The journey

An essay film made on board the Trans Siberian Express. The Journey (16mm / DVD 20 min) is an essay film reflecting the changes aboard a train journey through space and time. Ten Brink’s work uses narrative and non-narrative structures to portray the ‘real’ as a complex grid of space and time, culture and memory. Thus memory, real time and dreams all find their own space in the train journey. The film utilises cinematic language as cinematic ‘text’ which becomes a reflective text, mediating between filmmaker and viewer. The Journey constantly shifts its parameters, asking the viewer to reassess the origin and meaning of the exotic content of the film. In the repeated viewing context of looped gallery projection the numerous cinematic narratives and shifting points of view in The Journey allow for multiple readings of the work. Ten Brink was selected in 2005 to take part in an international conference on board the Trans Siberian Express. The conference – Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Era of Permanently Temporary War - brought together 40 artists, political scientists, sociologists and media scholars from 20 countries. Along the route there were conferences in Moscow, Novosibirsk and Beijing and a variety of art works and research papers were produced, culminating in a journal publication and an exhibition at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (part of the ARS 06- Sense the Real Exhibition). This included work by Jake and Dino Chapman, Jota Castro and Petah Coyne. The Journey was screened at the cinema and as video loop in the gallery at Kiasma, and subsequently at London Gallery West, UK, (25.10.07 – 6.01.08). Ten Brink has revised and updated his writings on Essay Film for publication in Film Quarterly in the USA in 2008