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SCREENING

Relative Opacity: Standard Gauge and Water and Power

Ongoing

Location: Bartos Screening Room

With introduction by guest curator Courtney Stephens



Standard Gauge (Dir. Morgan Fisher. 1984, 35 mins. 16mm.)

Water and Power (Dir. Pat O’Neill. 1989, 57 mins. 16mm.)

Structuralist filmmaker Morgan Fisher, whose work Jim Supanick has described as “like a service entrance hidden behind the Hollywood sign,” narrates elements of his own personal history through fragments of discarded film stock in his autobiographical Standard Gauge. Holding these celluloid elements in the viewer’s gaze as the tactile ingredients of the medium rather than the worlds they are used to project, the film speaks between a life as it is lived and as it is represented through time-based media. Timescales collide in Pat O’Neill’s astonishing Water and Power, a collage masterwork of optical printing and time-lapse photography. From geologic time to traffic rhythms, Pacific tides to the cadence of movie dialogue, the oscillations of the city and the landscapes that were drained to create it are formed into dense, moving tableaus of superimposition. Scott McDonald writes that the film “reveals a modern city as layer over layer of experience, and makes no pretense of reducing Los Angeles to anything like a single, coherent understanding… L.A. is not merely an elaborate reality; it is a nearly overwhelming surreality.”—Courtney Stephens

Tickets: $15 ($11 seniors and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / free for children under 3 and Museum members at the Film Lover and Kids Premium levels and above). Order tickets online.(Members may contact [email protected] with questions regarding online reservations.)

Ticket purchase includes same-day admission to the Museum (see gallery hours). View the Museum’s ticketing policy here. For more information on membership and to join online, visit our membership page.