From its distinctive neighborhoods to its architectural homes, Los Angeles has been the backdrop to countless movies. In this dazzling work, Andersen takes viewers on a whirlwind tour through the metropolis' real and cinematic history, investigating the myriad stories and legends that have come to...
A documentary that examines the films made by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist and offers a radically different perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema.
With Reconversão (Reconversion), Thom Andersen opens another fascinating chapter of his ongoing investigation of architectural landscapes, their filmic representation, and their relation to history, by focusing on 17 buildings and projects by the often-controversial Portuguese architect Eduardo...
Thom Andersen's remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent...
Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends...
Melting shows the natural monostructural disintegration of a strawberry sundae, its passage from rigidity to softness, from edibility to waste. The spoon resting on the plate refers to the human presence, which lurks behind the screen, declining to interfere with what transpires. Preserved by the...
Although he has been limited to bit parts, the actor Tony Longo is an axiom of American action cinema: the giant who is too soft-hearted for the job. Composed of three short movies, Hey, Asshole!, Adam Kesher and You Fucking Dickhead!, The Tony Longo Trilogy brings together all of the actor’s...
Andersen's first extant work as a filmmaker, made as group project while he was a film student at the University of Southern California. A spirited adaptation of Beckett's eponymous mimed play, efficiently compressed to the 300 foot (16mm) class requirement, Act Without Words boasts an uncredited...
“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I...
One of America’s foremost practitioners of the essay film presents a major new work inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze on cinema. Andersen’s The Thoughts That Once We Had is a richly layered journey through cinematic history, masterfully edited as it playfully moves across decades and...
The House, The True One and The One That Follows, Is Yet to be Built
02019HD
A journey across unique places that challenge the world of their time, landmarks of the future built by revolutionary minds that can be described, each in their own way, as architectural utopias. The film is divided in five chapters which represent five works.
A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks in Los Angeles.
Olivia may have felt no need to change, but the world around her was not bound by such an impractical sentiment. Olivia’s Place is gone. The site where it used to stand is now a sort of plaza between two large old wood frame houses that were moved to their present location from elsewhere in the...
A documentary about rock 'n' roll. The Canned Heat, City Lights, Seeds of Time, LA Tymes, Llyn Foulkes, Charlie Watts, Chris & Craig, Duke of Earl, Seeburg, Wurlitzer, The Trip, The Lynch Bldg., Top's, Pandora's Box, Maverick's Flat, someone's backyard. Riot in cell block number nine, riot on...
Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood) reconsiders the films of Spencer Williams, the pioneering African American screenwriter, director, and actor whose 1940s melodramas centered on sinners and saints—Beale Street mamas and storefront preachers, crime bosses and upwardly...
A “music video” to accompany the Farmingdale Sound Machine version of “California Sun,” originally recorded by the Rivieras. The Farmingdale Sound Machine had created a video for the song using clips from Thom Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself. Andersen supplanted these with movie...
