The Last Vehicle is one of the first of Ortuño’s video works. In it he pays tribute to the history of cinema. For this piece Ortuño appropriates and reutilises images and sounds taken from existing films, and combines these with material that he has filmed himself. Both sets of images, those that he appropriated as well as those he shot in the train and underground, feature the train as the ultimate protagonist. The appropriated scenes are taken from films by the Lumiere brothers, Adolph Zukor and Billy Bitzer. They show the arrival of a train and the passengers coming out of the carriages. From their inception, both the train and the cinema have run parallel lives. Both reflect human progress as well as a new way of perceiving and showing reality. The train’s window mimics the frame of the lens and that of the screen, in front of which reality passes by at a speed which is only possible to experience and generate with the help of a machine.
The soundtrack contains fragments from Wim Wenders’ film Tokyo-Ga.