Works » By Title » L » Landscape No. 1 (11:02 / 1994)

Landscape No. 1 is a time-lapse film of an automobile journey from Montréal to Sarnia by way of Toronto and Detroit. This film literally is a “road movie”, and was a technical and æsthetic study for a pair of cross-Canada films that were planned but never realized. Two Super-8 movie cameras filmed at a rate of one frame every four seconds, and compressed the 15-hour automobile trip to less than 10 minutes. One camera pointed out the front window of the car, the second out the back window. The average speed of the automobile was 100 km/h (60 mph).

Landscape No. 1 has two versions: a Single Channel Version with a stereo soundtrack, and a five-channel, Installation Version. The Single Channel Version of Landscape No. 1 is a single videotape that, aside from a couple of brief repetitions, preserves the chronological flow of the trip while it varies the visual quality. This version alternates between high-quality and degraded footage, while the Installation Version presents the high-quality and degraded footage simultaneously on different screens.

The soundtrack to the Single Channel Version is a musique-concrète quartet in two movements that correspond to the two days of filming. The instruments of the quartet are the following: struck and scraped sheets of metal, the string-side of a classical guitar bouncing against a table, loops of passing trains, and the crackles of the lead-out groove from a cardboard phonograph record. These sources were selected for their timbral texture, not for any narrative reason. The soundtrack synchronizes with, plays against, and melds into the video. It has percussive and legato sections and layers.

An excerpt from the soundtrack, Woodstock to Detroit, can be found on the DISContact! II compact disc and on Sonus.ca.