Post by huttingham on Jun 5, 2011 0:13:17 GMT -5
I had wanted to see this documentary (sorry, video essay) for a long time now. Tyler and David have both waxed lyrical about it (particularly David) in the past. However because of copyright issues it has never been released on dvd or shown on tv. However, it has now been uploaded to youtube!
It is split into 12 parts, unfortunately part 11 is missing but I don't think you really miss much. Here is the link - www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNc41zyLJ0&feature=related
Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the film at all. After watching it I was very surprised at remembering all the praise it has received on BP. If memory serves David even listed it in his best of the decade list.
The following is my rant against the film.
A feature film such as The Departed can arouse strongly positive or negative responses without either being incorrect because of the inherent subjectivity of art. This is not the case with documentaries or non-fiction films that present sustained arguments. I feel quite confident in saying Los Angeles Plays Itself is objectively awful.
Rather than an intelligent and cogent argument, Andersen delivers a puerlie rant bathed in abject condescension and obvious banalities he finds revelatory and problematic.
He doesn't like the fact that films take artistic licence with geography. He doesn't like that bridges are renamed unecessarily. He doesn't like that Los Angeles is usually shown from the hills and that a lowly employee of a book shop can own a place over Sunset Plaza in Heat. And on. And on. And on. He never provides any reason for us to be seriously concerned that the consequences of this are insidious. He of course has theories but so does the guy sniffing paint outside the railway station.
He thinks the fact that Pierce Patchett (the bad guy in L.A. Confidential) lives in a beautiful modernist house designed by John Lautner is one aspect of Hollywood's assault on modernist architecture. That is more plausible to him than say, the writer/director ostentatiously displaying the house because it exudes opulence and can act as a quick symbol to the viewer that this corrupt guy is living pretty well. In short, in the world the film portrays; crime pays.
Knowing no doubt that his argument is asinine and baseless he points to a review that appeared in the LA Times by their architecture critic who noted how it seemed appropriate that Lautner's house should be used for such malevolent reasons. Huh! Proof! Does Andersen really think that an architecture critic arrived at his opinion of Modernist residential housing from a perfunctory glance provided by a film? Or more plausibly (but sadly for his thesis) the architecture critic had long disliked modernist residential housing and took this serendipitous opportunity to condemn it?
Andersen spends a significant amount of time in the latter stages of the film assessing how films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential rewrite history. He condescendingly asserts that "Chinatown is not docudrama". Really? A feature film is not entirely true? Of course this is just confimational bias and is later revealed as such when Andersen informs the viewer that he doesn't like cynicism and that's what film noir or the novels of Chandler trade in.
Then he leaves us with films he does like. A bunch of films I and presumably no one else has ever heard of. Mostly African American neorealists films from the 1970s and 80s. He derides the fact that Hollywood (invoking the term as a metonym, something he had earlier in the film railed against) has presented South Central as a Hobbesian disaster. Presumably he is referring to films such as Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, films written and direceted by black men. If we take Andersen at his word and acknowledge that the South Central depicted in these films is overly harsh, aren't we still left with the reality that we have a work of art that brought to peoples attention the struggles of young black men in the early 1990s? If we accept film as art then shouldn't these films be viewed as immense successes?
Watching this nonsense I couldn't help but think of Herzog and his idea of 'ecstatic truth'.
Herzog said: "If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate."
Andersen seems completely unaware of what art is and the purpose it can serve. I could go on about the essentialism of his views and the repeated non-sequiturs but it would be more banal than his film.
I can't help but think if the popularity and esteem the film is held in has something to do with its obscurity. One of the central foundations of the prevailing hipster aesthetic is the genuflection towards anything that is difficult to access. Perhaps now that the film is on Youtube and will presumably proliferate those who previously had liked it will now recognize its vacuous nature.
It is split into 12 parts, unfortunately part 11 is missing but I don't think you really miss much. Here is the link - www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SNc41zyLJ0&feature=related
Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the film at all. After watching it I was very surprised at remembering all the praise it has received on BP. If memory serves David even listed it in his best of the decade list.
The following is my rant against the film.
A feature film such as The Departed can arouse strongly positive or negative responses without either being incorrect because of the inherent subjectivity of art. This is not the case with documentaries or non-fiction films that present sustained arguments. I feel quite confident in saying Los Angeles Plays Itself is objectively awful.
Rather than an intelligent and cogent argument, Andersen delivers a puerlie rant bathed in abject condescension and obvious banalities he finds revelatory and problematic.
He doesn't like the fact that films take artistic licence with geography. He doesn't like that bridges are renamed unecessarily. He doesn't like that Los Angeles is usually shown from the hills and that a lowly employee of a book shop can own a place over Sunset Plaza in Heat. And on. And on. And on. He never provides any reason for us to be seriously concerned that the consequences of this are insidious. He of course has theories but so does the guy sniffing paint outside the railway station.
He thinks the fact that Pierce Patchett (the bad guy in L.A. Confidential) lives in a beautiful modernist house designed by John Lautner is one aspect of Hollywood's assault on modernist architecture. That is more plausible to him than say, the writer/director ostentatiously displaying the house because it exudes opulence and can act as a quick symbol to the viewer that this corrupt guy is living pretty well. In short, in the world the film portrays; crime pays.
Knowing no doubt that his argument is asinine and baseless he points to a review that appeared in the LA Times by their architecture critic who noted how it seemed appropriate that Lautner's house should be used for such malevolent reasons. Huh! Proof! Does Andersen really think that an architecture critic arrived at his opinion of Modernist residential housing from a perfunctory glance provided by a film? Or more plausibly (but sadly for his thesis) the architecture critic had long disliked modernist residential housing and took this serendipitous opportunity to condemn it?
Andersen spends a significant amount of time in the latter stages of the film assessing how films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential rewrite history. He condescendingly asserts that "Chinatown is not docudrama". Really? A feature film is not entirely true? Of course this is just confimational bias and is later revealed as such when Andersen informs the viewer that he doesn't like cynicism and that's what film noir or the novels of Chandler trade in.
Then he leaves us with films he does like. A bunch of films I and presumably no one else has ever heard of. Mostly African American neorealists films from the 1970s and 80s. He derides the fact that Hollywood (invoking the term as a metonym, something he had earlier in the film railed against) has presented South Central as a Hobbesian disaster. Presumably he is referring to films such as Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, films written and direceted by black men. If we take Andersen at his word and acknowledge that the South Central depicted in these films is overly harsh, aren't we still left with the reality that we have a work of art that brought to peoples attention the struggles of young black men in the early 1990s? If we accept film as art then shouldn't these films be viewed as immense successes?
Watching this nonsense I couldn't help but think of Herzog and his idea of 'ecstatic truth'.
Herzog said: "If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate."
Andersen seems completely unaware of what art is and the purpose it can serve. I could go on about the essentialism of his views and the repeated non-sequiturs but it would be more banal than his film.
I can't help but think if the popularity and esteem the film is held in has something to do with its obscurity. One of the central foundations of the prevailing hipster aesthetic is the genuflection towards anything that is difficult to access. Perhaps now that the film is on Youtube and will presumably proliferate those who previously had liked it will now recognize its vacuous nature.
