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Sarah Morris' fifth short documentary film, investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. It reveals a new cityscape of Los Angeles by tracking its de-centered plan, complex architecture, and most importantly its crucial role as a center of film production. “Los Angeles” posits the city as a hyper-narrative within a very distinct duration of time. Here the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week leading up to the Oscars. A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score, range from the rehearsals and pre-production moments of the Academy Awards to a John Lautner house, Brad Pitt on the set of “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” at Twentieth Century Fox, the final taping of Hollywood Squares at CBS, the legendary Bonaventure Hotel, Pat Kingsley at work, I.M. Pei’s Creative Artist’s Agency, Mulholland Drive, the Department of Water and Power, and the Vanity Fair party.
Director
Status
Released
Original Language
EN

Closely cropped white men populate the video work My Bodies. Their faces slide like a corporate PowerPoint over grainy, noisy textures as a host of black women—Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Ciara, among others—sing variations on “my body.” They are tightly sampled, as if to arrive at some kind of median. One clip that zooms into the pores of a sweaty pink forehead recalls a robotic text-to-voice line from another work, “And my skin shines with white people’s problems.” Unlike the white men, culled from a Google image search for CEOs, blackness is only ever heard and never seen. The artist explains, “If you came back, would you choose to have the same body or not? Would you have the body of a woman again? Or a woman of color?”

On their way up to a mountain cabin, Sarah and Thomas run into a dense mist and seem to go astray in the dangerous altitudes. In search of the cabin they encounter increasingly strange events. Lost in those heights, eventually a life-threatening battle between reality and illusion begins...