LA Plays Itself

The literary theorist and critic, Walter Benjamin, imagined a book comprised solely of quotations from other writers.  He seems to have attempted to compile such a book in his vast, and failed, Arcades project, the Passagenwerk.  Thom Andersen's LA Plays Itself (originally released in 2003, remastered and re-edited in 2013) is the Arcades project of cinema --  Benjamin set out to define Paris, as "capitol of the 19th century," by a vast system of quotes; Andersen defines Los Angeles by editing together film sequences in which the city and its locations play a significant role.  Since movies are made in Hollywood, Los Angeles appears in the background of thousands of pictures.  Andersen's project to reverse the ordinary relationship between background and foreground; his enormous film essay -- the picture is three hours long and designed to be shown with an intermission -- is encyclopedic, an odyssey through the history of films, film styles, long-forgotten scandals, and chronicles the growth, and, in Andersen's eyes, the decadence of Hollywood and southern California as a whole.  Andersen's method is simple:  he shows one film clip after another, sometimes at length, accompanied by a fiercely opinionated and sardonic voice-over commentary.  As with Chris Marker's film essays, Andersen's method is associational and, sometimes, the thread of his argument is hard to follow:  his approach is leftist-radical, a polemic against Hollywood and its boosters that is simultaneously a celebration of the work made in that place.  Some of his views are profoundly idiosyncratic:  he endorses as great L.A. films pictures like Coffey, Robert Culp's Hickey and Boggs, and the original version of Gone in 60 Seconds.  He seems to despise the well-known film writer David Thomson and bashes him whenever he can.  (He also hates Woody Allen and Henry Jaglom, worships Cassavetes, and is generally disdainful of big-budget Hollywood pictures.)  Andersen makes some factual errors in the voice-over -- after all its a 180 minutes movie -- and, occasionally, his ideas are banal and self-righteous, but, by and large, the film is a triumph:  it is continuously fascinating and the commentary is thought-provoking and, of course, the film clips, which range from the obvious and famous to the completely obscure, are extraordinary.  The first half of the film, the most diffuse part of the picture, is entitled "L.A. as a Character" and is built from clips in which the city's buildings or landscape are integral to the action -- of course, Andersen shows the "Music Box Steps" made famous by Laurel and Hardy's exertions in their Oscar-winning two-reeler, The Music Box, from the early thirties.  Andersen also explores the luxury mansions, many of them built in exemplary Modernist style, that seem to feature in melodramas as haunted houses, the pads of brutal criminals or psychopaths, a general terrain of villainy set in structures that were supposed to be prophetic of a more sane, and healthy, future:  there is the Lovell Health House and, of course, the Ennis House, Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan temple near Silver Lake, and various other iconic glass and steel palaces, in the movies all of them infested with criminals and bad guys of various species.  "L.A. as Subject," the second half of the picture is more tightly argued and rhymes to some extent with themes treated briefly in the first part of the movie -- for instance, Andersen devotes a fair amount of time to L. A. police misconduct; he describes Jack Webb as a robot, an appellation that resonates with sequences showing Arnold Schwartzenegger as the "terminator," a "cop-killing machine," Andersen says displaying for us as an exhibit the "I'll be back" sequence in which the homicidal automaton slaughters a station-house full of hapless cops.  These arguments, in turn, bring to mind a short shot in the first half of the film in which Andersen notes that the famous Bradbury building used in many films including DOA and Blade Runner is now the headquarters for L.A. police Internal Affairs.  Other films to which Andersen devotes significant attention are Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, both pictures about civic corruption, and, of course, Blade Runner, a picture that Andersen idiosyncratically sees as a celebration of urban revival -- "a diverse community with lots of pedestrian activity on the streets and good parking right next to your apartment complex."  Andersen ends his magnum opus with a poignant study of L. A. neo-realism -- the great films that show the city's poor and disenfranchised in a realistic light and that have received next to no recognition:  he cites, at length, two transcendent films that deserves to be better known, Keith McKenzie's The Exiles and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep.  The film's final sequence, a traveling shot of an enormous wrecked factory that once made Goodyear tires, images redolent of the decline of the Black middle class that formerly flourished in Los Angeles, summons from Andersen a final flourish:  "Tourists were once given tours of this factory where tires were made just as tourists today take tours of the studios where movies are made..."  Filled with weird curiosities, flashes of brilliance, bits and pieces of old comedies and bizarre-looking horror films, all of these oddities interlaced with sequences from much more famous pictures, Andersen's picture is ideal as a home DVD -- you can dip into here and there, watch twenty minutes or an hour, and come away refreshed and intellectually invigorated:  it's like Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a huge tome with interesting material on every page, too big to be read continuously but always fascinating.