CHAPBOOK OF THE NON-EMINENT

<![CDATA[<i>]]>Chapbook of the Non-Eminent<![CDATA[</i>]]> is a bittersweet love poem to Los Angeles, a city of tremendous contradictions, where appearances and actuality are often at odds, as they are in its major industry, cinema; where the contemporary panorama of labor, immigration, and homelessness is rarely represented. Los Angeles is also a city that suffers from historical amnesia, though its history lives on visibly in architectural palimpsests, as it does in film images and nostalgia.

In <![CDATA[<i>]]>Chapbook of the Non-Eminent<![CDATA[</i>]]> a flâneuse explores the streets, factories, and passages of downtown Los Angeles, reading the city through multiple analytical lenses, which parallel genres of cinema, from documentary to narrative to the essay film. Chapbook of the Non-Eminent uses these various lenses—empirical, philosophical, narrative, visual and experiential—to investigate both Los Angeles and the construction of cinematic meaning. A particular concern of the flâneuse/narrator is to straddle ordinary divisions between everyday life, popular culture, and elite discourse. While exploring and reading Los Angeles, <![CDATA[<i>]]>Chapbook of the Non-Eminent<![CDATA[</i>]]> also interrogates knowledge, truth, and meaning themselves, and playfully encourages a viewer to undertake his or her own exploration.

This film is part of the program <filmlink id=\"3016\">Falling Apart</filmlink>.