Reading Canada Backwards

At the time Reading Canada Backwards was made, I had much experience riding freight trains. Having crossed Canada many times, I started the trip with idea to see all the landscape of Canada during the day. I had to catch a new train every day; the camera was along for the ride. Hopefully (as the idea went) it would show me and everyone else something at the end that would be impossible for eyes to see.

That is.... the film has life outside of my own memory of the journey.

For the length of the country(4 000 miles), at 30mile intervals, I shot 90 single frames of film using the spacing of telephone poles. This makes the film 12000 frames long (9.5min on 16mm, 11.11min on Super-8 and 10.5 min on video).