In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AIRPLANES 9
for him because he is judged to be too gifted for mere auxiliary work:
"Look, my friend, ... Your place is in a technical school. We don't need
intelligent people here-we need stupid brutes for this work" (178). In
Bonamy Dobree's essay "Timoteo 0 el teatro del porvenir," published in
Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente, theatergoers arrive in an air-taxi
at the skyscraper which is the site of the futuristic national theater: "Our
air-taxi left us on what seemed to be the nineteenth floor of a building,
and we immediately entered an enormous funnel shaped like a hyperbola,
whose walls consisted of rows of seats. It could hold about twenty
thousand people and resembled a Roman amphitheater, although it
differed in the unusual curve of the walls and in the fact that the seats
continued right down to the bottom of the funnel" (171). This could
easily be a set from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, where "canyon-like
walls of city blocks rise far above street level. Cars and trains speed along
on overhead tracks; airplanes circle like moths" (Lang, 34). Indeed, the
movement of the airplanes in Metropolis is as light and sometimes as
jerky as that of moths. Hectically, they dart along corridors and schedules
that are too complex for the viewer's gaze to comprehend.
But what filmmakers and writers envision as a highly automatized
device of the future cannot completely escape the existential shadow of
death. On February 5, the French pilot Menard, his severely burned body
grotesquely swathed in bandages, receives from his country's assistant
secretary of state for aeronautics the cross of the Legion d'Honneur for
having rescued numerous bags of mail from the wreckage of his plane
(Annees-memoire, 29). On September 22, a three-engine Sikorsky aircraft
with a French-American crew of four under the leadership of
Capitaine Fonck fails to lift off from Roosevelt Airfield in New York for
what is supposed to be the first transatlantic flight from west to east. The
Sikorsky is destroyed in "a sheet of flame and a huge column of smoke."
Two crew members die. In the press coverage of this accident, the language
of high-tech normality turns into melodramatic existentialism.
After saying their goodbyes "as nonchalantly as if [they] were seeing a
friend off for a steamer trip," Capitaine Fonck's admirers "[watched]
with anxious eyes as the machine gathered headway. Sikorsky stood with
clenched hands, his strained face turned eagerly after his machine, as if
he would lift it into the air by the sheer force of his hopes." After the
crash, the two surviving participants in the enterprise struggle to stay
calm. Lieutenant Curtin, the American second-in-command, tries "des-