Thom Andersen

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“The Sunshine Here Has Fried Peoples’ Brains”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another new item about one of my favorite movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, this one a Q&A with director Thom Andersen conducted by Standard Culture. An excerpt about the differences between celluloid Los Angeles and New York City and the actual cities:

“Question:

How are New York and Los Angeles represented differently in movies?

Thom Andersen:

It’s a big question. When sound came in [to film], there was an influx of New York writers to Los Angeles, so there were many, many films set in the NY, although they were filmed in Los Angeles, mostly on stages. They created this picture of New York as this magical city. And that kind of romanticizing of a city never happened with Los Angeles except in some movies made by directors who came from other places for whom Los Angeles was a magical city. For local filmmakers, Los Angeles had a more mixed feeling — something that seems to continue to the present day. There’s something about New York that lends itself to representation on film. It may be simply the fact, as Rem Koolhaas said: it’s a city based on a culture of congestion. Whereas LA is a culture of dispersion, which make it harder to represent on film.

Question:

Do you prefer New York or Los Angeles?

Thom Andersen:

Los Angeles is an easier place to get things done, but to me, New York is still the center of the world. People look better there. They’re smarter. The sunshine here has fried peoples’ brains.”

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“He’s An Unabashed L.A. Partisan Who Bristles At Any Perceived Anti–Los Angeles Sentiment”

October 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At Grantland, Steven Hyden has a smart article about Los Angeles Plays Itself, one of my favorite movies. A documentary about the role of the “most photographed city in the world” in film and on television during the twentieth century, Thom Andersen’s long-form survey is brilliant, insightful and fierce. An excerpt from Hyden:

“An exhaustive, exhausting, funny, trenchant, and frequently cantankerous work of film criticism and social commentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself was envisioned as a double feature, Andersen said. When viewed this way, the first half plays as a witty observational comedy and the second half as an impassioned political docudrama. Andersen starts off by griping about L.A. movies the way only a longtime Angeleno would: He nitpicks Alfred Hitchcock for setting several films in the San Francisco area and none in Los Angeles, and Sylvester Stallone for taking undue ‘geographic license’ with local streets for the car chases in Cobra. It’s not just a matter of realism — though Andersen is a stickler for realism. He’s an unabashed L.A. partisan who bristles at any perceived anti–Los Angeles sentiment, starting with the nickname ‘L.A.,’ which he finds diminishing.

‘People who hate Los Angeles love Point Blank,’ he says of John Boorman’s 1967 psychedelic noir, though he does express sardonic appreciation for Boorman’s taste in garish decor, which ‘managed to make the city look both bland and insidious.’ He’s less forgiving of how filmmakers always put their villains in the city’s modernist architectural masterworks. The work of John Lautner has been especially exploited in this regard, finding favor among Bond villains in Diamonds Are Forever and Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski.

If Andersen were just a provincial crank, Los Angeles Plays Itself would peter out well before the second act. But his eccentric narration also sticks some weirdly insightful landings, like when he compares the bare-knuckled fascism of Jack Webb’s Dragnet TV series to the austerity of Ozu and Bresson, or marvels at how the supposed dystopia of Blade Runner is actually ‘a city planner’s dream’ of bustling streets, bright neon, and easily traversable aerial highways. ‘Only a Unabomber could find this totally repellent,’ he observes.”

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“But Hollywood Movies Have Almost Systematically Denigrated This Heritage”

April 11, 2012 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Thom Andersen analyzing Hollywood’s puzzling penchant for equating Los Angeles’ glorious Modernist architecture with villainy.

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“Before Rolled Film, Eadweard Muybridge Found A Way To Make Motion Pictures”

April 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Photographer and locomotion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, who miraculously made still photographs dance and gallop, was born on April 9th 182 years ago. He’s celebrated by a Google Doodle.

From Thom Andersen’s 1975 documentary, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer:

 

In 1874, Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover, Harry Larkyns, in a crime of passion. He was acquitted and his wife succumbed to a stroke soon thereafter. The baby born of the extramarital affair was raised in an orphanage. From Stanford Magazine: “THE OPERATIC EPISODE began on October 17, 1874, when Muybridge discovered his wife’s adultery. In 1872, he had married a 21-year-old divorcée named Flora Stone. When she bore a son in the spring of 1874, Muybridge believed that the child, Floredo Helios Muybridge, was his own–until he came across letters exchanged between Flora and a drama critic named Harry Larkyns. The most damning evidence was a photo of Floredo enclosed with one of the letters: Flora had captioned it ‘Little Harry.’

Convinced he’d been cuckolded, Muybridge collapsed, wept and wailed, according to a nurse who was present. That night, he tracked Larkyns to a house near Calistoga and shot him through the heart.

At his murder trial in 1875, the jury rejected an insanity plea but accepted the defense of justifiable homicide, finding Muybridge not guilty of murder. After the acquittal, Muybridge sailed for Central America and spent the next year in ‘working exile.’“

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Bradbury Building Gets Its Close-Up (1960)

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

This classic 1960 picture, which was taken by longtime National Parks Service photographer Jack E. Boucher, depicts the interior of L.A.’s Bradbury Building, one of the most filmed and photographed pieces of architecture in the world. The setting for numerous films and music videos, the downtown Los Angeles structure is perhaps best known for its appearance in Blade Runner. Built in 1893 by George Wyman for the visionary mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury, the building was completed a year after its namesake’s death. Wyman purportedly consulted a Ouija board before accepting the assignment.

A brief history about the project from the Pacific Coast Architecture Database:

Sumner P. Hunt began a five-story design for the mining magnate, Lewis Leonard Bradbury (1823-1892), in 1891; Bradbury wanted an office building that he could walk to from his house on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles; Hunt had previously designed a warehouse for Bradbury in Mazatlan, Mexico; Hunt had completed plans for the new office building by March 1893 at the latest; Bradbury died in July 1892, and there were legal disputes over his estate; in this contentious context, it is possible that the Bradbury Estate may have wanted to finish the Bradbury Building as inexpensively as possible; in 1892 or 1893, George Herbert Wyman, a draftsman in Hunt’s office, entered the picture, as a project supervisor, taking control from Hunt. According to Cecilia Rasmussen writing in the Los Angeles Times, modern research on the history of the Bradbury Block derived from a story done by the noted architectural critic and historian, Esther McCoy (1904-1989), in Arts and Architecture magazine in 1953. Rasmussen stated: “Esther McCoy interviewed Wyman’s two daughters, Louise Hammell and Carroll Wyman. McCoy’s story…reports that Wyman’s daughters told her that Bradbury found Hunt’s design uninspiring and promptly offered the job of redesigning the building to their father. They told McCoy that their father incorporated ideas for his design from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel, Looking Backward, which described a utopian civilization of the year 2000. Wyman, the daughters told McCoy, originally turned down the offer, judging acceptance as unethical. But that weekend, while using a Ouija board with his wife, he received a message from his 8-year-old dead brother Mark: ‘Take the Bradbury assignment. It will make you successful.'”•

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