Night Train

Night Train

Synopsis

"Shot with a camera clamped to the lowered window of a train traveling from Birmingham to London. Filmed in time-lapse, on projection the two‐hour journey is abbreviated to two minutes. The long exposure‐time of each frame transforms the lights in the landscape into horizontal streaks (neon lights appear as dotted lines due to their flicker). These individual frames were extended by running the film through the contact printer several times to make a multiple‐superimposition print, each time slipping the film along by one frame. This effectively slows the film down. Two years later I made a sound version of the film, using the lights to generate ‘optical sounds’ (details of this process are in my dvd/book Optical Sound Films 1971-2007)." – Guy Sherwin