Los Angeles Plays Itself (Anderson, 2003) is streaming on Mubi in NZ
It’s always a pleasure to recommend a film that changed my life and Los Angeles Plays Itself certainly did that.
I first saw it in the 2004 New Zealand International Film Festival and became so obsessed by it that I ended up “long-term borrowing” the VHS screener copy from the festival office.
Because the film is probably 90 percent made up of copyright film clips it felt for a long time that a commercial release of any kind was – to say the least – unlikely.
Los Angeles Plays Itself is an essay film – a long documentary about the city and its relationship to the movies, and it’s in two parts.
Part One is about the history of Los Angeles as a production town and the ways in which the city (and LA County) ended up becoming other places, thanks to the presence of the Hollywood studios.
There are some eye-opening sequences about iconic buildings like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House – most famous perhaps as a location for Blade Runner but in fact used dozens of times.
This section is sometimes very funny, helped by Encke King’s sardonic narration of filmmaker Thom Anderson’s script. It’s as if Philip Marlowe himself is investigating the history of Hollywood, stumbling across loose ends everywhere.
But then Part Two – I think there was even an interval at the festival screening – takes a deep dive into cinematic portrayals of the city itself and whether Los Angelenos can even recognise themselves and their city in those portrayals.
From European imports like Jacques Demy trying to understand alien California culture in the 1960s (Model Shop) to Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s rewriting of LA public transport history and on to Michael Mann’s alienating downtown in Heat, a shiny downtown that had been constructed on the ruins of displaced working class lives.
Why is modern California architecture always occupied by the villains? Why do cops in LA always seem to live beside working oil derricks?
This sort of thing came to be called psychogeography and I was obsessed by it for a while.
In 2014, the long battle over copyright “fair use” was resolved and the film was remastered with HD versions of the hundreds of clips so it became available legitimately. It’s now streaming on Mubi in New Zealand or you can still find the Blu-ray on Amazon.
Mubi started out with the premise of streaming only 30 films at time, one added and one removed every day. They seem to have given that up but some films do have a very limited lifespan on the service while others appear to have taken up residence permanently. There’s a seven-day free trial and a monthly sub is $14.99. It’s the closest thing we have to a dedicated arthouse streamer.
