Henry Hills
Experimental Filmmaker
Experimental Filmmaker
Commute, 2024 (9 min)
COMMUTE was recorded on the train route I travelled back and forth from Vienna to my teaching job at FAMU in Prague from 2008 until 2019. Travel by train allowed people for the first time to begin to see things fast. The entire history of film from the Lumiere brothers on is suffused with train imagery. Train tracks with their ties bear an astounding resemblance to the film strip and the imagery in this film is entirely tracks. Gazing out the window at switches and crossings during repeated travels invokes a certain reverie. Or it can be viewed as entirely abstract, sort of like looking at a roll of film as you crank it high speed on the rewinds. Filming in 16mm on a wind-up Bolex adds its magic. The soundtrack is composed from a wide range of train musics, mostly selected from my extensive music library for the moments whose vocal or instrumental passages most radiate a deep personal life-experience of riding or living by the rails.