Drew Heitzler's Double Feature
In the current issue of the eminently readable Film Comment, writer and filmmaker Chris Petit ponders a shift in cinema. Refusing to pin the elusive moment of transformation on the usual suspect - the analog/digital divide - Petit instead muses on the eclipse of the all-powerful projectionist and the rise of the viewer, remote in hand, cheerfully fast-forwarding, pausing and rewinding at will. "Under such conditions, cinema has become less magical, less suspended and more about other kinds of obsessions," he writes. While I get a bit cranky with this rampant nostalgia for the magic of the theatrical experience - who remembers the sticky floors, fumbled reel changes and scratched prints? - "other kinds of obsessions" describes an entire generation of artists who don't make movies but instead plunder existing films, re-cutting, rearranging and re-thinking them in a practice that centers on scrutiny, revelation and the powerful - and intensely creative - role of the viewer in any act of viewing.
This is certainly the territory of Los Angeles artist Drew Heitzler, who picks apart Hollywood movies to find repressed storylines and hidden politics. In his latest, a video projection titled Lilith (for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers, Hustlers) currently installed at LAXART (through June 20), Heitzler recuts the 1964 film Lilith, directed by Robert Rossen and starring Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg and Peter Fonda in a story about sex, desire and the limits of sanity. All that, plus a meta-story that includes the Communist party, the Hollywood blacklist, death and, according to Heitzler, local politics in Baldwin Hills in the 1960s.
The project, part of a trilogy that includes similar deconstructions of The Wild Ride from 1960 and Night Tide from 1961, consists of a truncated version of the original film looped and projected on the rear wall of the blackened gallery space. Heitzler focuses on the nerdy character played by Peter Fonda, contrasting his repressed desire, suggested by long, moody stares, with the playful and mischievous antics of Jean Seberg's character, a schizophrenic who, in Heitzler's version which omits all dialog, seems to find affinity with the freely rushing water that cascades below a bridge and over huge rocks below.
The story beneath the film's story, however, adds a new lens through which to read the film. Rossen was a member of the Community Party, and appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. He refused to list other party members, and was blacklisted. After going without work for two years, he named names when offered a deal in 1953. Lilith was made afterwards; released in 1964, it was the final movie by the director before he died in 1966. While a direct correlation between the story and Rossen's life is dubious, analogies between the power wielded by institutions and its terrible effect on creativity and passion seem relevant, especially if you add the tragic life of Jean Seberg into the mix.
Heitzler also finds a connection between the film's thrilling scenes of rushing water and the rupturing of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir in December 1963. Although Rossen shot Lilith on the east coast, using the Great Falls of the Potomac Park as a metaphor for desire, the timing of the film's production and release, as well as a story about the power of profitable industries wreaking havoc, resonate with the reservoir's rupture and the ensuing flood in which five people were killed and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed. The rupture has been blamed on the injection of fluids into the ground in the process of oil-drilling in the Inglewood oil field.
Heitzler doesn't pontificate or make elaborate judgments. Instead, the shortened version of Lilith acts like a sieve, filtering the shards of one story from the watery effusiveness of another. We're left to piece together the parts, and thanks to Heitzler's skills, we're given plenty to work with. Indeed, Heitzler's version shows Lilith and her lesbian lover walking by a theater several times; the marquee reads "Double Feature," nicely capturing Heitzler's process, which finds a second story latent in the first.
Drew Heitzler, Lilith (for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers, Hustlers)
on view through June 20, 2009
LAXART