Authors — Courtney Stephens
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Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California
On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David […]
by Courtney Stephens on Mar 18, 2025 -
The Longhand Film
For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun: biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and […]
by Courtney Stephens on Jul 12, 2021
