{"id":1217,"date":"2004-10-31T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2004-10-31T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1217"},"modified":"2018-06-06T11:16:42","modified_gmt":"2018-06-06T10:16:42","slug":"los-angeles-plays-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2004\/10\/31\/los-angeles-plays-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Plays Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

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LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
\n<\/b>Sunday 31 October 2004, at 12pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3<\/b><\/p>\n

Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself, USA, 2003, 169 min
\n<\/b>A remarkable documentary about cinema, an endlessly fascinating visual lecture and an important social commentary, Thom Andersen’s love letter to Los Angeles explores the city’s representation on film. With its relentless, mesmerising montage of clips and archive footage, the film explores how the Western centre of the film industry is actually portrayed on-screen. Divided into chapters that treat Los Angeles as – amongst other things – background, character and subject, the film revisits crucial landmarks (the steps up which Laurel & Hardy attempted to manoeuvre a piano in The Music Box<\/i>, explores famous buildings (the Spanish Revival house in Double Indemnity<\/i>, the cavernous Bradbury Building made famous by Blade Runner<\/i>), and charts the city’s ‘secret’ history through such films as Chinatown<\/i>, L.A. Confidential <\/i>and Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/i>. As comfortable with softcore exploitation as it is with the avant-garde, Los Angeles Plays Itself<\/i> is a cinematic treasure trove that makes one think again about a city that – as a movie location – has never seemed quite as romantic or exciting as New York. Indeed, the world around you may seem more mysterious and compelling after almost three hours well spent in Andersen’s company. And you’ll definitely never refer to Los Angeles as ‘L.A.’ again. (David Cox)<\/p>\n

Also Screening: Thursday 28 October 2004, at 8:15pm London NFT1<\/i><\/i><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
\n<\/b>Sunday 31 October 2004, at 12pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3<\/p>\n

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
\nThom Andersen, USA, 2003, video, colour, sound, 169 min<\/b><\/p>\n

Most movies are intended to transform documentary into fiction; Thom Andersen\u2019s heady and provocative Los Angeles Plays Itself <\/i>has the opposite agenda. This nearly three-hour \u201ccity symphony in reverse\u201d analyses the way that Los Angeles has been represented in the movies.<\/p>\n

Andersen, who teaches at Cal Arts, is the author of two previous, highly original film-historical documentaries \u2013 Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer<\/i> and Red Hollywood<\/i> (made with theoretician No\u00ebl Burch). A manifesto as well as a monument, Los Angeles Plays Itself<\/i> has its origins in a clip lecture that Andersen originally \u201cintended for locals only,\u201d but as finished, it is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis. If Andersen\u2019s dense montage and noirish, world-weary voice-over owe a bit to Mark Rappaport\u2019s VCRchaeological digs, his methodology recalls the literary chapters in Mike Davis\u2019s Los Angeles books City of Quartz<\/i> and Ecology of Fear<\/i>; no less than Pat O\u2019Neill in The Decay of Fiction<\/i>, but in a completely different fashion, he has found a way to turn Hollywood history to his own ends.<\/p>\n

Digressive if not quite free-associational in his narrative, Andersen begins by detailing the effect that Hollywood has had on the world\u2019s most photographed city \u2013 a metropolis where motels or McDonald\u2019s might be constructed to serve as sets and \u201ca place can become a historic landmark because it was once a movie location.\u201d Andersen is steeped in Los Angeles architecture as well as motion pictures, and his thinking is habitually dialectical \u2013 the Spanish Revival house in Double Indemnity<\/i>, which Andersen admires, turns up as another sort of signifier in L.A. Confidential<\/i>, the movie that inspired his critique (not least because Andersen has the same irritated disdain for the nickname \u201cL.A.\u201d that San Franciscans have for \u201cFrisco\u201d).<\/p>\n

With a complex nostalgia for the old Los Angeles and a far-ranging knowledge of its indigenous cinema, Andersen draws on avant-garde and exploitation films as well as studio products. In his first section, \u201cThe City as Background,\u201d he wonders why the city\u2019s modern architecture is typically associated with gangsters. (Producers may actually live in these houses, but, as is often the case in Hollywood, \u201cconventional ideology trumps personal conviction.\u201d) Andersen ponders the guilty pleasure of destroying Los Angeles, but he\u2019s most fond of those \u201cliteralist\u201d films that preserve, however inadvertently, or at least recognise the city\u2019s geography: Kiss Me Deadly <\/i>(with its extensive shooting in lost Bunker Hill) and Rebel Without a Cause<\/i> (in which locations are shot as though they were studio sets).<\/p>\n

Andersen goes on to discuss Los Angeles as a \u201ccharacter,\u201d beginning with the city\u2019s transformation, by hard-boiled novelists Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, into \u201cthe world capital of adultery and murder.\u201d The movie\u2019s latter half is devoted to Los Angeles as subject, starting with the self-conscious urban legend of Chinatown<\/i> and considering other movies \u2013 Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/i>, L. A. Confidential<\/i> \u2013 that provide the city\u2019s imaginary secret history. A disquisition on the on-screen evolution of Los Angeles cops in the 1990s leads Andersen to the African American filmmakers Charles Burnett and Billy Woodberry, who, in their neo-neorealism, provide the antithesis of movie mystification and studio fakery.<\/p>\n

(Jim Hoberman, Village Voice)<\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2004","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}