Drew Heitzler

The analysis of Hollywood film as legitimate historical material is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has led to extensive methodological overhauls throughout the social sciences. Drew Heitzler’s interrogative look at the Babylonian underside of Hollywood, and its associations with the American oil industry, contributes to this approach. Perhaps more important, however, it also reflects an artistic shift from the handling of cultural material as a ready-made system of signifiers that can be emptied out and evacuated of their meanings at will.

For this exhibition, Heitzler has rearranged the footage of three 1960s classics—The Wild Ride (1960), Night Tide (1961), and Lilith (1964)—into an airy three-channel montage of doubled images and suspended sound. The three films—featuring Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda, respectively, in their first significant roles in major motion pictures—have been condensed and interwoven with one another to construct unfamiliar and contradictory narratives that foreshadow the countercultural movement the three actors later came to embody.

Heitzler’s treatment of this material speaks to both the evidentiary nature of cinematic images and the inherent truths such images belie. In the adjoining galleries, Heitzler has installed a series of two hundred photographic works, which serve as analytic road maps, or visual arguments, related to the various seedy and unsightly moments in the history of Los Angeles. More often than not, the tragic deaths, the natural disasters, and the inexplicable moments of desperation that these images capture bear witness to the city’s proximity to a pervasive entertainment industry and the business of oil underlying it. Installed within the context of this expansive accumulation, the reedited films draw us closer to the visual product of history’s invisible forces.