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| Drawing based on a shot from Venice Pier (Gary Beydler, 1976).
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Los
Angeles is a universe of cities and roads and land. How does one get
to (make) sense (of) it? Baudrillard felt that the best way is the
plane, but aerial vision stops on the top of the things. Banham
proposed to get in the car and hit what he called autopia.
Soja, perhaps more courageously, explored real-and-imagined spaces of
downtown L.A. on foot. And so on, and so on. But, one of the
privileged paths to L.A. is still the very stuff of which it was and
is being made – celluloid.
As
of late, I have been discussing cinematic incarnations of Los Angeles
from the point of view of film noir. These visions are filtered
through the perspectives of noir protagonists, necessarily
fragmentary and patchy. This may as well be symptomatic of the entire
experience of the city, and especially this city, almost a synonym
for centrifugal sprawl. But, a carefully constructed collage of films
may provide a good trajectory. Especially if these are, by their
nature, non-fiction, and produced by a bunch of watchful experimental
filmmakers.
The
other day I was lucky enough to attend to the screening entitled
Urban Observations – LosAngeles,
organised by Sheffield Fringe. Six films were selected by Adam Hyman,
'documentary filmmaker and executive Director of Los Angeles Filmforum,
the longest-running showcase for independent, experimental and
progressive moving-image art in Southern California'. Films have been
shot over the span of half a century, and they cover are much more
than just 'urban observations'.
The
screening opens straight from the urban core, a very downtown Grand
Central Market (William Hale,
1963). There are no usual preliminaries, urban panoramas as seen from
the steeping hills, views so beloved by the Hollywood (often being in
fact views from Hollywood stars' roof terraces). Instead, Grand
Central Market lies deep in the great plain, and the film captures
the bowels of one of this fundamental node for the city's system of
food provision. (Thus, the current topicality of edible geographies
is not such a new thing. The film was financed by the US Information
Agency fifty years ago.) In just 10 minutes of the film, complicated
preparations for a market day unfurl, followed by an almost ritual
opening of gates, which then let pass through streams of people, who
apply themselves to the shopping of ingredients for their meals. The
co-presence of races and genders is astounding, there are Asians,
Whites, Afro-Americans, all together, equally in roles of vendors or
buyers. Grand Central Market really 'brings it all together',
constructing an image of globality rather precocious for the year
1963.
Another
body dedicated to the food provision was in those years taking over
the centenary institution of green markets – supermarket. It is the
protagonist of the film that followed, Shoppers Market
(John Vicario, 1963). Made in
the very same year as the first one and essentially about the same
subject, the picture appears to be different to such an extent that
we may wonder if the people engage in the identical activity. The
exchange of glances and bargaining between vendors and buyers is
gone, leaving the scene to a different body language. An air of
confusion envelopes the clients, women look slightly disoriented in
front of the endless racks of canned food (for example, up to the
point of musing endlessly about which of the same product to pick).
The general feeling is that of uncanniness, as if the buyers still
haven't learned the rules of this new choreography. Of course, this
is partially a result of Vicario's razor-edge nervous editing, loops
of frames, and the asynchronous usage of sound. In several sequences,
the sound (registered live on spot, occasionally deepened or
befuddled with classic musical intonations) and the image fold onto
each other as a Moebius strip. The so-everyday business of buying
food seems to assume pyschedelic nuances. And, yes, the stage of
events is the container box of a 24/7 open space supermarket. Only
the very last shot of the film shows its exterior – a neon sign
glowing in twilight. But, Vicario is careful not to produce just an
apocalyptic prelude thanks to masterful counterpoints: clumsy and
quasi-comical gestures or grimaces of the buyers. That is where this
film connects with the previous one, in the end, it is just quotidian
buying-food thing. A solitary or family experience, just a dull
routine or maybe an occasion for an encounter, between racks or
market stands.
Darker
tinges settle in after the twilight, in the film that follows,
Vineland (Laura
Kraning, 2009). Its main character is the open-air film screen of, as
the press release states, 'the last drive-in movie theater in L.A.'.
Even if in fact it were not the last one, it may as well be the one.
The sunshine and even the cold bright of neon have given way to
reflections of reflections and shadows, in this film theatre with a
name invoking sun and vitality, but which looks more like a part of
the noir world, nested among the warehouses of the City of Industry,
a city almost devoid of inhabitants, an obsolete version of an 'edge
city'. Hollywood's grand dreams (of glamour and catastrophe alike)
are fractured, distorted, inversed in mirrors, through windshields,
and absorbed in that other dream machine – an automobile. An
explosion on screen coincides with the noisy passage of a train,
which seems as about to crush the framework of the screen. Silver
screen is not a blank surface, it is a morphological feature, a lieu
of sedimentation of films, of a hundred years' long line of dramas
and comedies. A layering of history much deeper than that of the
surrounding built environment. Respectful to that other very Angeleno
tradition of debunking the city with ever noirer notes, Vineland
is a pure Ecology of Fear: [an]Imagination of Disaster, as Mike
Davis put it poetically (and menacingly). Blinding lights seem to reflect in
opaque shadows.
In
plain daylight, Piensa En Mi
(Alexandra Costa, 2009) drifts across this ocean of (sub)urbanity. In
greater part shot aboard a public bus, Costa captures the slow
gliding of this means of transport, through the so common yet
uncertain city views. Commuters, as in every other metropolis around
the world, seem abstracted, pensive, not there. But, they are
romantic figures, too, looking this strange urban beast in the eye.
They are aware that bus is the least efficient means of travelling
this cityscape, but for some reason they need or just feel like
crossing it and that is what they do. On the other hand, machines of
freedom – cars – do not seem that much able to confront the scale
of the landscape either. They are captured on film through a barbed
fence, as they roll hypnotically in streams down a superhighway,
coming from anywhere going anywhere. What strikes is the essential
solemnity of the rhythms of these movements of machines and men. As
Banham already perfectly grasped, there is no such thing as
infrastructure in Los Angeles. Its surreally intricate road system is
an actor unto itself, as much as any other, and every Angeleno
probably feels the gravity of this system, be him or her a car driver
or a public bus commuter. From this recognition a strange calm
abounds, paralleled with an awkward nonchalance, not dissimilar to
those of the regular customers of Shoppers Market.
Yet
grander rhythms, the geological ones, are at play in Devil'sGate (Laura Kraning, 2011). Not
so faraway from the hum of the L.A.'s superhighways, the earth
emanates silence, criss-crossed with the arrhythmic gurgling of
water. That most precious and rare element of every landscape, and
especially of Californian dry as dust valleys, is given a gold
treatment, being channelled into beds of cement of Devil's Gate Dam.
But this is not the story of a difficult (and speculative) enterprise
to conquest the water and make California a fertile Eden. Kraning's
landscape shots, ranging from close-ups of desertic moss to larger
morphologies of crackled earth, unveil other powers in act over that
same territory. These ones are disjoining and enjoining almost
unimaginable times and spaces. Inspired and deterred by them, the man
[sic] aimed to tame a more malleable substance – air, by the use of
another all but intangible element – fire. The landscape shots are
cross-cut with a narrative line about scientist/mystic John Whiteside
Parsons, a rocket propulsion engineer and a follower of Aleister
Crowley's. Parsons was one of the mid-20th
century classical Californian figures, endeavouring to mix odd
cocktails of heavens and hell. His experiments in occult magick,
recounted filmically in form of diary entries, in white letters on
black screen, inscribe themselves over the landscape, nervously as
creeks or fault lines do, but leaving no trace behind. Man is absent,
no footprints in the dust. Solidified in the mute lines of the dam.
Yet the water bubbles, and the vegetation survives the desert (and
maybe turns it into a green valley).
The
interplay between dry and wet, solid and fluid, continues, with
another balance of forces, in Venice Pier
(Gary Beydler, 1976). Again, the man [sic], bravely dreams up and
engineers a bridge into the void, spiking straight into the ocean.
The pier is solid, mould in pure concrete, so starkly in contrast
with the lightness of the surrounding water, a discord gleaming man's
uncertainty in front of to him foreign physicality of water. But the
pier is not a challenge to the ocean, as Devil's Gate Dam is, or
rockets are. The pier is made to contemplate and to joy in something
bigger (the sense of reuniting which drives that other Californian
favourite – surfing). A tiny cylinder-and-cone-shaped building at
the head of the pier is not there to fire itself into the ocean and
colonise it, but to affirm that humans are a part of it as well. Men,
women and children are filmed as they walk up and down the pier,
walking across the ocean and back ashore.
Beautifully
attuned to what it aims to present, the film is a huge yet patient
undertaking in itself. It was shot 'over the course of a year'.
The time can be seen and sensed, humans' and the earth's time in
embrace. The pier is intermittently bathed by sun, washed by rain,
swept by wind, covered by clouds. In shots taken in dusk or in pitch
dark, nothing more than nine lampposts, small glow worms betray the
human's presence, enmeshing him with the folds of the sky, the ocean,
and the earth. The overall time-lapse nature of the film, punctuated
by continuous, at time almost imperceptible, shifts of the camera's
position along the pier, makes tangible an ancient saying panta
rhei. Evoking the quote of
Timothy Morton's, from The Ecological Thought (2010:
45):
“A
time-lapse film of a flower growing and dying shows not only its
fragility and unique beauty but also its linkage with everything
else.”
These
words filter through the entire collage of the films. Los Angeles is
an intermingling of urban and sub-urban ecologies with other, larger
and tinier, ecologies, and the medium of the film is a powerful means
of 'connecting the points' of this wondrous mesh. What is impressed
on films are not false promises of a green utopia with orange groves
sprouting from drips of water, but translucent ecologies of shadows
and lights, of myriads of human and nonhuman forces, to be touched
and sounded with fear and curiosity.
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