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Matinee: 'Echoes of the Palisades'
8 March 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 594th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Echoes of the Palisades.
This 4:49 video by photographer and filmmaker Ken Sax follows Claude Harvey's return to the ruins of his former home (also his childhood home) in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Both video and stills as well as Harvey's narration tell the story. You have to look closely. What looks like a charred awning beneath a burned flag is actually a twisted steel I-beam.
It isn't all about destruction, though. Harvey finds a bell and a kettle that came from his great great great grandparents in West Tennessee.
All he found at his home was the chimney, that bell and that kettle. "It amazes me that the oldest things on the property were the only things that survived," he says. He hid them on the property before returning to take them away.
He worries that what can't be replaced is the neighborhood. In the time it will take to clear the debris and begin rebuilding, families will lose a generation and start another.
And only echoes of the Palisades will be heard in the hearts of those who survived the Jan. 7 wildfire.