A car identified with the camera travels around a closed circuit a certain number of times. There it will find, with each lap it makes, a screen on which there are a number of scene-images composed of shadow play; as the car travels it will encounter behind these the elements and characters of which they are formed. SUR L‚AUTOROUTE takes the road movie as its point of reference, and in this sense places the characters, and the spectator too, in a situation of transit between one scene and another, so that they build up an exceptionally critical or dissonant relationship with their surroundings. Like road movies, it is organised into episodes, an episode starting each time the car sets out on a lap. The road amidst deepest night is its main scenario, but road movies divides its obsession equally between the road and the house, making the house as home the other scenario shown on the white screen. Each episode is divided into three parts. In the first part the camera-car embarks on its lap until it reaches the screen. The second part is made up of the scene-images which are played out on the screen, while the third part, like the other side of a single coin, shows us the characters and elements of which the images areconstructed and the way they do it. The car which travels the course over and over again takes up the story over and over again as if trying to unravel it, to look at it from other angles. In the course of one of the laps, the fifth, and due to a fault, its lights flash up against the screen, erasing the images and leaving it momentarily blank. The pictures that appear on the screen form shadow-play scenes, a construction method that brings the picture closer to the world of stories, of tales, of dreams and of childhood. In them the leading players ò a man, two children and the house ò are seen as stylised. The pictures show the domestic universe becoming inhospitable for those who inhabit it and the struggle they wage to adapt. In the first lap we see the house with a man reading a book to the children. As if coming alive through the story, the house suddenly begins to move, startling the characters who look on uncomprehending. During the second lap the house has become monumental, forming a sort of spider‚s web which gradually closes in on the man and from which he can find no way out. In the third lap the house is so hostile that it has managed to shut the man up inside the cage with the birds, which attack him. The fourth lap shows the house returning to its normal arrangement, though still rather out of proportion, too big for the people who inhabit it. The children have hidden beneath the table and the man goes about unable to master the domestic universe. In the fifth lap, amidst tremendous disorder, the house has returned to normal scale, the man tidies up and then sits down to rest; now, however, it is the children who are out of proportion, having grown into giants. In the sixth part, and in line with the enormous adaptability of the children, who have now returned to their normal size, the house allows itself to be dominated by them and shrinks down to dolls‚-house scale, while the man can only look on in the realisation of the point to which the house has become alien to him. Unable to move around in it, in the last image on the screen he sees the entire domestic world trooping past him ò furniture, tools, objects that escape him by slipping around him, keeping up a movement of their own as if to make up a world from which the protagonist is excluded. Behind the on-screen images in each of the laps the camera finds the characters and items that make up those pictures and reveals the way they do so. The items making up each scene-picture are brought together on the screen because their projected shadows coexist in a single plane, although in reality man, children and house do not interact but remain isolated, the only thing uniting them being the constant movement of the camera. It is the camera that explains the relationships between the characters. What we see in going through the screen is a mechanism of fiction, and while fiction recounts one thing the mechanism unveils another. Thus the story narrated in this part is a different one: the characters have been expelled from the house; they try to relate to one another but each lives in an isolated world, the domestic universe does not exist, the house is a road and the characters live on it ever in a state of permanent transit. On the other side of the screen the boys are girls and other characters appear, groups of characters that function as associated images and interact with some of the symbolically powerful house objects: the cage with the birds, the books, the teapot. In some way they highlight these objects and intensify the surreal, dreamlike tone in which the story is narrated. The sound track has been specially created for the video, like a second skin attached to the pictures through brief insertions of direct sound-takes, almost reduced to their minimum expression. SUR L‚AUTOROUTE deals with the nature of images and the way in which they are produced. It reconstructs a space through a journey, in a narrative that changes ceaselessly, illustrating the idea that the best way to recount a picture is by means of another picture.