Screening:
Thom Andersen

Active as a filmmaker since the 1960s, Thom Andersen is best known for his essay films, which look at cinema as a technology of political imagination and a secret repository of cultural memory. Andersen created Los Angeles Plays Itself by re-editing footage from a wide range of Hollywood productions, salvaging images of the metropolis from the background of other movies, and adding narration that reinvests them with documentary meanings. Get Out of the Car functions as a coda to Los Angeles Plays Itself, looking at the contemporary city from the pedestrian level. Here, Andersen counterposes new 16mm footage of palimpsestic billboards, neon displays, murals, and building facades with an idiosyncratic survey of remarkable (if lesser-known) music made and recorded in Southern California, creating a symphonic portrait of a city through its signs and sounds. Together, Andersen’s two films propose what he calls a “militant nostalgia,” a complex recuperation of a city’s vanished history. “Change the past,” he entreats viewers in his program notes to Get Out of the Car, “it needs it.”

PROGRAM
Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003
Beta SP video, black-and-white and color, sound; 169 min.

SCREENING TIMES
April 4, 5, and 7
12 pm
April 6
1:30 and 6 pm

PROGRAM
Get Out of the Car, 2010
16mm film, color, sound; 35 min.

SCREENING TIMES
April 4, 5, and 7
4 and 5 pm
April 6
5 pm
April 8
12 and 1 pm

Screenings are free with Museum admission. Admittance is on a first-come, first-seated basis until capacity is reached. Late admittance is strongly discouraged, so please arrive early.