Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen’s ‘Los Angeles Play Itself’ (2003) is an assessment of how Los Angeles is depicted on film presented through a montage of clips taken from all kinds of films (i.e. American classics, European cinema, experimental pieces etc), interspersed with Andersen’s own footage of the city and a narrative voice over (scripted by him but played by Encke King). In offering this description, it is important to confess that there are maybe more tangential thoughts that could be implemented here to describe Andersen’s film. Though none get close enough to articulate the way in which Andersen manages to abstractly zoom in and out of a single criterion, that in this case is his native city. His observations are pervasive and exist somewhere within the worlds of art, cinema and criticism without ever solely belonging to one in particular. This, coupled with the fact that the film was completed in 2003, means that as it is viewed year after year, there is conversation around what was missing back then [‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)] and now what could be included [‘Collateral’ (2004)] in this cumulative idea.

During the introduction to the film’s screening at the Flatpack Festival, you are informed that Andersen has been a professor at CalArts, alluding to an academic tone. Yet, the discussion in his near three-hour long, illustrative lecture is not a didactic one. He does not refer to any theorists directly, though by his own admission he is paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze at many points. The position Andersen takes is characterised by a literalist reading of film. It is to do with the relationship between reality and representation, which when confounded can suggest that a secret history may emerge in Roman Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ (1974). Andersen’s discrete mediations on neo-realism (especially with regards to films made by independent African American filmmakers) sit comfortably with his assertion that we can watch fictional films for their documentary revelations.

The reverse of this equation is seen with a public stairway named ‘Music Box Steps’ after the Laurel and Hardy short film, ‘The Music Box’ (1932). As you watch them trying to move a piano up the stairs, you realise the explicit way in which concrete space has been reframed by cinematic space. An urgency to historicise sections of Los Angeles illuminates another superficial filter through which we must see the city (how else would you stumble across the spot where ‘Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour - A Best Seller Movie’, was shot’) It also explains why Andersen finds fault with the abbreviation L.A. (’‘they often mean show business’) It is not just a linguistic issue because Hollywood as he presents it, trespasses and marks its terrority both on and off the screen, seemingly adding to and subtracting from the landscape.

Within this, we see a Los Angeles that has repeatedly performed as background, as character and finally as subject. On closer inspection, you understand the part transportation plays in the city becoming an anonymous condition. It is also largely connected to the city’s obscure landmarks and eclectic buildings, which have enacted many roles. According to Andersen, the greatest mistake appears to have been committed by those filmmakers who cast modernist architecture as the sole residences of villains (i.e. Richard Neutra’s ‘Lovell House’ in L.A. Confidential (1997) - home to pimp and pornographer, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Ennis House’ in ‘The Replacement Killers’ (1998) - centre for gangster peril). Andersen forces you to consider how John Lautner’s ‘Russ Garcia House a.k.a. Rainbow’ can be destroyed in ‘Lethal Weapon 2’ (1989) - the fact that they are cited next to one another is an occasion worth contemplating. This in turn makes it difficult to not simply repeat what is interesting here and borrow that which is useful in conducting any kind of evaluation of art and architecture. [But really, who are the producers of these films that are unflatteringly fulfilling the aspirations of avant-pop’ Or as Andersen puts it more insightfully, ‘‘is it just a convention then, the architectural trophy house is the modern equivalent of the black hat or the moustache’‘].

There is an aesthetic appeal in expressions like ‘transcendent kitsch’ and ‘accidental surrealism’ that will persist beyond the viewing of this film. In some ways an accumulated education is being divulged here, which may unintentionally have some connection to what the artist Pablo Helguera has called ‘transpedagogy’. This film serves both as an archive and an oral history that at times perpetuates through a kind of hearsay. It is an extensive resource, with the type of accomplished cross referencing that will make you quietly wait in hope for a film like ‘The Terminator’ (1984) to be brought up in something other than disparaging light. When Andersen does eventually work it into his argument, there is a sense of satisfaction that can be bracketed under an Iris Barry lecture title - ‘on liking the wrong films’.

Although Helguera’s ideas can be easily negotiated away as a symptom of a recent sensibility in contemporary art, there is much value to be derived from the notion of efficacy and legitimacy associated with any display of knowledge. After all, this is a study that resists completion through a google search. So we may share Andersen’s desire for more content, but we do not make his discovery, neither do we deliver an explanation of the problem. When at the receiving end, his dialogue can be repeated but his acute attention remains impossible to replicate.