Nightingale is a film that uses a love affair to examine the way we recreate our own histories; continuously fictionalising our past and forever altering the events within them.

Nightingale

Can Los Angeles of the 30’s be effectively placed alongside modern 21st century Los Angeles? As a true experiment, Awake and Sing mixes periods and genres taking pleasure not in easy solutions, but in the search for a form or way of telling that has to be tried out, discovered.

Awake and Sing

Lee Anne Schmitt explores California's landscape and past to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt's film covers various locations through time, as the major industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satellites for growing urban metropolises.

California Company Town

"The Wash is a portrait of the river wash that runs behind the older part of Newhall, California, where Lee and I used to live. We shot the wash on Super8 film and then finished it on video. It is a collaboration between us, describing the ways the wash is used, and the people who use it, ourselves included. It charts the way this land has changed since they began developing Newhall and the surrounding community of Valencia for housing, a development that is expected to bring over 250,000 more people into the area by the year 2015."

The Wash

For five years, Schmitt and Lynch followed the buffalo hunt in the American West. Their fascinating portrait of a disappearing world contrasts unspoiled landscapes with commercial influences on the American myth.

The Last Buffalo Hunt

The connection between these three short films is initially indicated by their sound and music: In all three films, Lee Anne Schmitt does without direct sound and dialogue, letting the music of Jeff Parker accompany the images. In the first miniature, Schmitt films graves from the American Indian Wars as silent witnesses of a past that have left their traces on the collective American consciousness. Subsequently, we see blackandwhite street scenes in Hollywood, which are followed by almost familiar images – a garden bench, a bouquet of flowers. Thus history, the public and the private form a new, abstract and yet tangible unity.