John Moses

Projections

Imaginary signifiers

haunt the scenes

in my view—

beneath Golden

Gate, or Angels Flight,

or even more ordinary

locations.

Madeleine Elster at Mission Dolores;

Roy Batty in the Bradbury;

Phyllis Dietrichson on Quebec Drive;

Jake Gittes at Big Tujunga Wash;

Jim Stark on the steps at Griffith Planetarium;

the Highway Patrol officer on Gorman Post Road;

and all the other pictures that move

through the scenes.

Cinema is truth

24 times per second,

Godard said, in character.

Was it to impress

Anna Karina? Or

to get us thinking

about what is true

and real in this

image-glutted

world?

I taught film studies at Fresno State and Fresno City College for thirty years. A student once described me as “crazy for film.” That obsession is on display in “Projections,” a series of composite images blending film locations with ghostly traces from the movies filmed in those spaces. In this way, my images merge reality with the imaginary signifiers that movies use to tell their stories, often leaving indelible impressions in viewers’ minds.

Some of the locations are famous in their own right, while others go unnoticed by most passers-by. Likewise, some of the movies glimpsed in “Projections” are among the most acclaimed Hollywood has produced, while others are the stuff only a cinephile’s dreams are made of. My process was to choose movies that have stayed with me, like Vertigo and Chinatown, and to arrive at the locations with only my memory to guide me. Rather than matching my viewfinder to the original compositions, I wanted to choose the most arresting perspective in the present scene. Even so, my memory was often an eerily reliable guide.

John Moses, 2018