California Company Town
Director Lee Anne Schmitt
Countries
Duration 77 min
Synopsis
California Company Town, the much-anticipated essay film by Lee Anne Schmitt, casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise. A versatile multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends from film and performance to photography and writing, Schmitt is a member of the faculty of CalArts’ graduate Film Directing Program. She creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual, including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections of landscape with personal memory (Las Vegas, 2000), with the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003), and with urban development (The Wash, 2005).
California Company Town, the much-anticipated essay film by Lee Anne Schmitt, casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise. A versatile multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends from film and performance to photography and writing, Schmitt is a member of the faculty of CalArts’ graduate Film Directing Program. She creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual, including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections of landscape with personal memory (Las Vegas, 2000), with the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003), and with urban development (The Wash, 2005).