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Tech

Jacques Green's 'Night Tracking': Bliss-Techno and High-Speed Getaways

The ethereal side of street racing.
Image: Green performing at Mutek, 2011/Philip Sawicki

Dash cammed high-speed suicide sprints around the quiet late night streets of large cities didn't start with the internet. By many accounts it began with the short film "C'était un rendez-vous," releaed in 1976 courtesy of the film's apparent sole filmmaker, Claude Lelouch. It is simply 10 minutes of high speed driving around Paris very late at night filmed with a camera mounted underneath the car's bumper. It ends with the driver parking, stepping out of the vehicle, and embracing a strange woman. The end.

The French film is said to be the inspiration for the now 10 volume Getaway in Stockholm collection. The Stockholm films are released one per year and are based on a single night's racing around the titular city, usually featuring new/different cars. What's interesting is that they're more hypnotic than anything you might immediately associate with street racing, delivering a kind of bizarre visual poetry rather than out and out testosterone. The effect is a weird mix of snuff film (with the death implied, I think, at some point), technology worship, and noiseless urban landscapes. That's part of the oddness: the pristine environments. They are dark (relatively), empty, and viewed too briefly for detail.

The Stockholm videos are the source material for Jacques Green's "Night Tracking" video (via FACT), which dives deep into the poetry suggested above. Its main characters aren't the car or driver, or even the city. It's that white blob of headlights, tracing across stone streets and dark residential windows like some sort of party-ghost. Green's track is proper too, a mood-saturated house cut that deftly carves out the urgency of super-sketchy driving along with its less expected ethereality.

The track is on Greene's recent EP Phantom Vibrate, described by Resident Advisor as, "an attempt to mimic an overstimulating but ultimately isolating relationship with technology." There's not much more isolating than the inside of a car.