The road of history
Twelve short films built on the Swiss newsreel (1940-1975). Each episode takes a period document about the road and uses it to open a question about the future. Here the series is simulated: no archive footage until the archive grants the licence.
Simulation: no agreement with the archive has been signed yet.
Four registers, always declared
Viewers always know whether they are seeing the past, our reading, verified research or an invented future.
The period document in black and white, never colourised, with its reference and year.
Our juxtaposition of documents, declared as an editing choice.
Today's finding, with its limit and DOI.
What is generated, with the tool and the date. It is not a product.
One episode, seven chapters
Four to six minutes. The order stays the same; the timings do not.
- 0:00
- The question
- 0:20
- The document
- 1:10
- The context
- 2:00
- The doubt
- 3:00
- Today
- 4:00
- Imagined future
- 4:45
- The question that remains
No. 01 · Who comes next?
In 1971 someone warns those coming up behind about the danger. Who warns us, before we set off?
- Archive
- Swiss newsreel, SFW 1453-1, 1971, in German.
- Thesis
- Danger on the road is signalled to those coming next. Sleepiness starts before departure, and drivers may not notice it.
- Status
- Minimal archive: a description and the words of the film, no footage.
- For your next departure
- The sign that does not exist, in Perspectives.
The twelve plates
Working titles: they may change after the archive research.
Danger is signalled to those coming next. Sleepiness starts before departure.
The train carries the car across the Alps: the journey becomes easy, the body stays the same.
The motorway promises time saved. What do we do with it at three in the morning?
Crash barriers, signs, bans. For sleepiness there is no sign.
Light made the night drivable. It did not change the need to sleep.
Professional drivers had rules on driving hours before sleepiness had a public name.
The first motorway service areas designed the stop as part of the journey.
Switzerland measures time to a tenth of a second. Measuring the sleep of drivers is still research.
Every new road had its opponents. What did they see that we no longer see?
Preventing, warning and rescuing remain three different things.
The wish to set off can include the right to stop.
In Romansh: who tells the future of a place, if its language keeps the memory?
With the archive, if it agrees
Simulation of a collaboration: what we propose.
For the site, video on demand and the documentary: one agreement for every use.
In every episode, the archive's form of citation and a link to the public record on Memobase.
An episode screened with the people who look after the collection, and the question it leaves open discussed with the audience.