I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Thom Andersen’s newest film, Get Out of the Car, twice in the past week.
A collage of images and sound recorded around Los Angeles, Andersen show not at the usual icons of the city, but the empty billboards, the murals on car shops, and the lots that once housed places of importance to the city’s rhythm and blues scene in the 50s, among other overlooked sites. In a beautiful text he has written about the film, he says that he tries “to make movies I would like to see, and then hope there are others who share my sensibilities.” I can’t help but feel that his own personal pleasure and interest in the material imbues the entire film with a giddy sense of jubilance that is almost overwhelming. Not that the film is all joy; there is as much in the film about loss and past injustices as there is celebration. His own words are of course more interesting than anything I have to say about the film, so read his text here.
In other news, the celebration of the release of Radical Light by the UC Press drew to a close with a program of 8 mm and Super 8 mm films curated by Steve Anker. The program had personal significance for me, being an artist who works with 8 mm film myself, as well as an exquisite diary-film by one of my mentors, Janis Crystal Lipzin, called The Bladderwort Document, along with works by other filmmakers who lived at some point or another in the Bay Area, including Scott Stark, Bruce Conner, and Nathaniel Dorsky. The room was packed (in fact, not everyone who wanted to get in could) and it was a real treat to see a number of films more often seen blown up to 16 mm projected in their original format. Steve Anker performed the Conner film, which was an 8 mm version of footage used in Cosmic Ray and had belonged to Stan Brakhage before he died, adjusting the speed of the projection from 18 fps to 5 fps in order to reveal aspects of the film that would otherwise have gone by too quickly to notice.
All images from Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car.