New Horizons: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Unearthing the outré 

Directed by Thom Andersen

Written by Thom Andersen

Narrated by Encke King

Cinematography by Deborah Stratman 

Edited by Seung-Hyun Yoo

Released in 2003 (limited) and 2014 (wide)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo had its premiere in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art. Present at that screening was The Elgin theater owner, Ben Barenholtz. Unafraid of the somewhat icy reception, he programmed it constantly in his own cinema. El Topo ran for around half a year, always late at night at The Elgin. Eventually, fans of the film John Lennon and Allen Klein helped distribute it across the United States, to (marginally) wider acclaim. The success of David Lynch’s Eraserhead followed a similar path. Once its years-long gestation was finished in 1977, it was shown at the Filmex film festival in Los Angeles, where the same Barenholtz recognized its peculiarly fascinating qualities and convinced a local theater to show it in the same way as El Topo. Eraserhead expanded from there.

As shown by the two aforementioned titles, a few of the key aspects to the development of a cult are backing by an influential individual, a period of limited availability that allows word-of-mouth to build, and, finally, a wider roll-out that builds off that hype. Due to the increasingly fractured, niche, and immediate way media is consumed, it has become far harder for cults to evolve in this fashion. Non-mainstream titles can show up for a single week in theaters, or not at all if you don’t live in a big city, and quickly move to home video/digital distribution from there, only to slip away into the vast ether of the internet. Since there are a multitude of voices online, all battling for attention, the people who champion these films can get lost as well.

At first impression, a three hour cine-essay about the history of L.A.’s representation in film may not sound like the stuff cult objects are made of. However, the hazy legality of the footage used created the exact right environment for Los Angeles Plays Itself to forge its reputation as El Topo and Eraserhead did before it. In order to avoid possible lawsuits, Andersen limited screenings to repertory houses and university theaters for a decade. Advanced praise came from critics and hardcore cinephiles determined enough to seek it out, or lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. In the past few years, LAPI showed up on Pirate Bay and Youtube, was recently released on Blu-ray, and is currently streaming on Netflix. Its inch-by-inch rise is one of few such events to occur post-millennium.

Summarizing Andersen’s points outside of the full context of the work makes him sound cranky and irrational. If located in a regular written review, his critiques would be roundly dismissed. The original Gone in 60 Seconds is posited as a successor to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Sylvester Stallone’s trashy Cobra is picked on, among other things, for its misrepresentation of the city’s geography. Consensus classics Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and L.A. Confidential draw Andersen’s ire for both their cynicism and their attempts to posit well-known historical events as secret conspiracies. Many more are attacked for associating specific architectural styles with villainy and decay.

It doesn’t always do so, but criticism, like movies in general, offers a chance to step outside ourselves and poke around someone else’s mind. Viewed this way, Andersen’s thoughts are fascinating and highly specific. His general perspective is one I would never come up with on my own and have never encountered while reading other critics. Encke King’s monotone narration diffuses some of the anger and bitterness directed at Los Angeles’ abuse at the hands of Hollywood. The voiceover adds flavors of irony, ambiguity, and humor that help make the contrarianism easier to swallow.

Lose Angeles Plays Itself is equally successful as an act of history. The real affairs that served as jumping-off-points for Chinatown and its descendants are revealed to have been publically voted-on. Mini-movements contained within the film show everyday places like grocery and gas stations morph and degrade through the decades. The arc of Bunker Hill and its short tramway is relayed leading to praise for its depiction in the noir Kiss Me Deadly and the neo-realist The Exiles. The racially driven Zoot Suit and Watts riots are given prominence, with Andersen then going on to chide popular cinema’s failure to tackle these subjects.

If the movie could be distilled down to one point it’s this: Hollywood’s obsession with glamour and spectacle has led to a gross misunderstanding of the city where it (only partially) resides. The most moving portions of LAPI include segments from movies that came out of the UCLA film school, such as Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. In act of resistance to Tinseltown's dominance, Andersen states that these paeans to L.A.’s working class minorities should be help as the true depictions of the city of angels.