alr

California Company Town

Streaming
Directed by Lee Anne Schmitt.
US, 2008, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, 76 min.

Lee Anne Schmitt’s celebrated essay film explores a series of settlements abandoned by the very industries they were designed to serve, portraits of ghost towns that together offer an alternate and melancholy chronicle of the Golden State. Sifting patiently through the forsaken homes of farmers and oil workers and the various union and company headquarter buildings, Schmitt zeroes in on poignant clues about the forgotten past. Alternating between her own voiceover narration and historical recordings, California Company Town assembles a layered evocation of the past that also makes pointed connections to the broken promises of labor equity still being made in the present day. – HG

Please visit watchhfa.eventive.org to reserve tickets and view the film.

Part of film series

Read more

Devour the Land: Cinema, landscape, history.

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès

Read more

Activism and Post-Activism. Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022

Read more

Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue