Screening as part of a retrospective of Thom Andersen’s works during the Whitney’s 2012 Biennial tomorrow Wednesday, April 4 through Saturday, April 7: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
Andersen premiered his essay on the cinematic Los Angeles at Toronto in 2003. The film screened extensively at other major festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Marseille, Karlovy Vary, and CPH:DOX.
Clocking in at nearly three hours, Andersen’s ambitious project is a masterful dissection of the various ways the city of Los Angeles has been depicted in film, and what these (mis)representations say about the real city and how the general public sees it. Divided into three sections, Andersen’s essay film explores the city as background, character, and subject, respectively, through clips from a remarkable number of films and a cogent narration, which, while essentially a lecture, is always engaging. By focusing on a city that is at the heart of the creation of illusions, the project holds a mirror to the undeniably influential film industry that has called it home for nearly its entire existence, and how it has been instrumental in creating and continuously reinventing a mythical version of Los Angeles – its geography, history, culture – that has been exported beyond the city limits to the rest of the world. The film is at once a piece of film criticism, an excavation of urban archaeology and anthropology, and a love letter to Andersen’s home since the age of seven.
what (not) to doc 