Thanks to its location as the movie capital of the world for so long, over a hundred years in fact, Los Angeles is more familiar to those who watch film than any other cities, but is its representation as more than a backdrop to the stories told there justified? What if we looked beyond the genres, the plots, the actors and regarded the place as it has been depicted down the decades as a form of documentary, a record of both how it had changed and evolved over the course of its representation, and for what that says about the place itself? Director Thom Andersen undertakes that daunting task by use of a plethora of clips over which narrator Encke King relates Andersen's thoughts. Can he get to the heart of the city through the movies it created?
He had a damn good try, and over the course of almost three hours there was a sense that even then he had missed things out, which was a mark of how comprehensive you can be for a documentary of this length, never mind the more conventional ninety minutes a feature usually takes up. Film lecturer Andersen approached his subject as if he were stringing together his studies for those in his class, one of those film lectures where the tutor brings in the TV cabinet and plays extracts from various movies to illustrate the points they were making; watching this you had a very good idea of what it would be like to be taught by Andersen, and not everyone responded to that with a welcome.
Nevertheless, for all those who complained about King's Joe Friday-esque narration being so laconic it was monotonous, and the perception of the director's negative attitude, if you wanted a factual account of every film made in Los Angeles (Andersen dislikes what he views as the pejorative abbreviation L.A.) then this was not the production for you, as it was far more an opinion piece designed to provoke thought and, you imagined, a degree of healthy debate. To that end he included thoughts on films judged to be classics that he found wanting, and vice versa, so that the original Gone in Sixty Seconds from the seventies was praised simply because it presented a realistic journey through the city's geography without the cheats and shortcuts of most cinema set there.
Andersen was patently passionate about the area he called home, and in some ways this was a crusading effort to encourage filmmakers to represent it more fairly, while at the same time acknowledging that it hadn't happened too meticulously in the past, so there wasn't much chance of it happening too often in the future. Even with the amount of space afforded to his arguments, there were still works returned to often as the best examples of what each era wanted from its Los Angeles, so Kiss Me Deadly was the finest from the fifties mostly because Robert Aldrich implemented as much location shooting as he could, including the scenes of characters genuinely driving which most other directors would have resorted to using the back projection in the studio for.
Inevitably, there comes a point Andersen identifies as the race riots of the sixties where the city began to look back on itself to its own past, and in doing so crafted atmosphere and tone as much about its present as it was its yesteryear. The two most obvious instances he put forward were Chinatown for the seventies, which he admires very much (his observation about how it relates to Los Angelean car culture will have you chuckling) and L.A. Confidential for the nineties, but he was careful to make plain the conspiracies involved in those were fictional, and there was more heinous corruption going on in real life - not even Who Framed Roger Rabbit escaped that accusation. Oddly, while he appreciates the outsider's eye view of his hometown - Woody Allen who hates it, Jacques Demy and Ridley Scott who love it - he saved his highest praise for Jack Webb's largely non-cinematic Dragnet television series (which did spawn a movie in the fifties) in a manner that seems halfway between guilty pleasure and the socially conscious efforts he concludes the documentary with, ending abruptly.
