The Multiplanar Image

the windows. I can’t help but recall Paul Virilio’s remark, that the landscape seen from the train window is art, just as much as the works of Pablo Picasso or Paul Klee. Virilio calls the eff ect of speed on the landscape an “art of the engine.”1 And he associates it with cinema. “What happens in the train window, in the car windshield, in the television screen, is the same kind of cinematism,” he writes.2 For Virilio, this art of the engine, these eff ects of speed, for all their beauty, are deadly. Cinematism entails an optical logistics that ultimately prepares us for the bomb’s-eye view, consigning us to a life at one end or the other of a gun, or missile, or some other ballistic system. Maybe it’s just me, but as I look at the landscape from the bullet train, I watch how the countryside seems to separate into the diff erent layers of motion, and how structures transform into silhouettes. Th ese eff ects make me wonder if there is not also an “animetism” generated through the eff ects of speed. Th is animetism does not turn its eyes from the window in order to align them with the speeding locomotive or bullet or robot. It remains intent on looking at the eff ects of speed laterally, sideways, or crossways. Consequently, animetism emphasizes how speed divides the landscape into diff erent planes or The Multiplanar Image