An experimental short film / Los Angeles

LApse Poetic

A city in constant motion. Time accelerated. Light left to write its own poetry.

Watch the film Behind the images

001 / Screening

Watch LApse Poetic

Watch directly on YouTube ↗

002 / The film

A different
speed of life.

At street level, Los Angeles is all noise and interruption. From a distance, and at a different speed, the city begins to look like something else entirely.

LApse Poetic turns its attention to downtown Los Angeles and the neighborhoods around it. Time-lapse photography draws the movement out of ordinary city life: traffic becomes streaks of red and gold, the night pulses with electricity, and familiar streets slip into abstraction.

There are no characters to follow and no conventional story to untangle. The city supplies both. As in the time-lapse cinema of Koyaanisqatsi, rhythm and accumulation do the storytelling. What emerges is less a travelogue than an impression of a place that never seems to stop moving.

Completed in 2017, the film continues an experiment begun with the 2001 short Lapse Poetic. It also premiered as the opening short before the feature 30-Love, giving that evening's audience an accelerated look at Los Angeles before settling into a very different kind of story.

003 / The afterimage

The pattern
no one sees.

No driver sets out to draw a picture. No intersection knows it is part of a composition. Yet thousands of unrelated decisions can produce something almost deliberate. From inside the rush, you see only the next green light. From outside it, a whole other city comes into view.