80 minutes (1981)
A film by Fabrice Ziolkowski
L.A.X. deals with slippery concepts of history, memory and how their traces mark the landscape of Los Angeles.
The black and white film is made up of thirty-five shots in black and white, its soundtrack contains excerpts from various texts concerning the history of the city and of Southern California.
The film was shot in June 1980 and shown at the following festivals: Mannheim, Melbourne, Athens (Ohio).
camera : Rol Murrow, Frank Tomasulo
sound : Alex Del Zoppo
voices: Maria Laplace / Barbet Schroeder / Bulle Ogier / Pascale Ogier /Beverly Hemberger
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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
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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
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