November 7th 2002 – December 28th 2002

Written and directed by Enid Baxter Blader
Opening Reception: November 7th 6-8 PM

LETTER FROM THE GIRL, MAILED AT THE GAS STATION is an experimental digital video/16 mm film hybrid. Using digital video to reference surveillance and voyeurism, and film to reference cinematic history, LETTER draws on Film Noir, American dreamscapes, American desert mythology, the B-movie, oppositional cinema, and Noir’s descendent, True Crime.

The first minutes of LETTER re-enact the first minutes of the Noir classic KISS ME DEADLY, reinventing its tension and gender inversions. Shot on Mount Washington, the site of Charlie Chaplin’s hotel and silent movie shoots, the piece references an historic cinematic landscape.

Filmed in dreamlike settings- a lonely desert, empty prairie land- a car moves through a winding highway in the Hollywood hills. The characters are trapped in a pre-urban space- on a stretch of back road that anticipates dark city streets, the Noir streets of Los Angeles Ð a space of fugitive menace where social bets are settled.

LETTER features a hard-edged original score by Preston Swifnoff and Aleph Research.

Enid Baxter Blader is an artist, filmmaker and musician. She received her BFA at the Cooper Union in New York City with a fellowship at Yale University and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Blader’s work spans social experience from hillbilly to cosmopolitan. In carefully woven visual and aural tapestries of suspense, romance, tragedy and comedy, her work features slices of life ranging from the mundane to the odd to the fantastic and has been presented at the Smithsonian, Orange County Museum of Art, California Center for the Arts, The Arnolfini, (Bristol, England), The Cornerhouse (Manchester, England), Sundance, the Director’s Guild of America, Women in the Director’s Chair, and the Aurora Picture Show.

LETTER FROM THE GIRL, MAILED AT THE GAS STATION was made possible with the generous support of Location One, Kodak, The Durfee Foundation, Craft Service Donations, Trader Joes of Eagle Rock, and Beaujolie Bolangerie.

Production with support from Stranger Baby Productions. (c) Enid Baxter Blader, 2002