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Hilary Goldberg brings her new film recLAmation tothe National Queer Arts Center

June 12th, 2010 12:17 pm PT

BySona Avakian, SF Events Examiner

Whether you love it or hate it, you're got to admit that L.A. is one of the most interesting places on earth. It'sgot wealth, poverty, desert, ocean and mountain. It's got racial divide, a vibrant art scene, and of course,Disneyland and Hollywood. What other city can claim all that?Writer and filmmakerHilary Goldberg, has a new project.recLAmation, is a Super 8 experimental documentary/narrative film in which queer superheroes navigate a future beyond capitalism. recLAmation willscreen June 15th, 8pm atThe Garageas part of theNational Queer Arts Festival 2010. My friendMattilda Bernstein Sycamoresuggested Hilary contact me for an interview. Thank you Mattilda!

Avakian:

Nice trailer for RecLAmation. You

ve got queer superheroes, riot police, palm trees and AmyGoodman. Can you divulge just a bit more?

Goldberg:

The film pairs documentary footage of contemporary Los Angeles with a combination of memoir,historical non-fiction, and imagined narration. My hope was to create a journey about my worldviews around

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capitalism and how those took shape. Los Angeles was my canvas for reflection -- I took a look at its history aswell as its present and future. I also delved into my own history to locate where my radical politics came fromand where they are going.

S.A.

RecLAmation is a feature length shot in super 8. Not many feature length films are shot in super 8. Whatthat an aesthetic or financial decision?

H.G.

Super 8 is associated with memories, emotions, experimental film and the past. While the financial limitsexisted, it was an aesthetic choice for the project. Los Angeles is a loud, bright, impossible oasis in the desert. Ihave strong feelings about its unrealized potential, and I wanted a nostalgic medium to convey that internalattraction/repulsion struggle.

S.A.

Did you grow up in LA? If not, what was your initial impression the first time you visited?

H.G.

I moved to LA when I was 22, and I grew up there in many ways over the next decade, mostly as anartist. I moved throughout the city many times. It is a massive sprawl, and each neighborhood was a world untoitself. I saw gentrification take place, especially in downtown, Silverlake and Echo Park. I watchedneighborhoods change, the way it changed and saw people displaced. Since I was not a native, I was part ofthe problem, and that is something hard to reconcile. When I decided to make a film about the city, part of thecreative process was having discussions with artists and activists from Los Angeles who I had collaborated withover recent years. Joy Anderson, Irina Contreras, Jessica Gudiel, and Jessica Hoffmann were later cast as“queer superheroes” featured in recLAmation. They shared histories of the landscapes that preceded myarrival, and I documented those locations. While I handled all the technical aspects of the filmmaking, thedocumentation of LA was guided by an inter-dependent model, and was facilitated by many native Angelinos. Iwanted to see the city through more than one set of eyes.One of my first impressions of living there was near disbelief that I had to travel around with a ThomasGuide to navigate the city. Los Angeles is enormous and I guess people now have phones and the Internet forquick directions, so that probably seems ancient. It is how I know what year I moved to LA—my 1999 ThomasGuide. I needed a book of maps to live there, and it just seemed like an impossible city, that many lawns in thedesert? Houses that I couldn

t believe were single-family dwellings. If you stand in Griffith Park near theobservatory you can tell the neighborhood property value by the concentration of green and trees. Theneighborhoods are disparate, divided up by class and race. You can see it from miles away.

S.A.

What would you say to someone, presumably a straight someone who didn

t want to see a film about gaypeople (queer superheroes) no less. What would be in it for them to enjoy or their takeaway?

H.G.

The film is about Los Angeles and you see it through the eyes of an outsider. What I hope anyone canfind in the film is the way we are all interconnected and the way that certain systems limit our imaginations. Imade this film with a certain sense of urgency, it was a film in which I wanted to have an opportunity to sharewhat I consider to be some pretty important stuff and it will take people showing up to complete the art project.I hope all kinds of people will be curious enough to be a part of recLAmation.

S.A.

Another queer LA filmmaker I

ve interviewed isSilas Howard. One thing he said about when I asked himabout moving to LA from SF was this:

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In some ways it was a huge culture shock, but I

d been going down there for film for a while. There is a vibrant art scene in LA. The thing that is evil about L.A. is the film industry. The city has a sneaky collective streak. It

s a city of contrasts: canyons and strip malls, ocean and desert, industry and art. I find it interesting but it never feels like home to me. In New York and LA you go to make a career, but in San Francisco you go to find community.

S.A.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have any thoughts to add to his statement?

H.G.

I completely agree with Silas Howard, and really enjoy the way he moves through the world. I went in theopposite direction and moved to San Francisco after Los Angeles. I had been visiting San Francisco for years,saying that I left my heart there whenever I returned to LA to get back to the grindstone. I had been trying to bea “part” of the film industry for over a decade, I never found a home in it, and I needed to move on. I decided tomove towards love and connection, and take a break from swimming against the current. San Francisco wasmy first stop on the new journey of making my work look more like my life. I kept trying to make money to makeart and that

s the opposite of what I was able to find in LA.

S.A.

There

s so much good literature written about LA,City of Quartzby Mike Davis, for example. It

s hard tobelieve that book is almost twenty years old. Does it feel dated to you? Do you have any favorites, anything torecommend?

H.G.

That Mike Davis book was my first read for this project. The racist and colonial foundation of LA is asrelevant as ever. I have a homage shot in the film that

s like the cover of the Davis book (of the prisondowntown). The ideas from Rebecca Solnit

sA Paradise Built In Hellwere also really inspiring, it reallydemonstrates human capacity in crisis and how the structure of the state defies common sense and I highlyrecommend that book. I saw Angela Davis speak in Los Angeles about prison abolition and cultural dreamingand that also became a layer of importance (especially the parts of her amazing autobiography that took placein LA). I watch/ed Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! every weekday and that had a huge influence. Rightnow there is all of this coverage about the BP Oil Spill and you can really see how much power corporationshave. The film The Corporation taught me that corporations were an idea, a construct created to build bridges.We have the power to not have that idea anymore. We don

t need corporations, they are bad for us, and it istime for new ideas. I don

t even know how we live in a world where a business model “owns” black gooshooting up from the sea floor. Capitalism doesn

t make sense. That

s my story.

S.A.

What do you think would actually have to happen for capitalism to be overthrown?

H.G.

I think that people will have to consent to the idea that the structure is flawed in a way that it isdetrimental to life on the planet, and decide that is reason enough to move on to better models. I don't eventhink it will need to be overthrown as much as outgrown. Somehow I'm hoping for a 2012 magnetic pole shiftand Age of Aquarius song medley that will shift humanity like a school of fish and the illusion of individualistdisconnected living will fade away. In the meantime, I am optimistic that local work will continue to flourisharound community building and common resource sharing. We are living on the brink of peak oil and nuclearpower, anything could happen, and if people decided they were done with capitalism, it would end.

S.A.

And without giving away the storyline of recLAmation--what would you replace it with? And how would youkeep that economy from going corrupt?