Jesse Lerner

Urban symphonies are a genre within experimental and documentary cinema: architectural recordings, everyday actions, travel diaries. This film-performance shares scenes of Los Angeles filmed in 2022. Geometric forms, human movement, glazes, reflections, the interplay of filters, and the transition from black and white to color expand the image, opening multiple windows. A pulse-pounding depiction of this great metropolis.

This DVD examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the United States and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara Fiestas and South Carolina's kitschy "South of the Border" tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, this film reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, this film weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art, and music video, producing a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing and hilarious. Includes appearances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Aztlán Underground, among others.

Integrating archival sources with pseudo-documentary fabrications, Jesse Lerner’s Ruins delves into the tangled legacies of Mesoamerican antiquarianism, revealing how archaeologists, art historians, and museum curators have, for centuries, fashioned various theories about pre-Columbian civilizations from the stuff of colonialist fantasies and ingenious forgeries. Structured around five key vignettes in this history, Lerner’s film combines travelogues, newsreels, and educational films to examine the claims of various experts like early-20th century “dean of the Mayanists” Sylvanus G. Morley and archaeologist Michael Coe, longtime curator of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.

In 1964 a colossal pre-Hispanic monolith was taken from the town of San Miguel Coatlinchan in the state of Mexico and brought to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Since then, the absence of the monolith has been present in the memories of the inhabitants, as well as in endless reproductions and ripostes.