A detective fiction mixed with an essay-documentary about Los Angeles.A detective fiction mixed with an essay-documentary about Los Angeles.A detective fiction mixed with an essay-documentary about Los Angeles.
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Movie dreams splayed on desert sand
I was fortunate to be exposed this past summer to a thing called Los Angeles Plays Itself. If you're not familiar, it's a lengthy film essay on the space occupied by this mecca of film inside films and a chronicle of that space as it unfolds with cinema and is informed by it. It was evocative stuff that made me fall in love again with the city.
This is one of the discoveries prompted by that piece, one of the most exciting I daresay. I was slightly worried at first because it comes by a filmmaker I don't appreciate much, who liked to rework a lot of French New Wave tricks into an American view. But it is potent stuff, this one, also an essay on the hot summer dream of Los Angeles and how it has unfolded as a movie.
The New Wave ideal was that life is a film. This meant that we might as well cobble together a life from other films, by also referencing that sort of movie life and a viewer's life of watching. All sorts of things became implicit between one camera and the next, most keenly a revelation of the illusions that we take for real.
All this is kept here, in just the ways a young Godard first imagined it to be; so an unfettered camera that explores the world as we might, here a Los Angeles unfettered by movie narrative; then all sorts of recognizable bits from movie narratives loosely threaded around a private dick who is investigating for the big scoop, here about a powerful money man that is pulling the strings from behind, a mistress groomed to be a Hollywood actress, a mysterious murder, Beverly Hills, another mistress, and escalating conspiracy and paranoia from this stuff that should have felt fresh at the time after Chinatown; constant spillovers between real and imagined, bland cityscapes and movie dreams.
It ends with violence from the make-believe conspiracy taking place before a mural of a tree, then the camera opens up to reveal a real tree standing a few feet away, and a 360o panorama of a smoggy, featureless Los Angeles extending in every direction.
It's a sublime shot to end the film but the one I will cherish the most is the lengthy point-of-view as we drive into Los Angeles, into view of downtown and through a sprawling network of highways out again for the suburbs. Its ordinary magic and sense of discovery enthralls me like the Tokyo roads in Solyaris.
This is one of the discoveries prompted by that piece, one of the most exciting I daresay. I was slightly worried at first because it comes by a filmmaker I don't appreciate much, who liked to rework a lot of French New Wave tricks into an American view. But it is potent stuff, this one, also an essay on the hot summer dream of Los Angeles and how it has unfolded as a movie.
The New Wave ideal was that life is a film. This meant that we might as well cobble together a life from other films, by also referencing that sort of movie life and a viewer's life of watching. All sorts of things became implicit between one camera and the next, most keenly a revelation of the illusions that we take for real.
All this is kept here, in just the ways a young Godard first imagined it to be; so an unfettered camera that explores the world as we might, here a Los Angeles unfettered by movie narrative; then all sorts of recognizable bits from movie narratives loosely threaded around a private dick who is investigating for the big scoop, here about a powerful money man that is pulling the strings from behind, a mistress groomed to be a Hollywood actress, a mysterious murder, Beverly Hills, another mistress, and escalating conspiracy and paranoia from this stuff that should have felt fresh at the time after Chinatown; constant spillovers between real and imagined, bland cityscapes and movie dreams.
It ends with violence from the make-believe conspiracy taking place before a mural of a tree, then the camera opens up to reveal a real tree standing a few feet away, and a 360o panorama of a smoggy, featureless Los Angeles extending in every direction.
It's a sublime shot to end the film but the one I will cherish the most is the lengthy point-of-view as we drive into Los Angeles, into view of downtown and through a sprawling network of highways out again for the suburbs. Its ordinary magic and sense of discovery enthralls me like the Tokyo roads in Solyaris.
- chaos-rampant
- Dec 2, 2011
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- $6,000 (estimated)
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