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LOS
ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
9/10
USA
2004 : Thom ANDERSEN : 169 mins
On the back
of two successful screenings at the London Film Festival in October, Los
Angeles Plays Itself has been booked in for a two week run at the
capital's ICA from December 10th. This will hopefully be the start of
nationwide exposure for what is one of this year's genuinely unmissable
releases. Andersen is a lecturer at the California Institute for the Arts
('CalArts') - as is fellow avant-garde documentarian James Benning, whose
experimental duo Los and El Valley Centro come to mind as
we watch this 169-minute portrait of Los Angeles told through clips from
the films shot there over the last century. We're also not a million miles
away from the dry detachment of Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson
in Space - Encke King fulfilling the omniscient-narrator role occupied
by Paul Scofield in the Keiller films.
But Los
Angeles Plays Itself really is one of a kind, stitching together dozens
of extracts from other films to provide a social and economic history
of the city. Andersen covers many established 'classics' - Chinatown,
Heat, LA Confidential, Blade Runner, The Long Goodbye, Point Blank -
but brings to each the fiercely intelligent eye of a resident who is intensely
proud of his adopted city. And his range is impressively democratic: Oscar-nominated
titles jostle for space alongside obscure straight-to-video entries like
A Passion To Kill and Dead Homiez which earn their place
by providing particular shots of particular areas in the sprawling megalopolis.
But there's
a third category of excerpts which provides the real meat for Andersen's
polemics: underground movies like Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, Charles
Burnett's Killer of Sheep, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles and
Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts - all of which depict
locales (like the much-missed Bunker Hill) and harsh struggles undreamt
of by the well-heeled denizens of Hollywood. Andersen's political analysis
is incisive and persuasive, but Los Angeles Plays Itself is no
dry academic exercise: his "idiosyncratic panorama" functions
on many levels, not least as a riotously entertaining - and frequently
hilarious - journey through this "fabulous city" and the myriad
celluloid fables it has spawned.
29th November,
2004
[seen 28th October 2004 : National Film Theatre, London : public show
- London Film Festival]
review written
for Tribune
magazine
For other
films rated 9/10 & 10/10 check out our Hall
of Fame
by Neil
Young
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