A subjective movie camera slips into a tramway to film Dunkirk.  The almost benevolent look that the thus incarnated movie camera alights on now represents a genuine archive of the town and rare proof of its reality in 1913. Remaining in the hands of the Allies during the First World War, Dunkirk was severely bombed by the Germans from the beginning of the Second World War and practically destroyed.  In the middle of the ruins, only this statue of Jean Bart that you can spot in the film remains today.

Eighty percent of film from early times is lost.  Film isn’t immortal: as in Tramway, what remains from this rediscovered subject suffering from grime and holes and there is always the danger of it disappearing.  Contemplating the damaged film as a starting point, film directors like Bill Morrison (1965) turned their attention to this singular combat between the film and its medium:  in Decasia that he made in 2002 altered elements of nitrate were used as an allegory of man’s fight to escape death.

The camera moving in a tracking shot brings us as close to the town as the marks of time on the damaged film take us away from it:  in fact, the narrative is suddenly filled with the materiality of the medium that has become gangrenous over time.  Once again the tramway, like the one that roams the streets of Barcelona in Barcelona en Tranvia or the Irish coast in Once Upon a Tram, becomes the nostalgic witness of time past.

The original music for this film was composed in 2010 by Ivan Boumans Molina in the context of the 2009-2010 partnership with the CNSMDP (Paris Conservatory of Dance and Music).