Fabrice Ziolkowski's L.A.X. (1980) — A Hypnotic City Symphony of Bygone LA

As part of PRS's YesterdayLA 2026 series—a month-long exploration of the people, places, and works of art that have become part of the fabric of Los Angeles history—7th House and Los Angeles Filmforum are proud to co-present Fabrice Ziolkowski's L.A.X. (1980), a landmark of the Los Angeles avant-garde and a profound influence on subsequent works ranging from Pat O'Neill's brilliant Water and Power to Thom Andersen's beloved Los Angeles Plays Itself. Returning to Los Angeles screens for the first time in a decade, this seldom-seen work stands today as both an exquisite portrait of Los Angeles in 1980 and an inadvertent future artifact: a patient, immersive record of a city that has continued to erase, reinvent, and transform itself in the years since.

A true city film and a singular avant-garde entry in the city symphony tradition—from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to Chantal Akerman's News from Home and Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga—L.A.X. follows Los Angeles by car and on foot through long, hypnotic tracking shots and patient observations of its streets, landmarks, and overlooked corners. Created by French-American filmmaker Fabrice Ziolkowski, whose perspective seems suspended between Europe's deeper sense of historical continuity and America's restless appetite for reinvention, L.A.X. brings to Los Angeles an outsider's eye akin to that of cinematic visitors like Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Wim Wenders, and John Boorman, rendering even its most familiar landscapes strange, improbable, and newly visible.

Progressing from sweeping aerial vistas bathed in Southern California's stark, sun-bleached daylight to the seamier nocturnal realities of street-level Hollywood, L.A.X. traces a gradual descent from sunlit mythology into the noir realities and hidden histories that lie beneath. Accompanied by a richly layered soundtrack of ambient sounds, historical and literary texts, and songs, the film reveals a metropolis haunted as much by what is absent as by what remains—its displaced communities, vanished landscapes, and forgotten histories lingering just beyond the edges of the frame.

The years have transformed what was once a portrait of the contemporary city into a kind of time-traveling road movie and urban séance, conjuring the vanished landscapes and past-lived realities of Los Angeles and inviting viewers to spend an evening drifting through them.

Dir. Fabrice Ziolkowski, 1980, 88 mins, United States, English/French, Unrated, Digital.

Tickets: $10 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

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