L.A.X.
is
available for rental in the US
from the New York Filmmakers' Coop.
Click here for rental
information.
--------
from
the L.A. WEEKLY
CALENDAR * FILM SPECIAL EVENTS
April 2 - 8,
2004
FILMFORUM - L.A.X.
Not screened locally in more than 20 years, Fabrice
Ziolkowski's brilliant essay film prowls its way from a
bird's-eye view of the Southland in its urban-suburban
splendor to the seamier street-level perspective more
common to the city dweller. In the process, Ziolkowski's
voyeuristic black-and-white camera lingers inquisitively
over the Venice canals, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and
other iconographic landmarks, while a roundelay of
different narrators, reading the work of Halberstam,
Godard, Chandler, et al., fill us in on the city's hidden
(and often unsavory) history. The film's expansive timeline
stretches from the days of Franciscan monks and Indian
villages to the irrigating of the San Fernando Valley, the
decay of downtown and the ongoing, trenchlike divisions
between races and economic classes. The end result is, on
one level, a snapshot of Los Angeles at the moment the film
was made (1980) and, on another, a record of the city at
all moments in all times - past, present and yet to come. A
clear influence on subsequent works ranging from Pat
O'Neill's Water and Power to Thom Andersen's recent Los
Angeles Plays Itself, the film is a seminal achievement in
its own right and a valuable contribution to that canon of
works about the great, tangled myth of our improbable
desert metropolis.
-Scott Foundas
-----
L.A.X.
- RECENT NOTES
by Fabrice Ziolkowski
Nearly twenty-five years after making L.A.X. I still
believe one of the most enduring founding myths of American
society is that of non-history - all made possible by a
formidable history-destroying machine. Nowhere is this more
evident than on the continent's westernmost megalopolis:
Los Angeles.
It is here that the process of effacing history has become
a veritable industry.
One thinks of the movie industry, of course, and how it
constantly feeds on the process of erasing its own traces,
all the better to apparently reinvent itself. But it's hard
to forget southern California's second-largest purveyor of
jobs, the defense industry, whose occasional task it is to
bomb certain peoples back to the stone age in attempt to
wipe out
their
history.
Today I find points of contact with some of my more recent
work. In Death Letters (a 2000 documentary about capital
punishment in the US), the concerns about history and
specifically the history of infamous human behavior appears
as a recurrent element. The lynching of Waco in 1917 which
lead to the installation of the death penalty decree in
Texas echoes the horrible Los Angeles race riot in which
nineteen Chinese immigrants were hanged, stores looted and
homes set afire in the old Chinatown section where Union
Station proudly stands today.
There are also the markers in the penitentiary cemetery in
Huntsville (Texas) where executed prisoners' names do not
appear - only their number and an "X" which shows they have
been executed. Here, as in L.A.X. and Howard Hawks'
Scarface, an X marks the spot.
March 2004
L.A.X.
is
available for rental in the US
from the New York Filmmakers' Coop.
Click here for rental
information.