antonov freighter careened off the runway at Kinshasa’s Ndolo airport and slammed into a market killing an estimated 300 people — only two of whom were on the airplane (a precise fatality count was never determined).

I asked Sister Wendy Beckett what she thought of Cherin’s non-masterpiece. You probably remember Sister Wendy — art historian, critic, and Catholic nun — from the PBS series a few years ago. “A splendidly gory recreation,” she tells us. “We see a bloody, devastated marketplace marked with the hulk of a burning fuselage. Yet the true fury of the event is captured not in the fire and gore, but in the cries and gestures of the people. It’s the apocalyptic landscape of a Bosch painting seen through the anguished psyche of modern African folk art.”

In reality who knows what Sister Wendy might say. I made that up and, if you can’t tell, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Cheri Cherin has nothing on a certain young artist whose pièce de résistance appears below. This work commemorates the horrific, if entirely fictional three-way collision between Swissair, American Airlines and TWA. I would date this to 1975 or so, when I was nine years-old.

Movies, music, paintings.

Meanwhile, the Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry registers no fewer than 20 entries under “Airplanes,” 14 more for “Air Travel,” and at least another five under “Airports.” Names here don’t include Smith, but do include Frost and Sandburg.

You’re hereby spared my own aeropoems, but among my favorites are “Tarmac” and “On an Airplane.” Maybe it was the cockpit checklists that inspired me, free verse masterpieces that they are:

Stabilizer trim override, normal
APU generator switch, off
Isolation valve, closed.
Autobrakes…maximum!