A Drive Through Bunker Hill and Downtown Los Angeles 1947 скачать в хорошем качестве

A Drive Through Bunker Hill and Downtown Los Angeles 1947

Bunker Hill: "old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town" (Raymond Chandler, The High Window) lay one steep block above the upscale downtown streets of Los Angeles. Graced with Queen Anne-style mansions first built for local aristocrats, by the 1950s it evolved into a low-income community housing pensioners, low-paid workers and Bohemians. Pressure from civic reformers and real-estate developers forced the Hill's destruction beginning in 1955. Today a flattened Bunker Hill is covered with highrise apartments and office buildings, museums and cultural venues, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall. None of the old structures remain.Pre-redevelopment images of Bunker Hill reveal a neighborhood filled with grandiose houses wreathed in abundant southern California vegetation, often in spectacular stages of decay and romantic ruin. Its streetscapes are richly detailed with antiquated commercial signage and obsolete infrastructure. Arguably a posterchild for Los Angeles's constant self-reinvention, Bunker Hill's story exemplifies the indivisibility of renewal and destruction, embodying an idea that circulated in many cities with conspicuous reservoirs of poverty: that we must forcibly treat an acutely diseased organism by excising its offending parts. Reviled in its time, it now functions as a case study of how historical consciousness is fed by absence and loss. Overall its landscape is a real-life analogue for the fictional world of post-World War II film noir, and in fact the Hill was the venue for many noir location shoots. This six-minute sequence containing three separate takes is a "process plate," made to be projected on a background screen as part of a film shot taking place in a car, train or ship, or possibly behind a running person or galloping horse. You may remember seeing conversations taking place in a taxi, out of whose window we see an out-of-focus, fuzzy street going by. But the three plates on this roll are far from indistinct — they're locked-down, rock-steady, razor-sharp long takes recording incidental American landscape scenes that might never have otherwise been captured. This particular clip comes from an unknown Columbia feature from the noir era, and is one of a number of plates shot around Los Angeles. I don't yet know for what movie this segment was shot, but the blogosphere has spoken and concluded that it was shot in 1947. One viewer even glimpsed her father, and when her sighting was called too good to be true, substantiated it with a birth certificate scan showing she was born at the address where the man in question stands. Ever focused on economy, Hollywood studios saved much of the material they shot but didn't use in finished films. Studios and independent producers built large stock footage libraries containing generic footage (in which no name actors were seen) that they imagined might be suitable for use in future productions. Only a small percentage of this material was ever used, and most of it has never been seen. But what transpired to be useless for the studios has, without premeditation or plan, acquired retrospective value, because process plates function as deeply thick depictions of place and time. As stock footage, they possess potential to inflect new productions with accurate historical evidence, and are sometimes used this way. But I'm more interested in the potential they offer when reused as found objects by themselves.