Designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific II, this film was shot near the artist's studio, from a window two storeys below on the second floor of a next-door building, between December, 1974, and February, 1975. It can be projected alone or in double-screen format with Canadian Pacific II.
Vancouver harbour with its railyards, mountains and passing ships is a vista in fluid transformation as three winter months are reviewed and condensed to ten minutes. "What interested me about these shots were the horizontals: the train tracks, the water, the mountains and the sky and the way in which these four elements would shift, change and fuse."
- David Rimmer
"Canadian Pacific I is a one-shot film, or rather one shot that is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same camera angle, same framing, during a period of several months. Camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance (top part of picture). Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads. Very impeccably executed, very formal film. But its formalism is very unimposing, like in a Hudson School painting. I'm looking forward to seeing it again."
- Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice.
silent
