LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF


US, 2003, 169 minutes, Colour.
Encke King, narrator.
Directed by Thom Andersen)

Don’t make the mistake I did with the IMDb website. I did what Thom Andersen is sternly advising us not to do in this documentary, call Los Angeles LA. If you search for this film using LA, you will find a 1972 gay pornographic movie of this title. This is not that film. Look for ‘Los Angeles’.

What Thom Andersen has done is to collect an enormous number of movie clips from the 1930s to the 1990s and do something of an audiovisual masterclass on how Los Angeles has been interpreted in the movies and the repercussions for its own self-consciousness as well as for its reputation in the US and beyond.

The film lasts three hours plus an intermission (he wants it to seem as if you are getting a double feature program). One is in admiration of the work done in collecting, editing and structuring the film. For movie buffs it is quite exciting to see the clips – and make a list of those films one has not seen.

However…

Andersen’s narration is not spoken by him. The voiceover he has chosed is almost monotone, rather expressionless, one might call it po-voiced. And the opinions (as in any lecture or class) need some challenge, disagreement or clarifying. In fact, the opinions expressed in the first two parts of the film were not persuasive. Sometimes they were platitudinous – and contemptuous of other opinions (especially Woody Allen’s very funny comments in Annie Hall). At other times, they were portentous, seeming to be oracles – whereas they were simply opinions favourable to LA (oops, Los Angeles) by someone who loves the city and feels it is being underestimated. There is a lot of criticism of change, especially in architecture (and some helpful information about financial deals and profits) but they did seem to be over-extended laments for the past.

Andersen offers us a range of scenes of Los Angeles as background for stories in movies. Then he deals with Los Angeles as a character in many movies. His last part, Los Angeles as the subject of movies is far more interesting and his theoretical explorations more attention grabbing. Of course, Chinatown and LA Confidential are to the fore, as is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He calls these stories the secret history of Los Angeles, the kind of secret history that we relish because it takes us behind the scenes to a murky moral world. He points out, with shots of newspapers of the times in which the films were set, that this was much more out in the open and that the story of the exploration and exploitation of Los Angeles is even more interesting.