Schrader: The Canyons (2013)

The Canyons begs the question: what would it take to imagine Los Angeles without cinema, or after cinema? In some ways, film might not seem like the right medium to answer that question – but, then again, what Schrader presents is not exactly a film either, at least not in a conventional or classical sense. Not only is it the first film by a major director to be funded by crowdsourcing, but it opens with a montage sequence of decaying and dilapidated multiplexes. In other words, this is no longer a film that recognises the distinction between production and consumption, nor a film that demands or depends upon a privileged or sequestered screening environment. Instead, Schrader, working from a trash-noir masterpiece by Bret Easton Ellis, takes a classic trope of LA noir - the love triangle between a director (James Deen), actress (Lindsay Lohan) and actor (Nolan Gerard Funk) - to present something like a film that has adapted to calibrate the evacuation of film from the Los Angeles cityscape. Early experimental film often turned on the gesture of simply placing the camera in pre-cinematic milieux, or at least milieux that hadn’t been fully colonised by cinema – and there’s something akin to that here in the way in which Schrader simply places the camera in post-cinematic milieux, among spaces and structures that have become jettisoned from a specifically cinematic mode of address, spaces that are so cluttered with cameras and other recording devices that they are no longer transformed or even phased by the presence of his own camera. And it quickly becomes clear that this post-cinematic world gives us a kind of nightmare of total cinema, a surfeit of cinematic objects and attachments that prevents anything feeling privileged, spectacular or distinctive, just as Ellis’ stillborn, oddly distended and distracted narrative revolves around a film that is indistinguishable from every other space and object in Schrader’s own ‘film.’ On the one hand, that creates film that is simultaneously its own venue, cinema as a medium, something that can only be partially experienced, albeit something we’re destined to partially experience in perpetuity, not unlike the total television of soap opera. But it also resists that, if only by fulfilling it so mercilessly, as Schrader and Ellis collapse Lohan, Deen and Funk back into the boredom they originally assuaged, in something like an elegy for cinematic scarcity - after all, boredom is only boredom because it is always, aggressively available.