Now Available: Bill Brown’s Mountain State

Posted August 7th, 2024 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

Mountain State (Bill Brown, 2003, 19 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

“History is a ghost, and every historical marker tells a ghost story,” Brown writes about his film; that’s true but also a truism, since every true story must one day become a kind of ghost story. Mountain State is instead a film about absence, not presence; when Brown reads about his ghosts, now haunting highway rest stops or vacant fields, it revives them only long enough for us to imagine how much things have changed, so much so that even ghosts must be gone. A strange thing, to mourn the death of a ghost. Brown’s film ends with a perfect little scene — the birth of a ghost, let’s call it, so as not to spoil it. But it’s also a sad ending: there remains an implication, flickering in bright and soft 16mm daylight, that history is really just death.

CHRIS ZIEGLER | JUNE 2, 2005
OC WEEKLY