Produced by Angrinose

3’02, colour, stereo 

To cross Canada’s vast spaces takes days or weeks: two lanes through boreal forest, four lanes across prairie, gravel roads to the far north, and truck-infested expressways between and through the large cities. Speedsters pass like you are standing still. When stuck behind slow vehicles, you just cannot find that passing lane. The distance to the next town seems to lengthen the closer you get. 

There are miles and miles of miles and miles, and the problem with many road trips is that there is just too much road.

• Song produced 2017
• Footage recorded 2016-19 on Sony Action Cams
• Video edited 2020

10'26, colour and black and white, stereo

Road Movie 401 is a time-lapse film of an automobile journey from Montréal to Sarnia by way of Toronto and Detroit. The journey follows Autoroutes 720 and 20, Highways 401 and 3, and Interstates 75 and 94. 

Literally a 'road  movie', this film was a technical and aesthetic study for a pair of cross-Canada films that have not been made.

Two Super-8 movie cameras filmed at a rate of one frame every four seconds, and compressed the 15-hour automobile trip, shot over two days, into less than 10 minutes. One camera was mounted at the front windscreen of the car, the second at the back window. A custom-built set of relays synchronized the cameras. The average speed of the automobile was 110 km/h (65 mph). 

Originally, I had planned to make two films: one pointed forward, the other pointed backward. All in colour.

But almost all of the footage used is from the rear camera because that footage is clearer and surprisingly easier to watch. But I must confess that the real reason (the truth) is that the front camera stopped working. It died just west of Kingston, less than a quarter of the time into the trip. Time lapse photography turns out to be very hard on consumer-grade camera motors, especially old cameras bought from pawn shops.

I had packed plenty of film, but had only two cameras. So, the loss of the front-facing camera - after I suffered a burst of panic - saw me parked at the side of an off-ramp in the middle of nowhere wondering what the heck I was going to do now.

I decided to keep driving and keep that back-camera shooting.

To make lemonade out of this sour technical problem, I made decisions: film in black and white on the second day of shooting, and abandon most of the front-camera footage

While waiting for the film to be processed, I re-thought the project.

I decided to alternate the view between high-quality and degraded shots especially for the footage of long, dull landscapes. I played around with the footage by re-filming and re-videotaping to see what would happen. These no-budget transfers between film projections, video monitors, and cameras embraced and gloried in the artifacts of low-quality transfers that amplified and superimposed analog artifacts such as flicker, poor colour balance, increased film grain, and video interlacing. This process explored the footage much like how I explore sound by layering, distorting, echoing, and filtering.

Aside from a few brief repetitions to emphasize interesting events, the movie preserves the chronological flow of the trip while it varies the visual quality. The alternations between degradation and clarity evoke how a driver's attention can fade hypnotically during long drives and then snap to attention when another driver does something crazy, or you get wedged into a "truck sandwich", that is, a truck ahead of you, a truck behind, and another truck passing you. Your mind wanders, you read the same signs that you read on the last trip, you wonder how much longer this will take, you wonder when you can next find some place to pee, you get sleepy, you hope that the traffic isn't too heavy as you pass through the next big city, you pass a car that a few miles later passes you and you wonder why this game of “I-pass-you-you-pass-me” happens.

The soundtrack is a musique-concrète quartet in two movements for each day of filming. The instruments of the quartet are: struck and scraped sheets of metal, a classical guitar bouncing the strings against the rim of a table, loops of trains passing over a bridge, and the crackles and pops of the lead-out groove from a phonograph record. I selected these sources for their timbral variety, not for any narrative reason. Percussive and legato sections synchronize with, play against, and merge into the video.

• Filmed on Kodachrome 40 and Kodak Tri-X Super8 film with Minolta (the quick) and Chinon (the dead) cameras
• Edited in Hi8 video
• Original title: "Landscape No. 1, Single-Channel Version" (Seriously!)
• Featured in the New Visions Festival of Audio-Visual Culture, Glasgow, 1996
• Installation version with 5 screens and different soundtrack, Concordia University, 1992
   
• Restored from the master tapes by Angrinose 2016
• Copyright Frank Koustrup 1993