This remarkable exploration of California’s landscape and past uses 16mm film to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt’s associative film proceeds loosely through time, as the great industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satellites for growing urban metropolises. Schmitt chronicles 14 California frontier towns, integrating archival footage and personal asides with beautiful 16mm images to show the towns then and now. She has depicted the ideology of progress and expansion, and the tangible sense of the haunted loss of American promise. The idea of a “company town” has developed and changed over time, but at heart their circumstances remain the same: these are service settlements laid waste as a result of economic changes.
- Tags
- film
- Filmfestival
Producer: Lee Anne Schmitt | Director: Lee Anne Schmitt | Production: LEE ANNE SCHMITT (2658 Cunard Street, Los Angeles, CA 90065, U.S.A.) | Distributor: No Belgian distributor |
76’ – Digibeta – No subtitles
