Train Station, 2008, black and white film, 13.30 min, subtitles animation
The turning point was the film “Railway Station”. It has all the typical features that are characteristic of the ABS series. It was inspired by a thought that occurred to me as I was waiting for a train in the Main Railway Station in Prague. I sat on a bench and became aware of the simple fact that the hordes of people around me were reallythinking as intensively as I was. At that moment I had a feeling that the spatial density of the thoughts in the railway station had an incredibly “substantial”, or more precisely “anti-substantial” nature and that it was even more intensive than the intensity of the visible and audible reality. It was a similar feeling that I wanted to capture in this film. It is an unedited, random recording, in which I first worked with a multi-layered sequence of texts.
For an authentic poly-text of this kind to emerge, I had to acquire several texts at the same time. I therefore needed a team of assistants to approach a large number of people at the same time. I gave a Dictaphone to each of them and asked them to spread out in the monitored space. Their task was then to approach everyone captured by the camera and to put to them the question: “Can you please tell me what you were thinking about as you were passing through this space?” Of the people addressed in this way, 80% really answered immediately, probably because they had never met with such a question. The acquired thought was immediately recorded on the Dictaphone.
My job then was to transcribe the testimonies into mental language and to replace them in the form of subtitles in the virtual space and time of the film with the original owners of the thoughts. During the process of animation I worked with the thoughts by stopping each at the left edge of the picture in order to have the option of working with a “random” literary composition.
