Beginning from the question of 'What does one go through to come to L. A. from elsewhere and become an actor?' Ventzislavova creates with 'American Dream Acting' a portrait of the film industry's newcomers. Shot in one of L.A.'s architectural icons, Case Study House #22 plays unique role in L.A. mythology and serves as the ideal backdrop for the documentary concept film 'American Dream Acting'.

The film deals with the desire for, as well as the belief in, the illusion of making the American dream come true – in this case that of an acting career. In episodes spread throughout the day five protagonists perform their personal stories, which are often tied to structural conditions, migration, assimilation, and foreignness. American Dream Acting transports a specific feeling and atmosphere of the place and the current zeitgeist. (MAK LA)

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Living and Acting in L.A.:1
The Fictional Documentaries of Borjana Ventzislavova *
Text by Dimitrina Sevova

People like to believe there is nothing that hasn’t already been said, written, or shown about Los Angeles. Nevertheless, the city remains literally incomprehensible. “Los Angeles is hard to get right,” muses filmmaker Thom Andersen in his filmic opus magnum, Los Angeles Plays Itself.2 Artists and historians alike have slaved away at it, alternately characterizing it as a simulation, a jigsaw puzzle, an amalgam of ideas, concepts, desires; a utopia and dystopia at once. Yet, “Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presumed that the city actually exists.”3

It’s the same with Hollywood: whether as the city’s “alter-ego” (Mike Davis) or as a “metonym for the film industry” (Andersen), it is partly responsible for these different imaginations, yet also an actual place where people live. Situated in the hills that are a part of this real Hollywood is the famous Case Study House #22, also known as the “Stahl House”. Pierre Koenig’s house - site of countless photo shoots and film sets - is considered the epitome of California “cool” thanks not least to Julius Shulman’s 1960 photographs.

In Borjana Ventzislavova’s video American Dream Acting the house serves as a playground of another kind: a stage set for actresses and actors who are meant to feel at home for the span of a single day. We quickly recognise, however, that this is not the case.

In five episodes, each dedicated to a character – Monika, Rossen, Michael, Srinivasa, and Kristine – American Dream Acting deals with the dream of acting in Hollywood / Los Angeles as a story of migration, assimilation, and alienation in the course of a single day. The actors, however, play themselves in “real life”, while this is deliberately unmasked as a facet of a performance, a pure construct. Nevertheless, “the real must be fictionalised in order to be thought.”5 This process of fictionalization progresses flu- idly, not in one direction, but constantly alternating between documentary and fiction. The ambiguity of the drama is lit- erally inscribed in the image, with the split-screen showing the protagonists from two slightly different angles, alternating between close-up and mid-range shots. While they narrate in one half, the other manifests the artist’s interest in the person, their facial expressions, gestures, and behaviour in and toward space. The camera functions as an agent in search of potential, a spontaneous expression of feeling, naturalness, that these stories of uprooting and the dream of the ideal good life render authentically and empathetically comprehensible.

Reflections and duplications function as tropes of the city, which is not one, but many, just as the potential roles of the actors, who have come to live out their dream, to embody it, to represent something. For Ventzislavova, it’s about this long- ing, which is inseparably linked to the preservation of an illusion, of the American dream. But she ventures even further, asking what happens between fantasy and real life, and why. Where do collective imagination, wishful thinking, different life plans, and technologies clash with the self? One of these points of intersection is the struggle for a visa and a work permit, whose necessity disrupts the dream sooner or later. Great cunning is required, or one of three options that Michael lists off: “Win the lottery, be exceptional at something, or get married.” Either live and work illegally, or go back to your homeland. “You’ve got to remember the original idea,” says Rossen, who studied directing years ago at the Film Academy in Sofia. But in a city that easily forgets or “has a false memory” (Norman Klein)7, what does that mean?

excerpt from Claudia Slanar’s essay, Case Study / Borjana Ventzislavova

(Hg.) bäckerstrasse4 – plattform für junge kunst, edition dispositiv, Vienna 2012
Der Titel ist eine Referenz an William Friedkins Film To Live and Die in L.A. (USA 1985).
3 Mike Davis, City of Quartz, New York, 1990, p.23. Original:
Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presu- med that the city actually exists, Übers.: C.S.
7 Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory, New York 1997.

Beginning from the question of 'What does one go through to come to L. A. from elsewhere and become an actor?' Ventzislavova creates with 'American Dream Acting' a portrait of the film industry's newcomers. Shot in one of L.A.'s architectural icons, Case Study House #22 plays unique role in L.A. mythology and serves as the ideal backdrop for the documentary concept film 'American Dream Acting'.

The film deals with the desire for, as well as the belief in, the illusion of making the American dream come true – in this case that of an acting career. In episodes spread throughout the day five protagonists perform their personal stories, which are often tied to structural conditions, migration, assimilation, and foreignness. American Dream Acting transports a specific feeling and atmosphere of the place and the current zeitgeist. (MAK LA)

_

Living and Acting in L.A.:1
The Fictional Documentaries of Borjana Ventzislavova *
Text by Dimitrina Sevova

People like to believe there is nothing that hasn’t already been said, written, or shown about Los Angeles. Nevertheless, the city remains literally incomprehensible. “Los Angeles is hard to get right,” muses filmmaker Thom Andersen in his filmic opus magnum, Los Angeles Plays Itself.2 Artists and historians alike have slaved away at it, alternately characterizing it as a simulation, a jigsaw puzzle, an amalgam of ideas, concepts, desires; a utopia and dystopia at once. Yet, “Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presumed that the city actually exists.”3

It’s the same with Hollywood: whether as the city’s “alter-ego” (Mike Davis) or as a “metonym for the film industry” (Andersen), it is partly responsible for these different imaginations, yet also an actual place where people live. Situated in the hills that are a part of this real Hollywood is the famous Case Study House #22, also known as the “Stahl House”. Pierre Koenig’s house - site of countless photo shoots and film sets - is considered the epitome of California “cool” thanks not least to Julius Shulman’s 1960 photographs.

In Borjana Ventzislavova’s video American Dream Acting the house serves as a playground of another kind: a stage set for actresses and actors who are meant to feel at home for the span of a single day. We quickly recognise, however, that this is not the case.

In five episodes, each dedicated to a character – Monika, Rossen, Michael, Srinivasa, and Kristine – American Dream Acting deals with the dream of acting in Hollywood / Los Angeles as a story of migration, assimilation, and alienation in the course of a single day. The actors, however, play themselves in “real life”, while this is deliberately unmasked as a facet of a performance, a pure construct. Nevertheless, “the real must be fictionalised in order to be thought.”5 This process of fictionalization progresses flu- idly, not in one direction, but constantly alternating between documentary and fiction. The ambiguity of the drama is lit- erally inscribed in the image, with the split-screen showing the protagonists from two slightly different angles, alternating between close-up and mid-range shots. While they narrate in one half, the other manifests the artist’s interest in the person, their facial expressions, gestures, and behaviour in and toward space. The camera functions as an agent in search of potential, a spontaneous expression of feeling, naturalness, that these stories of uprooting and the dream of the ideal good life render authentically and empathetically comprehensible.

Reflections and duplications function as tropes of the city, which is not one, but many, just as the potential roles of the actors, who have come to live out their dream, to embody it, to represent something. For Ventzislavova, it’s about this long- ing, which is inseparably linked to the preservation of an illusion, of the American dream. But she ventures even further, asking what happens between fantasy and real life, and why. Where do collective imagination, wishful thinking, different life plans, and technologies clash with the self? One of these points of intersection is the struggle for a visa and a work permit, whose necessity disrupts the dream sooner or later. Great cunning is required, or one of three options that Michael lists off: “Win the lottery, be exceptional at something, or get married.” Either live and work illegally, or go back to your homeland. “You’ve got to remember the original idea,” says Rossen, who studied directing years ago at the Film Academy in Sofia. But in a city that easily forgets or “has a false memory” (Norman Klein)7, what does that mean?

excerpt from Claudia Slanar’s essay, Case Study / Borjana Ventzislavova

(Hg.) bäckerstrasse4 – plattform für junge kunst, edition dispositiv, Vienna 2012
Der Titel ist eine Referenz an William Friedkins Film To Live and Die in L.A. (USA 1985).
3 Mike Davis, City of Quartz, New York, 1990, p.23. Original:
Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presu- med that the city actually exists, Übers.: C.S.
7 Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory, New York 1997.