"NNNN" (NOW Magazine)

“Los Angeles is where the relationship between reality and representation gets muddled.” (Thom Andersen)

An instant cult classic, this “city symphony in reverse” is manna for movie buffs and cinephiles alike. Voted best documentary in the 2004 Village Voice film critics poll, Thom Andersen’s film “is an intellectually lively and thoroughly engrossing defense of the city that may be the world’s most photographed and least photogenic” (Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly). Titled after Fred Halsted’s “gay porn masterpiece,” Los Angeles Plays Itself is epic and sprawling like its city of choice, using an encyclopedic array of more than two hundred movie clips— Double Indemnity, Kiss me Deadly, A Rebel Without a Cause, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop—to reclaim a sense of the city’s public history, which has been either distorted or negated by films set within its storied locale. Reflecting on issues of architecture (like the Bradbury building and houses by Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright), history, politics (Elia Kazan on the Walk of “Shame” not “Fame”) and the clichés perpetuated by Hollywood, the film uses a tripartite structure to propose an alternate social reality expediently forgotten or overlooked. No one is spared Andersen’s thrusting darts: Woody Allen, Joan Didion, even film critic David Thomson; meanwhile, neo-realist filmmakers like Charles Burnett and Kent McKenzie (whose The Exiles was rediscovered following the international success of Los Angeles Plays Itself) are shown to have contributed an important counter-tradition. “It is the most extensive American essay-film in many years…standing alongside the great essay works of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker” (Robert Koehler, Variety).

N. B. The film includes an old-fashioned, built-in intermission. The break will last 10 minutes.

Rated PG.