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Recovery

In the 19th century, railway companies were central in introducing unified time zones to the North American continent. A document of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company states that at 10:31 am on Sunday, December 2, 1883, local Winnipeg time was to be changed to the new Standard Time, or Central Time. Local Winnipeg time was exactly 29 minutes slower than the new Standard Time, and clocks had to be advanced accordingly.

The film—shot in Winnipeg, Canada on December 2, 2000, from 10:31 am to 11 am—is a stationary view of what was once North America’s largest rail yard. In a single, continuous 29-minute shot, the film shows a number of large engines, sitting like dinosaurs in the snowy surrounds of the rail yard. As steam and snow are blown across the view in a fierce Prairie winter, the engines are occasionally shunted—extremely slowly—from track to track.

Housed inside a 40' freight container—the type commonly used for cargo transportation via rail, truck or ship—the film is screened every 31 minutes past the hour. The container functions much like an itinerant movie theatre in the early days of cinema, in that it is a self-contained, potentially mobile unit.

As new technologies, cinema and railways were of the same generation, and both profoundly influenced and irrevocably altered the perception of time and space. Recovery is the ostensible regaining of the 29 minutes that were ‘lost to progress’ in Winnipeg in that December of 1883.