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Articles by Thom Andersen
Film Tourists in Los Angeles
By Thom Andersen This essay is a chapter from my forthcoming book, which I have called “a continuation by other means of my 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, a book about how movies have represented and misrepresented the city of Los Angeles.” It was written in 2018. The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni.
John Gianvito on teaching, art and change-making
▶︎ Her Socialist Smile is available for UK viewers to watch free online in the Essay Film Festival Screening Room from 25 to 30 March 2021. A live discussion between John Gianvito; poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché (who provides the voiceover narration to Her Socialist Smile) and writer and curator Gareth Evans is available globally at 20.00 GMT on 29 March, via pre-booked link.
Gurinder Chadha watching and shooting films at the NFT
© Lucinda Rogers ▶ Gurinder Chadha will be introducing Car Wash at the BFI Southbank on Friday 21 May. In Southall, where I grew up, there is a cinema that used to be called the Liberty. My first memory of the cinema is being in there with my father when I was a baby. He absolutely loved the cinema; in Kenya he used to bunk off school and work to go. I remember Song of the South (1946) was on and I started crying because I was scared, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
The 100 Greatest Films of All Time | Sight & Sound
Credit: Kobal Collection 1. Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1958 A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession. The accession of Vertigo to the top spot in this poll is hardly in the nature of a coup d’état. Tying for 11th place in 1972, Hitchcock’s masterpiece steadily inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir apparent to the long-ruling Citizen Kane.
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Andersen This is the city: Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it’s not easy. The city is big. The image is small. Movies are vertical. At least when they’re projected on a screen. The city is horizontal, except for what we call downtown. Maybe that’s why the movies love downtown more than we do.
I Was at Home, But… first look: an elegantly radical mystery | Sight & Sound
When we look for a film’s meaning, what does ‘meaning’ mean? That this is the kind of question raised by German director Angela Schanelec’s latest ascetically oddball odyssey I Was at Home, But… (the apparent reference to Ozu’s I Was Born, But… is yet another of its unanswered intrigues) should give you some idea of the kind of film it is.
Ozu Yasujirô: the master of time
I like to quote Wim Wenders’ statement at the beginning of Tokyo-Ga: What can I add? What seems like hyperbole is actually true. Perhaps I can supply the arguments Wenders didn’t feel were necessary. What everybody notices first in Ozu is the visual form. He apparently decided at the very beginning of his filmmaking career to adopt his own cinematic language, an idiolect that is both conservative and radical.
On Sleep, Thom Andersen, Jonas Mekas, 1964, 2005
Sleep (Andy Warhol, 1964) 16 mm, 285’ at 18 fps For the past two years Sabzian has been a partner of Subbacultcha, contributing to the film pages of the magazine. At the occasion of their fifth birthday celebration, Sabzian was invited to organize a screening. But which film could we possibly screen with a party going on in another part of the building?
The enigmatic ‘pillow shots’ of Yasujiro Ozu
An example of a ‘pillow shot’ in Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning (1959) Few filmmakers are as consistent in their cinematic style as Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. From the careful, low-angle framing (as if seated on a tatami mat) and conversations often shot head-on, to his exclusive use of a 50mm lens (most equivalent to the human eye’s perspective) and minimal camera movement, any diversions from these refined parameters are rare.
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Videos2 Of the cities in the world, few are depicted in and mythologized more in film and television than the city of Los Angeles. In this documentary, Thom Andersen examines in detail the ways the city has been depicted, both when it is meant to be anonymous and when itself is the focus. Along the way, he illustrates his concerns of how the real city and its people are misrepresented and distorted through the prism of popular film culture.
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