Farihah Zaman
California Company Town is an unusual creature in the world of modern documentary film. It is shot on 16mm, has no characters, no interviews, and consists of so many still shots that it most closely resembles experimental landscape films.
Robert Kenner’s exposé on the American food industry begins with all the dystopian promise of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, plunging us beneath the surface of a shiny, pristine supermarket with rolling camera movement, prophetic voiceover, and pulsing horror movie score.
Aghion turns her DV camera on a quartet of geologists searching for fossils of plant life that would suggest a formerly tropical Antarctica, but the goal is less important here than the painstaking portrait of their needle-in-a-haystack search.
New in Town evinces no awareness of its potential relevance; the writers could have inserted a sports facility, hospital, college, or a desert island in place of the factory.