"I wanted to make a film that was exactly one year in the making. I love the ocean, and I decided to shoot on the Venice Pier, which was about a quarter mile long. About every ten feet, there are divisions in the pier, which I decided to use as the shooting points. I made a drawing of the pier on vellum, marking out these divisions.

"I started shooting maybe in November or December, and shot it all the way through to the following year, finishing on the same date. I shot in all the different seasons, different times of day, filling in the blanks on the drawing I made of the pier. It was shot out of order: watching the film, you're moving forward every so slowly, through different times, different seasons, different situations. Sometimes you get the feeling of movement, sometimes you don't. No need for staging, I just shot things that were happening.

"When it was finished, I presented it for about a month at Gagosian gallery. We built a wall with a glass partition, through which you could see the film. Sometimes one person would walk in, sometimes forty, sometimes nobody. The film was projected continuously for the show. The drawing of the pier was hanging vertically in the gallery, along with some of my mirror pieces, which were popular at the time.

"This was my last film. I loved the film, and was very happy with it, but it wasn't received very well. Everyone seemed to ignore it. So I thought, 'Well, what the hell, I'll move on.'" (Gary Beydler, 2008)

"Gary Beydler's last, and possibly least-seen, film is an exhilarating tour down the length of the Venice Pier, shot over the course of an entire year. It's a particularly cinematic walk in many ways. Gary investigates the way a single film stock responds so diversely to different seasons, light, weather, time of day. He also beautifully exploits the power of editing to compose or recompose events. Shot spatially out of order over the course of a year, Gary recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology, so some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or ba ckward in time. The result is one of gauzy impressionism brought into vivid and breathtaking clarity." (Mark Toscano)