Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

History is always marked upon the land, a process made remarkable in California, a state whose very geography has been re-charted to serve specific uses. While sold as an open space, a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. The reality of our world was born out of very specific moments and choices, a construction that is neither organic nor inevitable. California Company Town casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise.

“The twenty-odd towns that Schmitt profiles appear as they really are—as vacant buildings, abandoned graveyards, warning signs, and tourist spectacles; as spaces where marginal inhabitants move under the muted blue-gray of polluted skies… Accompanied by Schmitt’s earnest narration, these images quickly become an essay on privatized land ownership, the failure of cooperative labor, the effects of industrial fallout on the environment, and, underlying it all, the American dream. Recounting facts and using archival film and audio, the artist cautiously fleshes out short, contained narratives to hang on the bones of each town.”
-Catherine Taft, Art Forum

"Schmitt’s work is a direct illustration of the connection between the personal and the political, and illuminates the strains created by the many inequities found within America’s political and economic systems."
-The Viennale