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Which Way to CA? reflects a tourist´s view, which is perhaps the only view anyone of European descent can have of California, having arrived here only recently (10 minutes, 200 years) from somewhere else. The film begins with freeways and cemeteries under freeways. Someone with a camera in one hand checks his watch - an allusion to Kren´s systemic timing techniques, absent here. Then come generic baby pictures; bouncing baby, baby mugging for the camera, changing after shitting, Santa Claus. Japanese tourists are frozen forever, anonymous and calm under the Golden Gate Bridge, the ultimate Camera Culture. Other unidentified monuments. The film is laced with surrogate self-portraits, involving a ´68 Chevy Bel Air: Chevy with Seagull, Chevy at the Beach, at Valley Ford Market, at Jensen´s Oyster Bar. See the USA in your Chevrolet. There are some places one just can´t get to on public transportation.
These ordinary images are combined in ways that cause us to question their value as representation. How is the baby different from the ´68 Chevy or the Japanese tourists? Within the reconstituted home movie frame, these subjects are reduced to generalized signs. The process is ironic in that the original intention of recording these images was to remember specific events and individuals. Through what processes do they lose their identity? What new significance do they acquire?
(David Levi Strauss, "Notes on Kren: Cutting Through Structural Materialism or, "Sorry. It had to be done."," in: Cinematograph I, San Francisco 1985)
