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Chávez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story
Directed by Jordan Mechner
Produced by Jordan Mechner, Don Normark, Andrew B.
Andersen, Mark Moran
Photographs by Don Normark
Music by Ry Cooder
Narrated by Cheech Marin
24 min, USA 2004
Don Normark's haunting photographs bring back to life a Mexican American village razed in the 1950s to build Dodger Stadium. The evening will include an in-person discussion with special guests with first-hand knowledge of what happened in the hills that overlook the Not A Cornfield grounds.
ABOUT THE FILM
"CHAVEZ RAVINE tells the bittersweet story of how an American community was betrayed by greed, political hypocrisy, and good intentions gone astray.
In 1949, photographer Don Normark stumbled on Chávez Ravine, a closely-knit Mexican-American village on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Enchanted, he stayed for a year and took hundreds of photographs, never knowing he was capturing on film the last images of a place that was about to disappear.
The following year, the city of L.A. evicted the 300 families of Chávez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. The land was cleared, homes, schools, and church razed to the ground. But the real estate lobby, sensing a great opportunity, accused the LA Housing Authority's Frank Wilkinson of being a communist agent. The city folded and instead of building the promised housing, it sold the land to baseball owner Walter O'Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site.
Fifty years later, Normark's haunting black-and-white photographs reclaim and celebrate a lost village from a simpler time." - Bullfrog Films
More about the history of Chávez Ravine
ABOUT THE NOT A CORNFIELD PROJECT
Growing in the historic center of Los Angeles, the Not Cornfield project transforms an industrial brownfield site into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. Now the Los Angeles Historic State Park, the site popularly known as 'The Cornfield' had remained derelict for more than a decade. The project serves as a potent metaphor that provides a focus for reflection and action in a city unclear about the location of its energetic and historic center.
ABOUT LAUREN BON, NOT A CORNFIELD ARTIST
Lauren Bon resides in Los Angeles and holds a Masters of Architecture degree from MIT and a BA from Princeton. Ms. Bon is a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation and President of Not A Cornfield, LLC. Her recent urban, public and land art projects in the U.S., Hong Kong, Belfast and Northern Ireland, as well as her role as a trustee, make her uniquely poised to build the capacity of the Foundation in the area of site based philanthropy, serving communities through education, civic, health, artistic initiatives and programs. Not a Cornfield art project is being developed through a grant by the Annenberg Foundation. |
