Los Angeles Plays Itself

Not to be confused with the landmark gay porn epic L.A. PLAYS ITSELF (1972), Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology centered on the one city on earth where one could be mistaken for the other. Andersen, a filmmaker who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, asserts that L.A. is where the relationship between reality and representation gets hopelessly muddled, and examines the ways in which this most photographed of cities has been mis/represented in movies. He divides his ambitious project, which largely comprises film clips culled from sources that encomp...