Water and Power and Freeways

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Of car culture, Joan Didion famously wrote: “Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.” Babette Mangolte offers an outsider’s counterpoint in her elegant meditation on the Southern California landscape and its built environments, while Pat O’Neill, in this classic of Los Angeles experimental filmmaking, takes on another of Didion’s preoccupations, West Coast water infrastructure.

There? Where?
U.S., 1979

16mm, color 8 min. Director: Babette Mangolte.

Water and Power
U.S., 1989

35mm, color, 54 min. Director: Pat O’Neill.

Total runtime: 62 min.