Monthly Archive for August, 2011

In Search of a Cinema Canon

August 22, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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New York City opening of “Citizen Kane.”

The September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment magazine featured what it calls its longest ever article: an exploration of a proposed “cinema canon” of the 60 greatest feature films as proposed by director/writer Paul Schrader. Even I, who have known and worked with Paul on five of his films since 1980, was surprised, and in complete accord, with his choice of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. He concludes his essay with this thought,”For me the artist without whom there could not be a film canon is Jean Renoir, and the film without which a canon is inconceivable is The Rules of the Game.”

Schrader begins the article with an interesting anecdote:

In March 2003, I was having dinner in London with Faber and Faber’s editor of film books, Walter Donohue, and several others when the conversation turned to the current state of film criticism and lack of knowledge of film history in general. I remarked on a former assistant who, when told to look up Montgomery Clift, returned some minutes later asking, “Where is that?” I replied that I thought it was in the Hollywood Hills, and he returned to his search engine.

Continue reading ‘In Search of a Cinema Canon’

Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part Three

August 15, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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“The best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation. Getting from place to place isn’t a given. Cars break down; they get flat tires; they get towed.” Thom Andersen’s narration of the trials of Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, a man without wheels after his car crashes head-on into a tree while being shot at by San Fernando Valley farmers, demonstrates how diminished even a cynical detective can become when deprived of a vital Los Angeles badge of identity: “ The loss of a car is a form of symbolic castration, in the movies and in life.” Gittes’ dependency on other drivers is more disturbing to him through the rest of the film than his sliced nostril that slowly heals from scene to scene.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, "Chinatown."

In Sunset Blvd. Joe Gillis (sounds a bit like Jake Gittis) is jumpstarted into the nightmare delusions of silent film queen Norma Desmond when his car, about to be re-possessed by pursuing goons, blows a tire on Sunset Blvd. and he screeches into her driveway.

Michael Douglas abandons his car in Falling Down when he faces traffic gridlock and begins an ever more violent odyssey across an urban Los Angeles wasteland. In many of these films, it is our car that keeps us insulated from the chaos seeping out of the mean sidewalks. Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part Three’

Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself, Part Two

August 8, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Edendale (now Echo Park) circa 1920—where the studios began.

America’s greatest cities often have monikers: “The Big Apple,” “Mile High City,” “Baghdad by the Bay,” “Big D,” “The Windy City,” “Gateway to the West,” “The Big Easy.” Most of these are booster-ish. And what about Los Angeles? “LaLa Land,” “Lotus Land,” “Tinseltown,”(allowing for the city’s conflation with its dominant industry). Only one such name for Los Angeles, which casts a nod toward its Hispanic origins, “The City of the Angels,” seems exempt from condescension; but in the movies, the pervasive attitude toward Los Angeles is one of  sour self-loathing.

Perhaps this dark vision of Los Angeles reflects the simple fact that it’s at the end of the highway west, Route 66’s dead end of dreams at Ocean Avenue, overlooking the beach below its cliffs, a psychic terminus kept vibrant by moving toward the retreating rainbow of illusion that finally sinks into the horizon of the Pacific: the palisades of Santa Monica as the cliffs of dashed dreams. What better revenge for filmmakers than to destroy, at least on celluloid, the city that causes such despair? Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself, Part Two’

Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part One

August 1, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Thom Andersen

Near the end of Thom Andersen’s three-hour meditation on the cinematic identity of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself, we are thrust into the  city aswarm with the real life problems that most working class Americans confront daily. Billy Woodberry’s low-budget, documentary style, black and white drama, Bless Their Little Hearts, along with Charles Burnett’s, Killer of Sheep, affords us a glimpse into the African-American, blue-collar lives that are an antipode to what we have seen in the rest of the film—Andersen’s kaleidoscopic examination of Los Angeles as a journey through our shared cultural and cinematic fantasies on the streets, in the homes, and at the public spaces of a city whose identity is never fixed, but is an always unreeling drama.

In the final scene of Bless Their Little Hearts, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is driven in his battered pickup truck past the closed Goodyear Tire factory where his fellow South Central workers had once been employed. Andersen’s narration over Woodberry’s final images intones,

Built in 1919 and closed in 1980, the Goodyear factory on south Central Avenue was the first and largest of the four major tire-manufacturing plants once located in the Los Angeles area. Once upon a time, visitors could take a guided tour and see how tires were made, just as today they can take a studio tour and see how movies are made. Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part One’