L.A. Nickel envisions the urban landscape of Los Angeles as nightmare and dream. Recording from a window to suggest a vantage point of surveillance, Miller positions the viewer as a voyeur when she documents the interaction of people and policemen on the Skid Row street below. A harsh, "scratch" aural collage heightens the sense of confrontation and aggression. A lush, dramatic orchestration accompanies the second sequence, an evocative night drive through the streets of Los Angeles. This passage is blocked by the presence of a police car, which Miller transforms into an abstracted dance of lights. The thwarting of mobility by authority becomes a metaphor of social confinement.
A guy picks up a girl hitchhiking and starts making advances to her to sleep with her, albeit with the ruse of offering to do a photo shoot so that she can succeed as a model.
“The details of the young actor’s face – his eyes, eyebrows, earlobe, chin, etc. – are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwrite.
Mary Ocky, a beautiful girl from Mondonedo, Ohio, comes to seek the help of the famous PI Philip Marlboro in order to find her boyfriend Macho Jim who went missing three months earlier under obscure circumstances.
A lift technician finds himself drawn into a web of mystery and peril as he investigates the perplexing deadly accidents occurring in the elevators of a new office building.
Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it.
