Saturday 4 August 2007, 17.00

Los Angeles Plays Itself is a video essay by Thom Andersen about how movies have portrayed the city of Los Angeles. Carefully weaving together footage from dozens of films made in or about the city, Andersen gradually builds his thesis about how Hollywood has represented, and misrepresented, its home town. Movies about Los Angeles have been, for the most part, period films, set in the past or in the future, and they replace the public history of the city with a secret history, opaque to its citizens This urban legend is not innocent. It serves to dissuade naive viewers from political engagement by telling them that they are condemned to ignorance and powerlessness, no matter what they do. In fact, the opposite is the truth: the public history is the real history, as the treatments of films such as Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and LA Confidential demonstrate.

Thom Andersen, USA 2003, 169 min

 

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended

    

This event is related to the Global Cities exhibition