Hollywood is as much of an invisible industry as it is an overexposed one. Its foundations of glamor are propelled by the toil and moil of an unseen village: publicists and agents, designers and technicians, coordinators and scouts. Within this universe—yet often left out of Hollywood history—is the continuity girl, a title coined in the Golden Age for the women who ensured that all the “godly small things” of film production sets remained consistent throughout shooting, and her continuity photographs. John Divola’s recovery of pre-Code continuity photographs reconfigures their status as archival collateral into contemporary works meant to be seen. Here, they are merited as portals into a world reliant upon artifice, a gendered eye for detail, and undisclosed labor—all of which remain under constant threat today.

“Singin’ in the Rain,” one of the first films I ever saw, loomed over my thoughts during Frieze Los Angeles. In its second west coast iteration, the art fair took place at the historic Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood. Top tier galleries set up white box booths in a tent laden with plush carpet at the entrance — the color of the year was a deep pink. Smaller L.A. galleries and artist project spaces occupied the row in the back of the tent. It was what I imagine a convention to be like — fanatics selling wares and displaying their newest oddities in a big civic arena flooded with fluorescent light, albino lizards, and unique species of scorpions. This was an Art Expo, the World Fair.

In 1967, French filmmaker Agnes Varda landed in Los Angeles with “a suitcase of assumptions and judgments.” Varda liked to maintain her outsider insouciance and the three films she made in Southern California are packed with wry observations on the region’s daydreams and dissonance.

Nothing can come of nothing. The infinitely small is not the same thing as nothing, though it may be close. I seriously begin to doubt whether nothing exists. The Planck length, I discover, is the smallest calculable unit, though it apparently lies many million times beyond the scope of what our current instruments can measure. It is reassuring to know that something does.

At the turn of the 21st century, video artist Michele O’Marah started making cover versions of Hollywood film and television. Working with borrowed equipment and willing friends, O’Marah’s homemade reenactments pay loving homage but also possess a bite sharp enough to pop the hot air out of their sources and subjects.

It’s 1992. A lead singer with a blond mane breezes into a glassy building and strides toward the elevator, clicking his teeth in time to a beat. He’s a tall, clean-shaven guy with tattoos and broad shoulders. His chiseled facial features are flourished with makeup, but he’s not in disguise. Just the opposite. He crosses the lobby clamorously, necklaces and earrings clanging, leather clapping against leather. The echoes of his stiletto-heeled boot steps announce his presence. Unconsciously, he reaches a gloved hand to his crotch. Yes, his leather pants are cinched tight. Two of his band’s singles have charted as high as number 2. Their last album reached number 7 on the Billboard 200 in 1990, and its initial single is a testament to his heterosexuality, so he couldn’t give a fuck what people are whispering about his leather pants and eyeliner. The band has already recorded a follow-up album, which will be their third. He’s riding a beer buzz. He has no idea that he’s living his last minute on top of the world.

In 1930, as the film East of Borneo was being made, a team of scientists descended on the remote volcanic island of Niuafo’ou to view an eclipse. Joseph Cornell, an avid stargazer who kept dossiers on constellations and heavenly bodies and subscribed to at least one journal of astronomy, was likely aware of this expedition.

Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s.

I’m lying in a waterbed. On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven’t touched the gun, I haven’t read the book. I’m listening to “Roses” by White Ring. I feel like I’m overdosing on Nicorette. I spit the gum into a champagne flute and pick up Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Ellis. I read 3 pages, and then I read 3 pages from Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and then I wander the apartment, kind of dazed, and put in a DVD of Dawn of the Dead.