CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation – onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise. A versatile multidisciplinary artist, Schmitt creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual, including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections of landscape with personal memory (LAS VEGAS), with the history of the American Left (AWAKE AND SING), and with urban development (THE WASH).

“Schmitt’s visually ravishing document of the devastation and desolation of California’s abandoned industrial towns is a wholly unique meditation on natural and man-made environs, at once languid and heartbreaking. Set against California’s beautifully diverse yet unforgiving terrain, [it] unearths the blight of industry and the failure of utopian naivet? among landscapes that appear ominously disinterested in human triumphs and tragedies, desires and needs. … Schmitt’s carefully assembled juxtapositions reveal forgotten towns anew, their current states of desolation and decrepitude now haunted by the past and haunting in their silence. In this young and fragile experiment called America, plunderers of nature and culture stand condemned of far-reaching abuses of the once-authentic promise of progress.” –Sean F. Diggins, SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

“Eschewing the formal structuralism of James Benning but retaining his poetic eye, and with a voiceover that recalls the work of Thom Andersen, Schmitt chronicles 14 California frontier towns, integrating archival footage and personal asides with beautiful 16mm images to show the towns then and now. She has depicted the ideology of progress and expansion, and the tangible sense of the haunted loss of American promise.” –VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL