Critics reviews

What Andersen is trying to do is restore the city’s identity, asking us to accept it as it is, to dispel the myth and undress the codes of Hollywood, to see beyond the mirage. It’s a noble endeavour from one of cinema’s true thinkers: a step towards reality in order to see the light.

An epic showcase of the landscapes of Los Angeles as seen in Hollywood cinema, Thom Anderson's amazing three-hour masterpiece also incorporates his own urban landscape footage of the city as he offers up his profound, edifying, whirlwind voiceover packed with digressive reflections and endlessly entertaining insights about the movies of Hollywood and the place itself.

Andersen's dense and illuminating video essay highlights Los Angeles's complicated relationship with the movies and the troubling divide between the city's cinematic portrayal and its geographic, architectural, and sociological realities... This is film criticism on an elevated plane, one that finds as much value in the sociological ramifications of a Steven Seagal shoot 'em up as it does in Altman's The Long Goodbye.

Thom Andersen's nearly three-hour essay-film, from 2003, features his trenchant and polemical voice-over commentary accompanying an astonishingly rich and alluring selection of clips from dramatic features shot on location in Los Angeles, ranging from "The Big Sleep" and "Rebel Without a Cause" to "Chinatown" and "Clueless." The result blends a complex kaleidoscopic portrait of the city and a powerful work of film criticism with Andersen's personal story of living in Los Angeles.

Above all, perhaps the keenest indictment of Hollywood's regular failure of imagination is that Andersen used clips of their own output to produce something, in many cases, far superior to the works quoted throughout.

If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities," says the narrator in Thom Andersen's indispensable Los Angeles Plays Itself, "perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations." Thus begins one of the most fascinating and deeply felt excursions into the language of cinema and the psychological disposition of a city... Thorough, thrilling, epic and timeless, it's one of the greatest essay films ever.

By debunking the claims of industrial moviemaking and "their betrayal of their native city," Andersen is in effect defending Los Angeles from "Hollywood"—not a physical place like Los Angeles, but "a metonym for the motion picture industry." Andersen is arguing for his own Los Angeles cinema, opposing geographic and historical license with Neorealism, opposing a commuter cinema that drives through with a pedestrian cinema that lingers.

It all adds up to a study too vast in scope and ambition to digest in one sitting, its insights inexhaustible even after multiple viewings. Andersen is a scholar by profession, so it should hardly seem surprising that his arguments are fortified by expertise and intellectual rigor — you expect a certain perspicacity from career academics, and Andersen's here proves exemplary.

Simply because it's never going to make it to legal home video—not unless more than 200 movie clips are okayed—you've just got to clear your schedule and commit to this. CalArts professor Thom Andersen poured a lifetime of moviegoing (and his own complex affection for the city he calls home) into this revelatory two-part documentary, a film that trains you to look at things askew.

But "Los Angeles Plays Itself" is far more than an architectural survey or illustrated walking tour. It's Andersen's highly quotable, fiercely political attempt to reconcile the multiple cinematic identities of the world's most frequently filmed metropolis, a "city symphony reverse" about a place "where the relation between realism and representation gets muddied.

It's an essay that qualifies as social history, as film theory, as personal reverie, as architectural history and criticism, as a bittersweet meditation on automotive transport, as a critical history of mass transit in southern California, as a wisecracking compilation of local folklore, as "a city symphony in reverse," and as a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill and unchronicled lifestyles such as locals who walk or take buses.

Eccentric, standoffish, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of some moments of truly searing insight, Andersen's consistently entertaining essay film takes its doggedly prosaic tack about as close as it can come to poetic revelation, aided in no small part by the very haziness of its title subject.