Lee Anne Schmitt

The modern history of racism and slavery in America, retold in a gifted film about a radical white activist's attempted revolution and death sentence in 1859.

The modern history of racism and slavery in America, retold in a gifted film about a radical white activist's attempted revolution and death sentence in 1859.

The Farnsworth Scores is a cinematic and sonic meditation on Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House located in Plano, IL, created by artist and musician Rob Mazurek and filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt.

A meditation. The menace of night and the memory of trauma. 

A film about violence and the trace it leaves.

'There is a woman that watches me, who watches me from her window. She watches me. 

Every night she watches me.

 Until one night, she is gone.'

Shot on 16mm over a number of years, the film rephotographs and rephotographs, until the image itself is a ghost. It is a moment in time, and then that moment is gone.

A portrait of a day a woman spends with her young son while watching an abandoned hotel on the verge of demolition. It takes place during the dog days of summer, in the 13th year, when the cicadas are everywhere. A meditation on the line between isolation and solitude. Nature is both comfort and decay. Motherhood as both presence and erasure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1885 two boys in Southern California discover a cave of Chumash Indian artefacts in the San Martin Mountains on land that is now part of the Chiquita Canyon landfill, located in the small town of Castaic. The cave is known as Bowers Cave, named after the amateur archaeologist Stephen Bower, a notorious looter of Indian sites, who bought the artefacts from the boys and then resold them for a profit, mostly to private collectors. Now, a small portion exists in the Peabody museum at Harvard.

Me Broni Ba is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a series of vignettes, set against a child's story of migrating from Ghana to the United States. The film uncovers the meaning behind the Akan term of endearment, me broni ba, which means “my white baby.”

"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 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."

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.

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.

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.

Las Vegas is a short video that uses the limitations of video imagery to explore the end of a love affair. It combines the lights of Las Vegas and the emptiness of early morning hotels to evoke the sense of intangibilty and loss left behind once love has gone.