Evidence | Lee Anne Schmitt

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844.

In an age where slouching authoritarianism and post-irony go hand in hand, and even good ol’ fashioned street protests come donning inflatable furry costumes, one might reasonably ask where, if anywhere, we should look for what James Lattimer calls “a cogent counter-position”. The phrase, with its compelling one-two consonant kick, comes from Lattimer’s introductory text to the Lee Anne Schmitt homage he curated at DOK Leipzig earlier this month. In the text, the curator praises the mix of personal and political in Schmitt’s work, her ability to offer unashamedly complex insights at a time where “rigour and research have often felt bizarrely out of fashion”.

The word “and” is, of course, doing a lot of work there. The “do your own research” mantra has become a rallying cry for conspiracy theorists in the post-truth era – and that’s maybe as good a starting point as any for me. Given how ungraspably remote the concrete foundations of our shared social reality have become over the past, say, thirty years, it’s really no surprise that people should feel the need to come up with their own accounts of how things actually work. “Research” could just be the mot du jour for what Fredric Jameson called “cognitive mapping” back in the late eighties. So yes, the addition of “rigour” might well mark the difference between Schmitt’s counter-positional efforts and the reptilian-alien delusions that, as of 2013, held something like 13 million Americans in their thrall – but the impulse behind these projects might yet be one and the same.

I say all this because one way to describe Lee Anne Schmitt’s work is, I think, as a prolonged, dogged, and yes, rigorous effort to make sense of the world she inhabits, environmentally and ideologically – all the while documenting the process. And to do so, in a career spanning over twenty years (first as a landscape photographer and now as a political essay filmmaker and professor at CalArts in Los Angeles), Schmitt has developed an idiolect of sorts, in which process, structure, and analysis reinforce one another. Take the selection that’s currently available on the Doc Alliance platform, which follows closely the Leipzig programme and includes her four feature-length films so far, plus a curated selection of shorter works. These films (often developed over the span of years) bear witness to Schmitt’s preoccupations, her attempts to map the economic and ideological underpinnings of the country she lives in. Together, they form something of a trajectory, i.e. a movement through space and time: Schmitt’s path as an artist and thinker, but also the history of the United States, and one person’s attempt to unspool it back to some meaningful point of origin.

The idiolect follows a certain pattern. The point of departure is often proximate and quotidian – in The Wash (2005), for example, an account of the housing transformations along the Santa Clara river begins with the casual observation of kids playing in a spot where Schmitt and her flatmate regularly go for walks. From there on, her films develop like sonatas, via patterns of accumulation and reprise in which temporalities (industrial, historical, personal) overlay and play off each other. A few modes, or expositional strategies, recur: the private archive, the fragmentary voiceover, the wandering diary à la Mekas, and, in the latest phase of her career, the direct incorporation of her research sources into the film matter (via shots of actual books).

It’s almost like an excavation, a methodical effort to lay bare the symbolic and socio-economic foundations of the American landscape.

At a more surface level, Schmitt’s 16mm landscape shots sit side by side with a mishmash of materials, from archival records to spurious anecdotes and quotations. More than anything, she seems to have a knack for picking out sediments of discourse plastered over the land: plaques, flyers, signage of various kinds, radio broadcasts, tweets, etc. It’s almost like an excavation, a methodical effort to lay bare the symbolic and socio-economic foundations of the American landscape: commodification and extractivism, private ownership, housing inequalities, violence and racial discrimination. California Company Town (2008) is maybe her best film in this sense, with its deep cuts into Jeffersonian mythologies and post-NAFTA deindustrialisation, its dissection of churned-and-burnt economic legacies and left-behind utopias. One only needs to take a look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), shot exactly in the same years, to realise how deeply attuned to the cultural moment she was at that point.

I’ve used the word “diary” above, but Schmitt is keen to avoid the confessional: in each of her films her presence is palpable, but somewhat hermetic. The filmmaker acts as a conduit, reporting anecdotes, overheard conversations, folk histories. Her works bear traces of her lived life – the quotidian textures of time and space, the long car rides and the splattering of rain against the window – but Schmitt refuses to become a character. Rather, she offers herself as a situational touchstone for the viewer, an anchoring point to experience how the political manifests itself to a viewpoint that’s personal but not particular. “Relaying,” “grounding,” and “positioning” are the words I would use – there’s a person there, to paraphrase Judith Butler, but the gaze remains unclaimed, unmarked, somewhat removed.

The multiple meaning of Evidence

Which takes me to Evidence, her last feature-length film, presented in February at Berlinale Forum. Built as an exposé, the film documents the influence wielded over several decades by the right-wing Olin Foundation on a host of American institutions – think tanks, universities, judicial organisations, broadcasting media. The foundation was established and financed by John M. Olin, an arms-manufacturer-turned-chemical-mogul whose corporation Schmitt’s father used to work for. Given these premises, Evidence develops several thematic strands, all stemming from the same cultural-philosophical core (roughly to do with private ownership) but eventually covering a broad field of environmental, ideological, and generational legacies. There’s the awareness of how industrial environmental damage disproportionately affects minority communities, for example. There’s a reconstruction of how reactionary family values are and were entwined with the racialised history of wealth inequality in the US. And finally, there’s Schmitt’s desire to come to terms with her own position as a new mother.

To convey all of this, the filmmaker adopts three main expositional strategies. The most notable is the inclusion of research sources (books) directly in the frame, as I described above. This goes hand in hand with Schmitt’s voiceover, which delivers information and reconstructs historical links in a dry, forensic manner. Sparse moments of wry humour interrupt the denunciation via intertitles. Framing the main argument of the film are two series of shots functioning as a personal archive: first at the beginning, with a series of close-ups of dolls brought home by Schmitt’s father over many years of international business travel on Olin’s behalf; and then towards the end of the film, with a loosely matching progression of squiggly drawings, human figures, made by her son. Finally, a third expositional register (alongside the forensic denunciation and the personal archive) consists of recurring landscape shots, which often develop into moments of visual reverie – scintillation of light over water, refraction through foliage, etc.

Here, I think, it is worth stopping and going back to that idea of research I brought up at the start, while also considering the deliberate ambiguity of the word “evidence”. Because yes, the evidentiary thrust of the film, along with Schmitt’s dispassionate voiceover, delivers that cogent counter-positional impulse evoked by Lattimer – the rigour of facts, of documented connections and inescapable ideological connivances. At the same time, though, the experience of watching the film is not exactly one of rhetorical persuasion. There’s no call to action, no tugging at the viewer’s sleeve. The ideological critique at the core of the film is clear, but Schmitt stops short of articulating one unequivocal counter-stance beyond the fabric of facts and ties. That remove I mentioned earlier – her reticence to enter the film as a character, let alone as a maître à penser – is at work here too. Even as she talks about her motherhood, the experience is not claimed as uniquely and privately transformative or redemptive or illuminating – quite the opposite: she has not learnt anything, she notes, that one could not learn from any act of physical care.

The ecology of humility

Instead, it is in those fragments of visual grace that punctuate the argument that one should, I think, find a counter-stance – but one that’s less rhetorically “cogent” and perhaps humbler than Schmitt’s fierce intellectual persona would otherwise suggest. The openness of her landscape shots, transfixed as they are with unspoken beauty, remains, crucially, unexplained. Here is the other meaning of the word “evidence”, and perhaps the other side of her research too. Against an ideological history of mastery (of land, of truth, of the concept of America), Schmitt quietly proposes what she herself calls an “ecology of humility”: a form of kinship with and presence towards the world, a sense of wonderment in the face of that which can be perceived immediately – e-vidently – but which escapes any one master narrative. This openness does not negate the political import of ideological critique, nor does it redeem the anguish of historical violence at the root of America. But it does acknowledge something beyond ideology and beyond history, something that links the land and its splendour to the drawings of a child: a sense of hope, of potential, of something shared. And there’s something profoundly American in that, too.