VISUAL ARTS

Three Businessmen
Directed by Alex Cox. With Miguel Sandoval, Robert Wisdom, Alex Cox
UK 1998, 35mm, color, 80 min
Working from a screenplay by his wife, producer and publisher Tod Davies, Cox fuses Buñuel and Beckett in the age of transnational capitalism. One night, two traveling art dealers, a brash American and an uptight Brit, meet by chance in the dining room of a Liverpool hotel. They go off in search of a colleague and a decent vegetarian meal, but after they get lost, their search develops into a globetrotting odyssey as they visit five different countries in the course of a night and the following day. Captured mostly in long takes without inserts or close-ups, the film follows their endless conversation as they wander from dystopic cityscapes into the desert.

Preceded by

Edge City
Directed by Alex Cox. With Greg Alarcon, Christine Burton, Alex Cox
1980, 16mm, color, 40 min
A student film made by Cox at UCLA’s film school, Edge City manifests his fascination with the urban sprawl of Los Angeles and with American society in the late 1970s. The film presents a portrait of a stranger in a strange land, with Cox playing a recent British transplant. What he finds in Los Angeles are skyscrapers, oil wells, apartments with thin walls, and of course endless freeways. The plot proceeds along a chain of associations, variations on the theme of the angst of the young artist. What ties the film together are the impressions of a society adrift, with an ever-present undercurrent of anxiety as Los Angeles prepares to transition from being a large Californian city to a global megalopolis.