prⅳate cinema berlin, october 18, 8:30 pm: los angeles plays itself

[prⅳate cinema berlin]

Both as a film and as a work of film criticism, Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles 
Plays Itself" remains an outlier, even though the cinematic form it proposes 
wouldn't be hard to generalize, or even popularize. Andersen's take on the 
practice of film studies more than once recalls Mike Davis' approach to the 
discipline of urbanism in "City of Quartz", whose tagline, "Excavating the 
future in Los Angeles", would fit Andersen's film just as well. He enters the 
field sideways, digs for a much deeper history of the city than the one we 
think we know, finds much darker mirror images of its cinematic representation 
than the ones we think we've seen, and in that process develops a mode of 
storytelling which, while its result has often and rightfully been described as 
"epic", never hides the author's personal investment, and never loses its 
polemical edge. Andersen breaks with the canon of cinema (his disses of Alfred 
Hitchcock's and Woody Allen's excursions to Southern California resonate with 
Mike Davis' critique of Adorno's and Horkheimer's perspective as exiles in 
Santa Monica: the city appears shallow only to those who remain tourists, 
voluntarily segregated from proletarian urban life), deconstructs some of the 
most famous accounts of corruption in Los Angeles (most notably the fake 
historicity of "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential"), and manages to turn some 
of Hollywood's most iconic monuments upside down (for example by unearthing the 
utopian urban vision of "Blade Runner", its vibrant street life and absence of 
traffic jams). Andersen has collected such an enormous amount of material that 
he can often just arrange it in a way that makes it speak for itself (alone the 
section in which he chronicles Hollywood's hatred for modernist architecture by 
means of a long montage of movie villains in their hillside villas is worth 
more than the price of admission), and while he relies heavily on his B-roll to 
make some of the film's central arguments (from H.B. Halicki's "Gone in 60 
Seconds" and Rick King's "A Passion to Kill" to Fred Halperin's gay porn movie 
that the film derives its title from), he avoids the nerdy eclecticism of "Pulp 
Fiction", from which he distances himself rather explicitely. At its core, "Los 
Angeles Plays Itself" is a film about class relations -- not about race, and 
definitely not about gender -- and even though the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, the 
1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Rodney King Riots all make their appearance, they 
remain on the periphery of the story, until more than two and a half hours into 
the film, the non-white protagonists finally take over (via Kent MacKenzie's 
"The Exiles", Haile Gerima's "Bush Mama" and Charles Burnett's "Killer of 
Sheep") and provide Andersen's journey with a short but alternative ending.

(Further reading: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2004/10/la-existential/)

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                                                        los angeles plays itself
                                              thom andersen 2003 170 min 5.47 gb
                                                   https://0xdb.org/0379357/info

                                                            prⅳate cinema berlin
                                                                u kottbusser tor
                                                     sunday, october 18, 8:30 pm

                                                                  12 seats, rsvp
                                                          first come first serve
                                                       location in separate mail

                                trailer: www.piratecinema.org/trailers/#20151018
                                        map: www.piratecinema.org/maps/#20151018
                              calendar: www.piratecinema.org/calendars/#20151018

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