LUX is pleased to be distributing the highly-acclaimed feature-length essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, by filmmaker Thom Anderson (whose early shorts, - — and Melting, are also distributed LUX). Below Anderson explains how the film evolved and some of his inspirations.
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| Los Angeles Plays Itself, film still |
This movie began as a lecture intended for locals only, that is, people who live in or around Los Angeles. It didn’t occur to me that a treatment of how movies have depicted the city of Los Angeles might illuminate broader issues. I happened to mention my project to a few friends from the San Francisco Bay area, and their enthusiasm surprised me. Maybe all of us have a stake in the relation between Hollywood movies and the city that surrounds the movie studios. We’ve all seen some representations of places that are familiar to us on a movie screen, and there is always a peculiar displacement between the cinematic image and the actual city.
So it grew, from an illustrated lecture to a movie and then to a long movie. Thanks to my collaborators, particularly the editor Yoo Seung-Hyun, it became more ambitious artistically. We discovered that even the most sordid and artless movies have some redeeming value because so much human labor went into their making and that even the greatest movies are inadequate to our needs and desires.
The length of Los Angeles Plays Itself (169 minutes) is unconventional for a documentary, particularly an essayistic documentary. As a smoker, I hate long movies, and, as a documentary maker, I am proud that my colleagues resisted the notion that length is proportionate to seriousness and instead embraced the Roger Corman aesthetic that demands a movie should be no more than 87 minutes long. However, since I took pains to include an intermission, I regard this movie as a homage to the double feature, which was the standard form of film exhibition until the 1970s. You get two movies for the price of one, which is what I propose to offer, although they are not entirely self-sufficient. You really have to watch the whole thing to get the idea.
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| Los Angeles Plays Itself, film still |
Los Angeles Plays Itself was inspired by seeing L.A. Confidential in 1997. On a first viewing, I thought it was silly, a movie for kids (or, more precisely, for boys), not for adults. I have come to appreciate its artistic virtues, particularly the density and richness of its soundtrack, but what remains with me is the ideological consistency with the other celebrated movies about Los Angeles, beginning with Chinatown in 1974. For me, all these movies are counsels of despair, and I don’t find any wisdom in their advice (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”). Instead, I find a cheap cynicism, which would be impossible to take seriously were it not packaged so attractively. Moreover, this cynicism is profoundly conservative in its implications: If the realm in which political decisions are made is unknowable, then any political engagement can only be misguided. My own experience of Los Angeles and my knowledge of its history tells me the opposite. The information necessary to inform an intelligent practice of politics or of simple citizenship was always available. If some forms of repression and oppression were not acknowledged, it was simply because whites refused to believe the testimony of coloured people. As I say in the movie, “the truth was always out there.”
If L.A. Confidential was a negative inspiration, fortunately there were positive inspirations as well. Oddly these were primarily films made completely outside the Los Angeles “film industry”, films that were made against the industry in a sense. I call them neorealist. That’s an old-fashioned word that is due for a comeback, like “documentary”. These films are low-budget, black-and-white, and they don’t presume to reveal the city, just a neighbourhood. Despite the 1990s boom in independent films, such films are becoming rarer, not more common (although I have been encouraged by two recent exceptions, both produced on digital video, progress by Andrew Garza and A Certain Kind of Death by Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh). I once told Billy Woodberry, the director of Bless Their Little Hearts, that if it hadn’t been for him and Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett, the directors of these “neorealist” films, I couldn’t have made Los Angeles Plays Itself, or it would have been just a joke. I still believe that’s true, and it’s odd because these movies are the most contingent of all the films I consider. Now it seems like a miracle that they got made, whereas Chinatown and L.A. Confidential seem inevitable.
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| Los Angeles Plays Itself, film still |
So, in a sense, Los Angeles Plays Itself became a manifesto, as well as a critique. The real city of Los Angeles is only imperfectly revealed in movies filmed here, and film-makers should take this as a challenge as well as a reproach. The most satisfying response I get is when viewers tell me, as sometimes happens, that Los Angeles Plays Itself has inspired them to go out into the city and make a movie. Maybe someday somebody will make an ode upon Los Angeles like Jonas Mekas’s great ode to New York and its seasons (As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty). Maybe somebody will reveal the complexities of life within our underground immigrant communities with the sensitivity Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne brought to La Promesse.
The acknowledged intellectual source for Los Angeles Plays Itself is Architecture in Los Angeles: A Complete Guide by David Gebhard and Robert Winter (there is also an unacknowledged, unconscious borrowing from this classic guidebook: the characterisation of Pierre Koenig’s architecture). The unacknowledged sources are the film writings of Hugo Münsterberg and Gilles Deleuze. The antic summary of “film theory” in the first few minutes epitomizes and repudiates the central argument of Münsterberg’s 1917 book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. The market scene from The Disorderly Orderly is included as an homage to Deleuze (and also as a backhanded slap at his English translators who render his evocation of it completely incomprehensible). In a few pages he managed to explain why Jerry Lewis matters.
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| Los Angeles Plays Itself, film still |
But what affected me most in Deleuze’s two books on cinema were his treatments of neorealism and independent African-American cinema. My comments on Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama are a paraphrase of Deleuze and also an implicit reproach. Although he is the only critic I know to write seriously about African-American film-makers, I don’t think he ever saw Bush Mama. If he had, surely he would have recognised that this film precisely anticipated his radical reconception of neorealist description as the flowering of a new kind of cinematic image, an image grounded in time rather than in movement.
Thom Andersen
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