Los Angeles Plays Itself

There are places where you may never have been, but which are familiar thanks to thousands of pictures. Los Angeles for instance, one of the most filmed places in the world. In an ‘upside-down urban symphony’, Los Angeles plays itself in this film by Thom Andersen in a puzzle of more and less familiar scenes, fragments and individual shots. With the hypothesis that fiction film basically has a great documentary value, Andersen tries to convince us that we can also look at film in a different way. The result is a provocative honing of our skills at watching film. Andersen reconnoitres the city as a background, as a character and as a subject. For instance we see how buildings and locations are used and distorted, the way in Los Angeles can be a co-conspirator (for instance in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity) or how the city, as in Roman Polansky’s Chinatown, can be a subject in itself. Anderson shows that the city hardly ever plays itself in major Hollywood productions, but is cast in specific roles. Los Angeles seems more itself in experimental work and in films by (Independent) foreign makers. In combination with the dry, amusing and even cynical voice-over by the New York film maker Encke King, this three-hour long essay is surprisingly entertaining. (See also The Exiles by Kent MacKenzie, a film from which Andersen has taken many quotes.)