Forgotten City

The Southland.  City of Industry. La La  Land. City of Angels. There are very few cities that are discussed regularly in a metaphysical context.  New York, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Jerusalem, Las Vegas, DC and possibly one or two others.  But there is only one city that is pretty much only refered to in a metaphysical manor which is simultaneously alluring and revolting.  Los Angeles is a city that seems to bring out the extremes in people.  You either love it or hate it and any emotions in between is left to Pasadena or Orange County, the Valley or possibly Long Beach. Certainly a significant amount of discourse has been created to try and define or explain the phenomenon that is Los Angeles.  Thom Anderson creates a brilliant picture of this in his film "Los Angeles Plays Itself" by stating that to the outside world there is no difference between "Hollywood" and "Los Angeles", but within the cities confines there is a radical difference.

Paul Arthur describes LA with an analogy by stating that "nowhere in America are the imperative of high and low culture so blurred."  There is certainly something to that.  If we split things into two camps with vulgarly obtuse terms such as "Hollywood" and "other art forms" within this city - like music and fashion.  Hollywood equals pop-culture movie making, commercial advertising and artificial representation spectacle.  "Underground" art forms of music and fashion thrive in this city, but if an individual from music or fashion is introduced to a "Hollywood" interaction they will certainly jump at the chance and in a way they end up reinforcing larger subtext to this city that is semi-conscious, but not always obvious.

This city screams pop-culture.  If you do not support nor idolize pop-culture you might as well not exist.  "Hollywood" is an overwhelming place. On a clear day the sign can be seen all the way down to South Central, Inglewood, Watts and Hawthorne.  The shadow looms over all parts of the city and those that are born here feel the intense class divide and, in a way, they idolize pop-culture that much more because of it's dark shadow and it's unattainable status.

This creates a very strange paradigm for those who have either no interest in popular culture or are strongly opposed to it.  By no means would I consider someone in this outsider camp any kind of counter culture or subculture.  Anyone who does not drink the pop-culture cool-aid is simply ignored.  The most apt description would be that it is an "Other" culture, in all the complications that the word "other" has become. 

The "other" culture is the outsider, the sick, the different, the disgusting, the taboo and anyone outside the commonalities of the LA life style, who does not praise excess wealth or attention, is certainly ignored and treated as disgusting. NYC might have a lot of attention for it's complexity, but LA gains more attention pretty much because of it's attention.

However, it is also the most regulated city when it comes to representation.  In NYC you only need a filming permit once you lay down a camera track or need to close off a location, but in LA you need a permit to shoot in any and all circumstances.  In Japan I had no problems shooting anywhere I wanted with a small crew from TBS, the largest TV station in Japan. LA follows the rules of image capturing.  Hell, it creates the rules. You cannot shoot unless you have everything signed off and the rules are laid out.  And the city complies whole-heartedly and gives Hollywood eminent domain over anywhere and everywhere it wishes - local communities and commerce be damned.

Everywhere you can find a location at any time of day where there is a building or street that is shut down for a shoot.  Often times the shoot is really a commercial, but the crew always knows better then to tell the public that.  If anyone asks a crew member will always say that it's a movie or TV show in a way to add acceptance to the shoot.  After all, if it's just a commercial then passers-by might not be so accepting of them to shoot there.  However, if there is a protest and the streets are shut down then passers-by are belligerent, hateful and angry.

And just as Anderson describes, the city attempts to mask itself.  It is either a stand-in for another city or it's no city at all.  If ever it is supposed to be Los Angeles then rarely, if ever, do you see a distinct setting. However, the whole city of Los Angeles is expansive.  Just about everywhere in Los Angeles County is considered apart of the city as well.  Everything north of Long Beach  all the way to Oxnard.  From the Beach to the desert.  It is endless.  And in the same fashion that Hollywood is only willing to show pretty people it is also only interested in pretty places or, if it's not pretty, it's at the very least convenient.

It is from this enormous metaphysical dialogue that I am constantly having with myself which has lead me to start a new project.  I know what you're thinking. How many projects can I work on at once.  Well, the answer is a lot.  Too many.  But I keep going places and as much as this city disgusts me there is a large part that I am in awe of.  Shall I name off the old downtown cinema's that have the most exquisite marquees that I have ever seen?  Million Dollar Theatre, Orpheium, the Mayan, United Artists, Los Angeles, the State, the Regent and my current favorite, the Tower, which still has old advertisements on it's back and side.  They are all so decedent, eloquent and unforgettable.  (In NYC all the old cinemas on Broadway were eradicated by Giuliani in order to clean up the city - a similar initiative is expanding from Figueroa and making it's way to Santa Fe).

The Sears building in East LA has such a complex history to it and it is completely mind boggling.  In one area you can still enter and purchase your hardware supplies and on the back side you can see the history where the loading docks brought in endless supplies when it was the West Coast's largest supply store.  The green neon still glows for miles in all directions.  Olvera Street is a throw-back to Los Angeles, Mexico and still possesses exclusively Mexican merchants that sell useless trinkets, clothing and crystallized sugar fruits that'll make you sick to your stomach.

And so the most subversive thing I can do in LA is to shoot illegally and expose all the areas that are overlooked, ignored and still beautiful.  In New York there's an endless sea of solo filmmakers shooting 16mm, S8 or DV.  San Francisco and Chicago it's not as prominent, but there are still a handful of people shooting on a weekly basis.  LA, the only people shooting illegally are fashion photographers shooting stills.

This should be done while it still can.  LA Live has already infiltrated and the new football stadium is all but built.  Soon it will all be white washed and cleansed.  Midnight Mission will be relocated and the expansive sea of homeless in the East side of downtown will be uprooted and displaced. They say the real-estate market has always controlled and will always control any major change or development in LA.

They recently announced on NPR that developers bought out two live-in hotel buildings on Los Angeles Street (the first street of Skid Row that is one block East of gentrified downtown - the 100'  difference is appalling).  These are the same live-in hotels that pocket all parts of downtown and are home to thousands that were able to get subsidized rent.  The same that are apart of the Alexandria and the Rosslyn Hotels that are now overrun with artists.  And we all know that the artists simply make way for the yuppies, the American aristocrats.  Aristocrats with artificial class. Soon the East side of downtown will become the new Bunker Hill.

There may still be signs for Bunker Hill downtown, but that neighborhood is completely and utterly erased from existence. Bunker Hill was a run down part of downtown on the North West corner.  Old Victorian houses lined the streets and it was available cheap housing for poor families. Now it has been replaced by hotels, museums and the ugliest building in human history- the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Many know of the old railways that filled downtown LA, but few even realize that many of the tracks from the old Red and Yellow lines are sill under that pavement in downtown LA.  Actually, much of the streets where the rails live the pavement has eroded away and reveal the left over and forgotten tracks.  This has become an eye-sore to city government and so have the old crossing signs that are still in and around Santa Fe Street, but they are the most beautiful parts of Los Angeles to me.  Every year there seems to be a little less rail and a little more asphalt.  And a little part of me dies.

Gentrification not only displaces families, but it also destroys history.  Frankly, I don't really understand the purpose of gentrification.  There are already thousands of locations that are already "beautiful" where yuppies can go live, but instead they want to make an "ugly" place "beautiful" for them.  Well, I think my neighborhood in Skid Row is beautiful with the rails coming out of the ground, rust covering the fences, trash littering the ground, junkies sleeping in the alley ways.

The Digital Dilemma of Experimental Cinema

And so, now we find ourselves at a crossroads.  The few of us that have wondered our brains into the forest of Experimental Cinema have found a wall.  The box that we are outside of and originally left behind has become stifling.  The new world that we have imagined has a limitation.  A roadblock upon aesthetics has barred many from being open-minded in their open-mindedness.  Technology has forced us to take sides in a foolish battle.  Experimental Cinema has become the last battleground for celluloid film.

There has been much speculation over the decades upon the end of film in which video will succeed the throne of the field.  It has become an endless dialogue how analog film will end.  Because of this and because video shares some fundamental qualities that are different from film many filmmakers, curators and fans of Experimental Cinema (and all cinema) have rejected video.  It is a radical change to put upon a system that is over 100 years old.  So many have devoted their lives in order to understand it perfectly and now it is completely deconstructed by a different medium.  A medium!  And nothing more.

Virtually all other areas of cinema have accepted this new form in which to use the same techniques.  Large production narrative, television and advertisement (aka Hollywood) have been behind funding this development.  It has made previously difficult processes become significantly easier – and at the same time they had added more expectations and workload to the productions.  Documentary, world and “independent” cinema use it as a means to cut the budget and shift funding.  Home movies became significantly less hassle with equipment easier to understand.

Digital has become the standard and it is almost because of this that the culture of Experimental Cinema is unwilling to unclench its fist from the 16mm reel.  The question then becomes – is it rigger mortise? 

Will this last stand for celluloid cinema kill the world of Experimental Cinema?  But I need to stop for a moment.  Surely there is a whole chorus of voices now who are angry because I am saying that digital is better then analog.  Do not be mistaken, dear friend!  My love for celluloid will never be extinguished!  However, you cannot deny the strong generalized rejection of digital “filmmaking” in the Experimental Cinema culture.  It is very similar to a certain artist by the name of R. Mutt who in the first half of the 20^th Centruy caused a tornado of kerfuffle when many declared his found art piece, “The Fountain,” not to be art.

Rejection to such an unnecessary extent as this is what I like to call “The Aesthetics of Rejection.”  It comes when an individual rejects a certain artwork or medium as “not being art”.  Certainly, this can be applied to more then just the world of art and cinema.  Indeed, a colleague of mine, a very intelligent individual who had strong passion for Socialism and the films of Godard and Eisenstein actually told me once that video games are not art.  I was appalled.  However, most people have learned much since the days of R. Mutt, however.  People usually do not reject something outright as “not art”.  Most use a disgusting categorization in which the culture of Experimental Cinema was invented by breaking – “good” or “bad” (also known as “high” or “low” art).

Anyone who is familiar with Experimental Cinema is familiar with the standpoint that video/digital is “not good” or “low quality” or some how displeasing.  I implore you not to follow in this path.  It is segregation!  One is not better then the other.  They are merely two different tools and each possesses different qualities.  I can only imagine the day when a pupil came to his teacher with a sponge instead of a brush in which to paint with and the lashing the pupil received for such an offence.

There is also the other even more revolting argument.  No, assumption!  The assumption that working in film is significantly more difficult then working digitally.  This somehow gives merit or validation to considering one form of cinema “good” and the other “bad”.  This is often an argument made by critics who have never used a movie camera in their lives.  I assert once again that the tools are merely different and some things are easier in film and others digital.  Anyone who has spent nights rendering 1000 frames in Autodesk Maya with 4 layers per frame each at 30 seconds rendering time per layer only to realize that you had one thing slightly off and it ruined your whole scene knows what I am talking about.  Anyone who has used Mental Ray would never say that digital is easier then film.  Even now with the dieing businesses of film development laboratories, it can be faster to send a roll of film to be processed and get it returned to you than to have a scene rendered from a CGI animation package.

Therefore, it is absolutely preposterous to make any judgment call about which is better or which is worse.  The only thing that the aesthetics of rejection reveal is what forms of art people don’t like.  A story can be poorly written.  An image can be badly composed, but a medium cannot in its entirety be bad.  If you do not like digital filmmaking then just state that.  That is at least a respectable stance.  I do not particularly care for Heavy Metal.  By no means would I consider Heavy Metal not to be music.  How absurd; I wouldn’t even consider it to be bad.  I just don’t like it.  And even within that I subject myself to live performances of such music because I enjoy music; I want to be persuaded to like Heavy Metal; I enjoy the atmosphere of a music event; it opens my mind as to the possibilities of our world.  (In fact, the films that I learn the most from are the films that I do not like - they teach me what I never want to do in my work.)

Yet, you can see everywhere in our current culture of Experimental Cinema that film is virtually the only accepted method of making our form of art.  Young artists who come to fruition are only accepted if they work in film.  Certainly, those who only work in film and are successful are likely to be very good filmmakers, but there are an equal number of filmmakers artists who work digitally whose pieces you might significantly enjoy, but since the Experimental Cinema world looks down upon digital works you will never be exposed to them.  Most often these individuals turn to a different world where they are more accepted – "interdisciplinary art", "multimedia art", "new media", etc.

“But there are many filmmakers who work in digital video that we will always watch.”

Who? Jonas Mekas? Su Fredrich? Ken Jacobs? The Kuchar Brothers?  This is only because they were already accepted as filmmakers before they picked up a video camera.  They were already infallible and therefore did not receive the wrath of the aesthetics of rejection.

How many who consider themselves to be studious and wellsprings of knowledge of Experimental Filmmakers even know the names Miwa Matreyek or Dr. Strangeloop (David Wexler)?  Certainly, there will be some.  However, both artists have become world-renowned and both attribute more influence to filmmakers who are generally accepted under the umbrella of “Experimental Cinema” then other artists, but both are rarely discussed in our culture.  Why?

If we let these authoritative rules hinder us our field will become stagnant and we will let it die.  Experimental Cinema will end with the final filmmaker who became known with their films.  By no means am I making a case for filmmakers to stop working with film.  I hope celluloid sees many more years, but critics and fans who really and truly love “Experimental Cinema” must accept digital if it is to continue.  For if we are actually the expansive thinkers who can see meaning amongst the abstracted shadows on the walls of the cave then we must have a perception that is expansive enough to accept digital.  Let no boundaries stop us!  Let us re-radicalize “Experimental Cinema”!