Telegraph
Decoding the Past
Directed by Cooper Troxell
Directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Cooper Troxell, Telegraph is a captivating short that follows a 19th-century telegraph operator overwhelmed by a flood of information.
Building on the success of Heptapus - which premiered at the Oscar-qualifying River Run Film Festival and was featured on Short of the Week - Troxell continues his exploration of time, technology, and human connection.
With Telegraph, he blends historical accuracy with modern anxieties, delving into the optical telegraph - a pre-electric system that transmitted messages at remarkable speed. With an intrigue for the world of codes and languages, Troxell creates a timeless and thought-provoking narrative.
Telegraph, set in the 19th-century, portrays a telegraph operator overwhelmed by information. What drew you to this moment in history and the specific role of an operator, and how do you think it reflects the modern experience of information overload?
I’m always looking for ways to see the past not as a distant country our ancestors lived in, but as a mirror that reveals something about who we are today. I’ve always been interested in codes and languages, and in reading about early telegraph technologies, I was startled to find that most of what I think of as unique to the internet era actually started about 150 years prior. Instant communication across the world, hacking, misinformation, identity fraud, dating, playing chess — it was already in full swing with the birth of the telegraph.
When I say “telegraph,” I’m not referring to the Morse electric telegraph, but an earlier, pre-electric version that operated by line-of-sight. The optical telegraph you see in this short is very close to how it actually functioned in the 1830s. A series of mechanical arms were positioned to create pre-defined symbols on top of a tower. These towers were stationed at 15 mile intervals, allowing a single message to be transmitted at about 200 miles per hour — lightning-fast compared to horse by mail.
As I imagined what it would be like to work on one of these towers, I imagined staring through a telescope at a moving image for hours on end, reflexing transcribing the symbols. Once the surface of it falls away, the actual work suddenly feels very similar to a white-collar information worker job. Staring at an endless inbox, responding to the stream of emojis on Slack. I felt a kinship with this imaginary telegraph operator, who would have had a job that no one at the time fully understood. And now the world is full of his compatriots.
The striking choreography by Sara da Silva conveys the protagonist’s inner turmoil. How did you collaborate with Sara and the dancers, Iren Kamyshev and Cheryl Rosario, to translate these emotions into movement?
Sara was a perfect collaborator, because she understood the complexity of the challenge. The choreography is both dance and not-dance. We looked at the original code book for the French optical telegraph system, and as you can see in the tower symbols, there is a visual similarity between the arms of the tower moving and the human body. These operators would not have thought of their labor as a form of artistic expression. Sara took my crude version of the YMCA dance, essentially, and developed it with Irone and Cheryl to imagine how these — not dancers, but information workers — might move. It was essential to convey that these might be 19th-century versions of air marshallers on the tarmac. They work a job, clock in, clock out, and while they might have a certain flair, they don’t think of themselves as artists working with the body. Sara was able to imagine this reality from the inside, and worked with Irene and Cheryl to refine a signaling system that made sense from a story perspective and yet retained an elegance to it as well.
The decision to shoot in black and white gives Telegraph a timeless, almost otherworldly quality. How did you and DP, John Henri Coene, approach crafting this aesthetic?
This is why John Henri is so talented. The initial plan was a de-saturated sepia look. As we were setting up the first shot, looking at the dancers in their black-and-white uniforms in this beautiful ancient space, John Henri said “I think it has to be black and white.” And he was completely right. Working on a small budget with limited time, we had walked the space several times and storyboarded everything. The shots were composed, and John Henri’s eye gave each shot that “in the pocket” feeling that it just had to be exactly as it was. And yet that decision to make it entirely black-and-white transforms us to a fable space, a world of symbols. And suddenly the uniforms are in conversation with the architecture, with the composition of the shot itself. It all becomes a single, unified experience.
The sound design really guides the film through shifts in intensity and moments of humour. What was the collaborative process like with your sound team to achieve these auditory layers?
I took a crack at composing the music this time around, which I haven’t done in years. This gave me a certain versatility in creating sound cues that are more like foley effects in my mind, bringing them into the edit, and playing with the edit in real time. You’ll notice it in the “dancing” sequences in particular. When I brought Garrett on, he had a lot of input into where we needed sound cues, and we went back and forth quite a bit on creating a visceral experience without leaving the aesthetic world of the short.
“I felt a kinship with this imaginary telegraph operator, who would have had a job that no one at the time fully understood.”
With such a talented team, from producer Evangeline Graham to costume designer Grace Troxell and editor Garrett McDonald, how did you foster collaboration to realise your vision for Telegraph?
The watchword was monomania. Every time we could find an overlap between two departments, we did, and there were many surprising connections. I think of the many moments where Akil Kirlew, our lead actor, borrowed movements from the choreography in developing his dramatic performance. The way editor Garrett McDonald used sound cues as the foley, blurring the line between sound design and composition. We talked about lot about integrating the compositional and sound design aspects of the mix. Grace’s design of the telegraph uniforms themselves evokes the shape of the telegraph symbols. We designed the uniforms in conjunction with the choreography, so that the uniforms would enhance the visual connection to the moving tower.
From your award-winning work on Queen of Glory to commercial projects, looking ahead, are there particular themes or mediums you’re excited to explore?
I’m developing a feature version of the tower project, set to film this year as well as a few other short films: a gas station attendant has a transcendent moment where he sees with unclouded eyes his minuscule part in the climate crisis; a beat reporter on Mars discovers a baseball scandal that could break the spirit of a crumbling colony. I am always fascinated by finding resonances in fictional worlds with our mundane lives today.
As an artist, I am always pushing the integration and re-imagining of how the elements of a movie work together. I am particularly interested in expanding the possibilities of low-budget visual effects. As I build out the world of the telegraph tower, for instance, I am scanning vintage 19th-century landscape photographs, and converting them to 3-D objects. The resulting images are not hyper-realistic, instead they retain a texture of the lost technology that captured those images. I see endless possibilities for the future.
Operator - Akil Kirlew
Dancer - Iren Kamyshev, Cheryl Rosario
Director - Cooper Troxell
Producer - Evangeline Graham
DP - John Henri Coene
Choreographer - Sara da Silva
Costume Designer - Grace Troxell
Editor - Garrett McDonald
Producer/1st AD - Harry Bartle
Location Scout - Claudio Roque
Associate Producer - Oliver Hudson