Wreck / Nation

Two films in one. Wreck: “I passed the wreck not long after crossing into Saskatchewan. Day 3, alone, driving west towards Vancouver. On the other side of the highway, a twisted mess of iron and steel. Rail cars like beached whales strewn arbitrarily in heaps rupturing the perspective symmetry of the endless prairie. At once an allusion to the fallibility of industrialization and modernity. I felt after it had flashed past the windscreen, that there were significations here that reached far deeper than this immediate literal interpretation. Half an hour after I had watched the image recede completely into the eastern horizon through my side view mirror, the memory of this apocalyptic tableaux – its darkly poetic irony – would compel me to turn back.” Nation: A roll of film shot in Montreal at the 1995 rally against the secession of Quebec became the raw material for a candy coloured hand-processed meditation on the idea of “Nation.”