Soundtrack assistance: Don Lloyd.

A film evolving out of my experiments with dual screen projection and concerned with conjunctive and disjunctive couplings suggested by the qualities of light and sound at the Village Carwash in Los Angeles. The sound and picture exist as complete and separate entities coinciding only for four seconds. This film is intentionally two-dimensional, exploiting the properties of the medium that prevent photography from true reproduction.

"A cinematogenic subject finally receives its due." - Thom Andersen

"LA CARWASH takes an existing reality, an organic whole, and submits it to a destructuring and dissecting that renders the commercial establishment a footnote to the process. The sound re-recorded out of phase in a structure of 4' (a canon) assumes an imagistic life of its own .... The visual, the other half of the medium's capacity to create 'illusion,' is projected as the pictorial union of two different NOWS in filmic time and different (via the methods of printing and being filmed again) yet same (disconnected by linear time, joined by memory) photographed fractions." - Richard Kaplan

Funded by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation.

Collections: Carnegie Museum of Art; SF Art Institute.

Award: Adolph Gasser Award, SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1976

Selected Screenings:  
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Tate Modern, London
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York
"Sweet California," National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
"Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in American 1930 - 2000," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York  
Austrian Film Museum, Vienna
Los Angeles Filmforum
Chinese Taipei Film Archive, Taiwan
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh