Karl Holmqvist
m.d.L.A. SHADOWPLAY (MESHES OF THE MACKEY APTS) was filmed a year ago last summer in Los Angeles, edited together this winter in Berlin and the showing at dépendance VIEW, Brussels is now the film’s Official Premiere. The Mackey Apts were built by the Austrian architect Rudolf Schindler in Los Angeles in the thirties and I was granted a six month stay there by the MAK Center who manages the Schindler Estate and its residency program.
It wasn’t my first time coming to Los Angeles obviously, but when I first entered the apartment I was struck by how the light bouncing off the white walls seemed so familiar to me somehow. The famous California light, it took me a while to realise I recognised it from Meshes of the Afternoon, the cult film by Maya Deren that she filmed in Los Angeles in 1943 and I decided then and there to attempt a remake of her film as a kind of walkthrough and simultaneous portrait of the apartment itself.
Schindler in his various projects for Los Angeles was famous for his use of daylight with a number of hidden openings and small windows bringing in daylight to all parts of his architecture designs. Also he put in a surprising amount of built-in storage and I think the idea was to store everything out of sight and basically live in a sparsely furnished, largely empty interior, a bit like a Japanese tatami room. Even though I hadn’t even brought a lot actually, for me it was just nice to spend time in this empty white place so different from my overstuffed Berlin apartment filled with too much books and plants and etc.
By coincidence, Maya Deren’s film was made in North King’s road in the Hollywood Hills up the street from the Schindler House where the architect lived and worked at that time when it would have been quite far away from downtown Los Angeles or basically in the countryside. She made it together with her then husband Alexander Hammid who must have been quite a skillful camera man in view of the many pans and zooms and irregular camera angles used in the film.
I met with artist Loretta Fahrenholz, who in 2018 made a version of Maya Deren’s film called Mashes of the Afternoon, where she edited together all the different remakes of the film that she could find on YouTube. It turns out Meshes of the Afternoon is quite a popular film to remake in film– and art schools etc. because of its camera work, slightly surreal and openended storyline and through Maya Deren’s position as a pioneer cult film maker. With Loretta, we also spoke about how Hammid’s name often fails to be mentioned as director and co-author of the film in a kind of gender reversal throughout art history of famous artist’s wives helping their husbands and never quite getting any kind of credit for it.
For our remake I invited my trans friend, artist and New York nightlife fixture Dese Escobar in the role of Maya Deren. Myself as her husband and the famous bent over mirror face creature that haunts her nightmare visions. We shot in 16 millimeter b/w silent just like the original with camera operated by Max Pitegoff and camera assistant Josias Lopez. One of my favorite moments in the film is when I’m seated on the side of the bed answering the phone and then handing it over to Dese/Deren and she looks at it as if it was an iPhone where she could see who’s calling before putting it to her ear. Also her sleeping in the same bed with silk poppy flowers next to her that then turn into a knife. As I go around the house again and again up stairs and through corridors, the knife then turns into a key, the record is spinning, the phone is ringing and shards of broken mirror are washed out in the sea.
I should mention also maybe that the original was first released in 1943 as a silent movie. It was only in 1959 after she had met and married the Japanese-American composer Teijo Ito that he added a specially made soundtrack to the movie. For Maya Deren film making should remain a democratic expression similar to poetry or choreography. She loathed the exclusionary and resources wasting Hollywood movie making machine that she saw as anathema to what the medium could be with story lines dealing more with the personal and occult or subconscious. Similar to what so-called independent film makers would develop in the sixties and seventies all the way to someone like David Lynch. Even though now recognised as a pioneering cult film maker she faced lifelong struggles for finding budgets and distribution for her oeuvre up until her early death in New York in 1961 at age 44.
L.A. SHADOWPLAY (MESHES OF THE MACKEY APARTMENTS) BY KARL HOLMQVIST, 2025,
21MINS43SECS, B/W SILENT/SOUND STARRING; DESE ESCOBAR AND KARL HOLMQVIST
CAMERA; MAX PITEGOFF CAMERA ASSISTANT; JOSIAS LOPEZ EDITING; LUKAS PANEK
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