Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 11:23 am 
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Hollywood dissected from inside and outside

Mind-boggling, passionate, obsessive, deeply informative, haunting, annoying, opinionated, bracingly political, Thom Andersen's revived and slightly reedited and now HD-digitalized documentary with continuous voiceover commentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, talks about a lot of things. (The title comes from a Seventies gay sex cult film, which, like so many other films here, some well known, many obscure, is briefly glimpsed. ) Primarily Andersen's film, in fact a long illustrated lecture, is a very personal location-based look at American film history. It is focused on "Hollywood," as we call it, and the much greater city around it, where, according to Andersen, only one person in 40 works in the film industry and more of the movies are made in Culver City. The film is about Los Angeles as used in American movies to stand for, well, itself, or anywhere, or almost everywhere, and how its own sites have been falsified. The film is at its best and most learned in running through (with illustrative clips) the many very different uses to which a given local site has been put. Aiding this are the city's anonymous quality and its eclectic panoply of architectural styles.

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THE BRADBURY BUILDING

A remarkable case (and place) is the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, dating from 1893, with its tall, dramatic open interior, which has played a hotel in Burma, a London military hospital, been used importantly in [i[D.O.A. Indestructible Man, Marlowe[/i], and as a setting in Blade Runner. These are examples of the ingenuity and dexterity of Hollywood filmmakers choosing to use actual places somewhat as they would use a studio lot. But Andersen does not like this. He praises films whose exteriors and interiors match, and in which cars drive away from real locations along the actual roads.

Los Angeles: not "L.A." Andersen, who is never shy about his prejudices and strong opinions, tells us right off how he hates these a initials, which he thinks only a city with a low opinion of itself would accept. (He mistakenly calls "LA" an "acronym," not the first misstatements or mispronunciations, though the man obviously knows a great deal, and has done his homework.) The film begins with early locations -- Mack Senott, Laurel and Hardy -- and warns us: "Hollywood" too is a misnomer, since far more movies are made in Culver City than there. We delve into, or are fed, a vast dose of film noir. Sometimes it seems like the movies' L.A. (sorry, Thom) is a place seen mostly at night.

Going deeply into local history, Andersen provides detailed discussions of Los Angeles politics as reflected and transformed in two movies, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, both adaptations of real local scandals. This section of the film, like others, is informative about the overlaps and contrasts between movies and their source material. Andersen also touches on other important aspects of city history, like the Watts riots, the deliberate downgrading of public transportation, the Rodney King beating, and (as Scott Foundas in Variety reported the filmmaker declaring last year, what Andersen sees as Hollywood's persistent reenforcement of social and economic inequality. “The way movies foreclose the possibility of emancipatory politics" Andersen said -- at a September 2013 tenth anniversary screening of the film, in its revised form, at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood" -- has not changed" since 2003 and the gap between the rich and privileged and a disempowered working class is “even more of a truism now."

Hasn't anything changed? Andersen does point to a growth in political cynicism in Hollywood movies. However, In referring to a film that takes us all the way from Laurel and Hardy and a piano falling down the steps to the Terminator blowing away cops, that's a strange thing to say. Clearly, Los Angeles Plays Itself does not provide any kind of survey of American movies or of American history, however pronounced Andersen's political views and sociological generalizations may be.

That "truism" about Hollywood reenforcing inequality is a lot to prove with a set of rapidly flashed film clips. In fact, in that respect, Andersen doesn't prove anything. Andersen is a longtime lecturer on film history (he teaches at CalArts, Valencia) and you know from this movie's first few minutes that you're in the presence of someone used to being able to pontificate -- and good at it, though. The facts Andersen gives and the clips he shows are interesting in themselves, and it would be better if he held back some of the obtrusive opinionating. His divisions of directors and writers between "locals" and "outsiders" is a bit offensive. Who isn't an "outsider" in Hollywood? Yes, Towne was a "local" and Polanski an "outsider," but isn't that how Hollywood movies are made?

Foundas explains that copyright issues prevented the original film from issued on a DVD. It has circulated in bootleg versions and YouTube segments. But Andersen says that exclusion of the film from commercial video/DVD release may change now through invoking now current "fair use" principles.

The film is divided into three sections, "The City as Background," "The City as Character" and "The City as Subject." One of Andersen's chief concerns is misrepresentation. He particularly likes those few films in which actual locations around the city are accurately named, and (a rarity in movies) interiors shown are the same as the exteriors associated with them. It is fascinating to see how certain sites, a distinctive building, houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and other notable architects, have been used to perform dozens of functions, given makeovers and new facades, and destroyed on screen.

Andersen is particularly convinced, and annoyed, that elegant minimalist modern architecture, like Richard Neutra's, has repeatedly been used as the headquarters of killers, gangsters, or drug dealers. Andersen, a longtime Los Angeles resident not born there, has the passion of the late convert, and he will not stand for anything he thinks is unfair to his adopted city, or its sights. This really seems unnecessary editorializing; simply to note the fact would be enough. He's also obviously very angry at Woody Allen's smears on L.A. in Annie Hall, notably his character's droll comment that he can't see the value of a place "where the only cultural advantage is you can make a right turn on a red light." Not funny, in Andersen's view, it would seem. Englishmen have been kinder to the city. Oddly he sees the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's barbed satire The Loved One as gentle treatment.

Andersen thinks the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame should be called the "Walk of Shame" because he points out it celebrates those who maintained the blacklist and those who informed on leftists but excludes their victims. His sympathies for the working class and downtrodden come more to the fore toward the end of the film when he blasts Joan Didion for saying "nobody walks" and discusses how driving is a privilege that does not exist for the poor but that the white middle class liberals assumes. Finally after making the enligening statement that black people are now ignored because an immigrant population has replaced them in the work force, he discusses a set of black neorealist indie filmmakers, not only Charles Burnett but also Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima and Gregory Nava. He praises them for that high value in his eyes, an authentic use of settings.

You might get another, alternate version of this film of your own if you held your ears or turned down the sound and merely watched the images. It provides an exceptional, hitherto unseen panorama of B-pictures most of us without major grindhouse experience may not know. Just watch the clips and make up theories of your own. One thing I came away with: James Dean was a terrible ham. So were a lot of other Hollywood actors, both famous and forgotten. Note that without the sound, every clip is identified by film title and date. Andersen's celebration of certain forgotten films sparked their revival after the 2003 release. This revival of Los Angeles Plays Itself may spur more rediscoveries of obscure films.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, 169 mins., was shown in its tenth anniversary form at the British Film Institute in August 2013. The original version debuted at Toronto in 2003 and in many international festivals in 2004. The new version was shown at BFI in August 2013 and at American Cinematheque in Hollywood in September. It opened at IFC Center in New York 3 January 2014 and was screened there for this review.

You can read a transcript of the entire original voiceover here. And you can watch the original film on YouTube in 12 segments starting here or in one long segment starting here.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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