Los Angeles Plays Itself

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🎙️ EPISODE 523: 08.02.22 An O.G. video-essay, at nearly three hours long, making all the Film Guy YouTubers swoon, Los Angeles Plays Itself is the perfect mix of brash opinion and fascinating history, though it's in the blending of those two where one might get turned off, confused, annoyed, possibly enlightened? The driest moments felt Ken Burns-ish but they're few and far between. The technical achievement of actually sourcing all of this material — literally 100s if not 1000s of movies — and organizing it all to fit a multi-part narrative that seeks to unpack the cinematic history of the city (and not the industry it houses responsible for their creation) is astonishing. It's a complicated and daunting task. Hollywood could be in Timbuktu for all Thom Andersen cares; this is about what a certain subset of motion pictures has to say about Los Angeles — its past, present and future —both as background and as subject.

The main complaint it seems people wanna raise is Andersen's ownership of this city as an individual. It's not his Los Angeles. Nobody can make such a claim for L.A. or any other place, regardless of the size. But on some level you have to appreciate the brashness. You need it for a documentary such as this to work. The narration is all first-person with many opinions stated as fact. The voice actor chosen for the narration — Encke King (who has nearly no other credits in this department) — was critical. His presence is constant and he becomes the embodiment of Andersen’s words, really — in a sense — becoming Andersen when its all said and done. It truly emphasizes the "essay" in video-essay and it feels too much sometimes.

Near the middle of the project, there is a line about how the things that are gone (buildings, places, mostly) mean nothing to people who aren't from there. And I wholly disagree with that premise, as if where your born, or even where you eventually choose to live (if and when it's a choice at all) really matters all that much. I've never seen The Pyramids they mean nothing to me. I never crossed through the Wawona Tree Tunnel, a path cut through an ancient sequoia tree in Yosemite National Park in 1881 which led to the 2,000-year-old structure to topple in the 1960s. Guess I can't appreciate it. Guess whomever makes San Fransciso Plays Itself will think I'm an asshole, or worse: a rube. I guess it 'means' nothing, after all. If fact, this idea seems so silly (because it is) that Andersen contradicts these sentiments or at least cops to the "had to be there" falsehood just moments later. This is the problem with a nearly 3-hour work that features a near-constant stream of narration. You're gonna trip up (like stating Woody Allen made movies about the middle class). The trick is not to fall flat on your face, unable to get right yourself and thankfully Andersen doesn't do that.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 522 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 524 ⫸

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Los Angeles Plays Itself is a video essay by Thom Andersen, finished in 2003, exploring the way Los Angeles has been presented in movies. Consisting almost entirely of clips from other films with narration, the film was not initially released commercially as it was only seen in screenings presented by Andersen, occasional presentations at American Cinematheque and copies distributed via filesharing and other person-to-person methods. In 2014, it was announced that the film would finally be released officially by Cinema Guild. It was released on October 28, 2003.