The Canyon (Zachary Epcar, 2021) (Patreon)

Another of the leading lights of experimental cinema at the moment, Zachary Epcar has very quickly defined a highly individual style. In such recent films as Return to Forms (2016) and Life After Love (2018), he has exhibited a new variety of California cinema, quite different from the West Coast filmmaking of the 1960s and 70s. Artists like Robert Nelson, William Wiley, Ed Ruscha, Ed Keinholz, and Bruce Conner tended to produce work that was wry, detached, and cannabinoid, exhibiting a insouciant bemusement at the superficiality of the colonized desert landscape, the mass media, and to some degree the very notion of art as commentary. 

While some Californians, like Conner and John Baldessari, sometimes evoked a sense of anxiety and despair at the Standard / Chevronization of their world, the overall atmosphere is better summed up by a film like Bleu Shut (Nelson / Wiley, 1971), in which a structuralist nonsense game is executed in deliberately sloppy fashion, flouting rules that the film's makers had probably forgotten they'd even made.

Epcar's work is different, and this is because he comprehends the underlying affect within California's motorcycle emptiness. There is no living memory of a universe before neoliberalism, and so the idea of a pure feeling, untainted by the tendrils of capital, is a mirage, a structuring gap that suggests lack but cannot conceive of an originary object or desire that might fill the hole. Like other members of his generation, such as Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi, Epcar intuitively grasps the ache of cathecting onto the superficial, grabbing at a floating ring in the pool as if it could really be your emotional life raft.

These inchoate feelings hover around narrativity, occupying the penumbra of comprehensible meaning. In Epcar's previous film Billy (2019), it seemed to me that the filmmaker worked to clarify a bit too much, mapping his nervous upper-middle-class suburbanism onto identifiable characters, individuals with names. While this certainly suggested that Epcar could easily make a lateral move and become a masterful Lynchian surrealist, I felt that Billy sacrificed the evocative unknowability that made his work so seductive and discomfiting. These sensations came across as signifiers of psychic disruption, rather than catalysts for it.

As it happens, his latest film takes the narrative miasma of Billy and relocates it, achieving a newer kind of frisson. The Canyon is perhaps Epcar's most expansive work, not in terms of running time (although at 15 minutes, it is his longest film to date) but in its psycho-geographical scale. Even as it focuses its attention on a select group of sunlit Cali mid-rise apartment buildings, The Canyon evokes the tenuous grip we have on recognizable feelings today, suggesting a philosophy of perpetual loss and displacement.

The film could possibly be characterized as an unexpected rendezvous between David Hockney and Ernie Gehr. Epcar brightens the screen with swimming pool blue and stucco white, organizing the film around the strict rectilinear patterns of balconies and balustrades, sidewalks and tennis courts, and his incredibly precise camera movements serve to accentuate this underlying plan. Epcar's camera anticipates the intrusion of sports cars and dogwalkers, all strictly situated on the horizontal, as if he had actually orchestrated these gestures. (They appear random, but for all I know Epcar was directing on a closed set.)

These geometrical long shots are interspersed with images of bodies, some silent and some speaking, placed in a black void. They tend to exude the bland, official beauty of catalog models, except that we are seeing them up close, given access to their blotchy skin and irregular breathing patterns. They are social actors, lifted from the broad paradise of luxury apartment living and offered for inspection. We're asked to regard them as aliens might.

Accompanied by a tremulous soundtrack of muted trumpet and saxophone, this figures are tragicomic because they are working so hard to convince themselves, and us, that they are living the Good Life. They want to connect to something or someone, but have been atomized into a private oblivion, devoting themselves to intangible goals: productivity, romance, satisfaction, sexual fulfillment. Epcar displays these figures as indistinguishable from social representations; they have little choice but to embody typologies, the notion of an authentic self receding further and further in the rearview mirror.

In the conclusion to The Canyon, Epcar provides a close-up of the "glory hole" spillway at the Monticello Dam. A woman's voice describes "the canyon" as the place where capitalist desires go to die, a "great devouring mouth" in a landscape that will mutate both itself and those who occupy it. "The canyon is community. It is one single resident tone, living through all bodies at all times." The peaceful pleasures of West Coast living, the omniradiant shell that the Boomers worked so hard to secure -- it is all described with the dispassionate drone of a Stepford soccer mom. "When we came to the canyon, there was nothing. And when we leave there will be less than nothing." Epcar suggests that when that time inevitably arrives, we will be even less than that.