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Hommage: Lee Anne Schmitt 2025

Bowers Cave

Lee Anne Schmitt, Lee Lynch
This graceful, protean short explores the past and present of Bower’s Cave in California, where a large collection of Chumash Indian religious artefacts were found in 1886.
Filmstill Bowers Cave
Filmstill Bowers Cave

Bowers Cave

Bowers Cave
Lee Anne Schmitt, Lee Lynch
Hommage: Lee Anne Schmitt 2025
Documentary Film
USA
2009
13 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None
In 1885, two boys came across a large collection of Chumash Indian religious artefacts in a cave in California’s San Martin Mountains. Later named Bowers Cave, it is now located on a landfill site. Lee Lynch and Lee Anne Schmitt’s graceful, protean short braids together a panoply of different texts and images to unearth the different layers to this all-too American story and allow its wider implications to resonate: photos of museum exhibits given their Chumashan names in voice-over, historical quotes that move across views of contemporary industrial activity, Indigenous figures rendered as bright plastic toys, the mouth of the cave and the markings carved into its walls.
James Lattimer

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lee Anne Schmitt, Lee Lynch
Cinematographer
Lee Anne Schmitt
Editor
Lee Anne Schmitt
Producer
Lee Anne Schmitt
Narrator
Thom Andersen