Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
You can’t beat a good film documentary. It’s unfortunate then that most of what passes for genuine insight into the movies these days are little more than studio disseminated propaganda, I find that locating examples of actual merit in todays media landscape is akin to divining for truffles in a cyclone . It was therefore a joy to see that the Barbican were screening “Los Angeles Play’s Itself’, a hugely admired, seriously minded epic three hour documentary dissecting the visual representation of the city of angels on the silver screen. I found it absolutely riveting but hey, maybe I don’t get out much. ‘LAPI’ deftly walks that fine line between an overly complex, academic film theorist tract and an empty, ultimately vacuous collection of film clips thrown together with no rhyme or reason, it delivers genuine insight, provoking connections and thoughts whilst also remaining accessibly entertaining throughout its marathon running length. Like many great documentaries it takes as its starting point a central conceit, namely that the real LA has not been accurately represented on screen in terms of its architecture or infrastructure, its culture nor sociology throughout the last 100 years despite being the most photographed city on the planet.
Native film-maker Thom Andersen leads the audience on a dexterous cantor of the visual history of Los Angeles as presented in the movies, from the early talkies of the 1920’s and 1930’s when the pioneer film-makers began to 
escape the confines of those embryonic studio environments, the Black Maria’s and the like (prevalent in the silent era of course) and began shooting out on the streets and suburbs of LA, conjuring the mean streets of New York in Burbank, substituting the hills of Hollywood for the trenches of World War ravaged Europe, substituting the district of downtown LA for any European turn of the century capital metropolis. I’ve been waiting to see this film for years ever since a review cropped up by John Paterson in the Guardian and it was terrific, satisfying both my film interest and provoking some fond memories from my holiday a couple of years ago.
Andersson starts with coverage of some of the most famous LA landmarks which have populated the screen over the years including of course the Bradbury Building and Union Station, the modernist classic Frank Lloyd Wright house, the iconic LA City Hall which frequently appeared in the titles of TV programmes of the 1950’s and 60’s (most famously Dragnet), and the Lovell Health House seen in the likes of ‘LA Confidential‘ amongst others. He makes a case for a spilt between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ representation of LA by what he calls ‘tourists’, film-makers who have come to shoot and work in the city and either luxuriate in its strange and unique architecture, locations and milieu like Antonioni in the likes of ‘Zabriskie Point‘ or Polanski in ‘Chinatown‘ and those who mock and dismiss the city, its history and cultural achievements as being minor, deferring to the popular opinion of the city and its inhabitants being vacuous, image obsessed morons.
The documentary makes some quite unusual and intriguing observations, amongst them the revelation that not a single one of Hitchcock’s American movies was actually set in LA despite his twenty five year residency where he made approximately thirty films. Andersson picks up on trends such as the 1980’s action movie tendency to portray schizophrenically action sequences detailing sleek, fetishistic cars careering around corners, dwarfed by the rigidly angled post war concrete and glass mega-structures which is the equivalent of a futurists wet dream. His diagnosis of the portrayal of the LAPD in film got the biggest laugh when he queried why in cinema their motto ‘To Protect & Serve’ is invariably seen in almost ironic ‘inverted commas’, not surprising given their shocking record of corruption and racism.
The film concluded perfectly by giving me some pointers on new film-makers to check out, I’d heard of Charles Burnett before but I now have a new impetus to check out his LA set 1970’s neo-realist work, the environment of which should be quite an antidote to the usual rodeo drive mansions and $6,000 a month art-deco apartments which are rented by homicide detectives on a real-world income of about $40K a year!!! In conclusion here is the comprehensive list of the films featured in ‘Los Angeles Plays Itself‘, and here are the best clips I can find as to reflect the sort of themes, breadth of examination that the film commands. Superb, I hope this arrives on DVD at some point in the near future as there was plenty more to absorb and learn.
Kubrick BFI Season – The Killing (1955)
Another year, another film season. Like I said I obviously welcome the chance to revisit more of Stan the Man’s movies on the big screen but it does seem a little premature after last years Barbican season. This is pure supposition but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the film orientated government, lottery and charity funded organisations in London don’t club together to share costs on marketing and developing new prints of films thus the this apparent repetition of screenings , I quite often see older films playing at some independent cinema then cropping up at somewhere like the Hammersmith Riverside a couple of months later, I guess it makes sense. In any case its only just clicked that it’s actually been a decade since his death on March 7th so it does make sense for the UK’s most prominent film organisation to pay appropriate respect to one of the titan’s of cinema who elected to make most of his films in the UK. I’ve loosely decided to catch an early, mid and final season movie from Kubrick’s canon as part of this season, I’m keeping my other choices under wraps in a pathetic effort to inject some element of suspense into proceedings. No, its not working is it? Anyway, let’s kick off proceedings with ‘The Killing‘, technically Kubrick’s third theatrical feature not counting the half dozen shorts he had produced in the early fifties, nevertheless ‘The Killing‘ is regarded as his first professional, studio backed feature which was released by United Artists in 1956.
It’s your archetypal film noir plot – central hood puts together a multi-disciplinary crack team to perform one last heist, this time at a racetrack during one of the season’s most busy meetings. Each of the criminals on the team have their own reasons for risking another stretch in the big house should the plan fail, their problems being of a financial or personal nature, in the case of the brilliant Elisha Cook Jr. both who is twitching under the talons of his adulterous femme-fatale wife, played by Marie Windsor. Team leader Johnny Clay (the stoic Sterling Hayden) just wants to achieve one last score and settle down with his new wife. What makes ‘The Killing‘ a truly great exemplar of noir is that sense of doom and inevitable failure hanging like the sword of Damocles over the meticulously researched and professionally executed caper. Fate does not favor these social transgressors, crime does not pay and the best laid plans are always vulnerable to the most absurd of coincidences in a cruel and impersonal universe
Although the screenplay was a collaborative effort, producer James Harris hired the hard-boiled Jim Thompson to insert some of his street wise slang in the guise of dialogue editor. Thompson was a highly regarded crime writer who I finally got round to reading last year, his most famous novel ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is currently being adapted into a Michael Winterbottom movie starring Casey Affleck either this or next year. The blistering dialogue is superb in the movie, abundant with pulpy exchanges between Johnny and the traitorous Sherry who sings to her boyfriend about the robbery and leads to the gang themselves being robbed and the granite Sterling Hayden are laugh out loud funny. What I do find distracting though is the distracting voice-over that permeates the film. The jury is still kind of out on voice-overs, some regard them as cheating, a clumsy storytelling device whilst others regard them as a useful tool in reducing redundant exposition, forcing unrealistic dialogue into characters mouths to connect possible story gaps. Kubrick was certainly in the second camp but I’m not so sure it works in this instance, the voice-overs serve as essential additions to the visual experience of ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘A Clockwork Orange‘ and its limited use in ‘Dr. Stangelove’, in ‘The Killing’ I found it quite distracting and unnecessary. At one point Stan was going to use a Martin Balsam voice-over for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘, thank god that idea was jettisoned eh?
What really caught the critics attention was the films fractured narrative which is widely accepted as Kubrick’s idea. After he and producer had knocked out a few drafts of the script with Thompson they had reached something of a stalemate, what they had was a seed of a film but they lacked an unusual angle, a different take to differentiate the movie from its peers. perhaps inspired by his and Harris working practice of buying books to adapt, tearing in the story down the middle to read half of the text each and then coming together to relate to each other the plot during story meetings Kubrick suggested mixing up the normal A.B,C,D form of plotting. The influence has been extraordinary, not least on the likes of this or this or this, it’s now a tradition to design and execute a calling card movie and catapult your career into the mainstream by making the use of what is free on a even a limited budget film – a real imagination – to charm the critics.
Those masks have surely been an influence on a more recent crime film don’t you think? For all Kubrick’s legendary perfectionism and exhausting search for the soul of a scene I think certain detractors have failed to note that in fact many actors came back to work with him again again, Timothy Carey was in ‘The Killing’ and then returned in ‘Paths Of Glory’, Hayden returned of course as General Jack D. Ripper in ‘Dr. Strangelove‘ and most memorably for me the great Joe Turkel teamed up with Stan again some twenty five years later as Lloyd the ‘best god-damn barman from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon’. There are many more examples after he had relocated to England, more details here – kind of contradicts the image of the harsh, brutal taskmaster doesn’t it? Ah, maybe not. He did have some showdown’s with technical staff on ‘The Killing’, veteran Cinematographer Lucien Ballard and he clashed over lens choice and camera placement for certain scenes, Kubrick quietly made it explicit after the very first example of disobedience that you either do what I tell you to or get off my set, you can see that he was already fermenting his visual signature of the sweeping tracking shots that found full fruition in ‘Paths Of Glory‘. It’s that behavior that’s one of the things I most admire about Kubrick. It’s not just the utter devotion and unprecedented level of control he wielded, its the fact that he launched his whole career himself with such self-confidence in his skills , he had effectively taught himself everything from the photography, the sound design and editing on his earlier shorts, read the then essential texts on screen acting and performance and then strolls in and makes a minor masterpiece such as the ‘The Killing‘.
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