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Bill MacGillivray's first feature, little appreciated at the time of its release and previously unseen in Australia, is a small gem. Stations is a road-movie-on-rails that replaces the cliches of the genre with a choughtful gaze, as a seemingly successful man in his early thirties has cause to consider the direction of his life. |
Tom is a successful television journalist whose career suddenly fumbles when a documentary he is making on the question of failure leads to the suicide of one of his closest friends. After an imposed vacation he is assigned a more grass-roots story, which involves taking the train coast-to-coast to capture aspects of the Canadian identity, interviewing the 'average' Canadian at whistle stops across the country. As a chapter of Canadian history has closed with the gradual disappearance of the railroad, so too for Tom, who by the time he reaches Newfoundland, has- reached the end of an epoch in his fife.
Stations clearly signals the major preoccupations to be found in MacGillivray's later work — characters seeking to clarify and take charge of their lives; the quest for Canadian national and regional identities; the impact of modernization; and the interaction of art and life in 'daily use'. Quite ahead of its time, Stations employs the self-reflexive use of images (television, video, Polaroids, home movies, etc.) to understand and articulate personal histories and comment on the action. With its fragmented narrative, existential concerns and meditative modalities; Stations is reminiscent of early "Wim Wenders and surprisingly mature for a first feature, while its explorations of identity, memory and the relationship between the individual and landscape are qumtessentially Canadian.