Fiction

AWAKE AND SING

Lee Anne Schmitt
USA 2003
42 min
V'11

Can Los Angeles of the 30’s be effectively placed alongside modern 21st century Los Angeles? As a true experiment, Awake And Sing mixes periods and genres taking pleasure not in easy solutions, but in the search for a form or way of telling that has to be tried out, discovered. Awake And Sing plays with various aspects of film at once and is based on the early writings of Clifford Odets, a playwright involved in the New York based Group Theatre of the 30’s. Odets’ play “Awake and Sing!” was initially produced in 1935 and tells the story of an impoverished New York family and their conflicts. Odets created a body of work that served as a record of liberal thinking and protest of the period.
Lee Anne Schmitt’s Awake And Sing refers to Odets by showing a spectrum of techniques, from seemingly improvised dramatic scenes to imposing voice-over commentary. It is as if Lee Anne Schmitt wants us to have to find our way in a new environment or with new characters in every new scene the film denies the traditional categories of fiction and documentary. The Californian landscape around Los Angeles, which will also be explored by Lee Anne Schmitt a few years later in California Company Town, is used to suggest a mythical world of highways and transigence. Clifford Odets died in Los Angeles in 1963 as a disillusioned screenwriter.

This film is screened together with Nightingale.

Credits
  • Lee Anne Schmitt
  • Lee Anne Schmitt
  • Craig Smith
  • Lee Anne Schmitt
Lee Anne Schmitt

Lee Anne Schmitt

16 mm
col
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