Item 2936 - California Company Town

Video

California Company Town deals predominantly with the landscapes of 14 towns created and then abandoned by the industries that created them. The film contemplates the idea of the American landscape as historical and political space and the gaps between the ideology and reality of the spaces in which we live. History is always marked upon the land; a state whose very geography has been radically reconfigured to serve specific use. While sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. My work is associative, combining personal memory with the supposed objectivism of history, thus questioning both. All of my work begins with landscape, the experience of living in a particular place at a particular time. The reality of our world was born out of very specific moments and choices, a construction that is neither organic nor inevitable. The film is shot on 16mm, and the use of film itself is of central importance, as it documents time within space, the way history hangs in our experience or image and light. The haunted loss of the American promise is tangible in the material of both the towns themselves, and the film that documents them.

• English

I have to send lower quality stills, stills the size you require are too large, I can send them later if need be...

• Catalan

• Latin