Volume 4, Issue 2: Los Angeles Keeps Playing
New Episode of The Video Essay Podcast & Much More
Twenty years ago this fall, Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself played for the first time. The film debuted at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival in September of that year. Robert Koehler began his Variety review:
Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it has never have been captured with such complex layers of meaning and fascination as in Thom Andersen’s remarkable [film].
It is a work that has continued to hold a special place in the hearts of cinephiles, and in particular those of us who maintain an interest in found footage. At nearly three hours, the film is a sight to behold; the byproduct of a team that extends beyond Andersen and that seems to now embody a kind of maximalist approach to what we now call “videographic criticism.”
I knew about Andersen’s film long before I saw it for the first time last year. I felt a strong desire to wait until I could see it in the “right” context: on the big screen. When it showed at the IFC Center in New York, I jumped at the chance. Seeing the film “big” allowed me to withdraw from our current reality, to pretend that I was seeing an underground document of the early 2000s, a film, that, as Variety wrote a decade after its initial review:
maintained a largely clandestine existence ever since, circulated among cinephiles and architecture buffs on bootleg DVDs and YouTube links, and periodically revived by the American Cinematheque (where it had its first local screenings back in 2004). Due to copyright concerns over the unlicensed film clips, commercial distributors were understandably wary of Andersen’s magnum opus — a situation, the filmmaker noted happily at Friday’s screening, that may finally be changing.
Now, of course, the situation has improved. Unfair copyright challenges abound, but those strong initial fears have diminished. Today, Los Angeles Plays Itself exists as a kind of forefather, one of the many giants that paved the way for the video essay not just on an aesthetic level, but a political one too. Amidst such concerns, it played at New York’s Film Forum in 2004. But, as reported in a New York Times profile from that same year, obstacles remained:
While Mr. Andersen's film has itself become something of a film-festival sensation, he remains frustrated that it is, in at least one respect, not actually a film at all. It exists only as a high-quality video master, not as a 35-millimeter film print. And Mr. Andersen's film has yet to find a distributor, or a commercial engagement in its namesake city.
The profile goes on to quote Andersen:
''Sometimes I think 'Los Angeles Plays Itself' would be really great if I could have afforded to make it on film,'' he said. ''What it is now is just a sketch for a movie instead of being a real movie.''
There is a certain irony in these quotes today as we look back on Andersen’s film as an early example of the videographic work we do on our computers. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of the archival of materials dealing with this film and its reception, but I remain endlessly interested in tracing its history. Of course, as the 2013 Variety anniversary piece, written by Scott Foundas, notes, it is a film that has itself changed over the years:
For starters, Andersen has remastered “Los Angeles” (which was made at the tail end of the analog video era) in high definition, replacing most of the thousands of film clips excerpted therein with HD source material. In addition, Andersen said, he’s done “a bit of re-editing” to fix “those things that were annoying me,” including moving up the intermission of the 170-minute feature from the 104-minute mark to 92 minutes in. A few clips have been extended, a few others removed.
What began as an object made amidst the anxieties of film’s (and video’s) decline became one that evolved with — and was bolstered by — the growth of the digital. Two decades later, it maintains a high regard amongst cinephiles, and in today’s digital film culture in particular. Koehler, in his review, righly places Andersen’s film within the filmic tradition that includes Rappaport, Marker, and Godard, all of whom are also considered video essayists and/or proto-videoessayists of some kind (often depending on the work in question).
The legacy of Los Angeles today brings to mind another quote from the 2004 Times profile, in which the author, also Scott Foundas, writes:
Though [Andersen] was part of the University of Southern California film school generation that included George Lucas and John Milius, his own career has been more about looking to cinema's past than seeking to establish its new frontiers -- beginning with his 1974 debut feature, ''Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer,'' and its inquiry into the life and work of the 19th-century motion-picture pioneer. [Emphasis mine.]
The text in bold — “more about looking to cinema's past than seeking to establish its new frontiers” — is most interesting, for it presents a false dichotomy. What Andersen was in fact doing (and perhaps this was only possible to see with the gift of hindsight), was helping to establish a new kind of cinema, a new way of engaging with found footage: the video essay, one that takes cinema’s past and establishes new frontiers.
Episode 41. Feminist Videographic Diptychs
The Video Essay Podcast returns with guest Catherine Fowler, a film scholar based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and curator of the latest issue of the journal [in]Transition. The issue features feminist videographic diptychs by six scholars: Nicole Morse, Maryam Tafakory, Melissa Dollman, Paola Voci, Maud Ceuterick, and Catherine herself. Listen here.
Be sure to also listen to Episode 40 of The Video Essay Podcast, which features a conversation with Evelyn Kreutzer, a film scholar and video essayist based in Berlin.
Heading into the new year, I am also hoping to grow The Video Essay Podcast’s YouTube page! Please consider subscribing:
Have something you would like featured in this section? Email me! willdigravio[at]gmail.com.
Calls for Video Essays
MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture has issued a CFP, “Intersectional Selves: Feminist Self-Portraiture.” The journal welcomes proposal in the form of video essays (5-10 min + a brief supporting statement 800-1000 words). Learn more here ahead of the November 30, 2023 deadline.
The Essay Library seeks submissions for the sixth volume of their ongoing anthology series, this time centered around the theme of “Becoming Someone Else.” Learn more here ahead of the November 26, 2023 deadline. Watch their most recent video, “When Essay Met Library: A Rom-Com Collaboration.” The Essay Library also invites submissions for the collaborative project, “These Video Essays Do Not Exist | An April Fools' Day collaboration.” Learn more here ahead of the March 24, 2023 deadline.
The Jimmy Stewart Museum invites submissions for its Video Essay Showcase. No deadline is given, but works will screen at a virtual symposium in May 2024. Learn more here.
The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) calls for academic audio/visual work to be presented at IAMCR 2024, which will be held in Christchurch, New Zealand, from 30 June to 4 July 2024. Learn more here before the February 7, 2024 deadline.
New Publications
The most recent issue of Feminist Media Histories includes four new video essays by Barbara Zecchi, Celia Sainz, Terri Francis, Catherine Grant, and an introduction by Jennifer M. Bean. Watch and read here.
The Videography section of the journal ZfM: Zeitschrift für Medienwisschenschaft has released a second issue, centered on the politics of the video essay, featuring work by Susan Harewood, Rodrigo Campos, Barbara Zecchi, Elena Igartuburu, Jaap Kooijman, and Will DiGravio. Read the first and second issues (and lookout for the third!) here.
How Film Histories Were Made, a new open access book from University of Amsterdam Press, includes a chapter by Chiara Grizzaffi, “Audiovisual Film Histories for the Digital Age: From Found Footage Cinema to Online Videographic Criticism.” Read and download here.
In addition to the recent special issue, [in]Transition has published a special double issue, featuring ten video essays on a variety of subjects. Creators include: Richard Misek, Colleen Laird, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Samantha Close, Jacob Smith, Alan O’Leary, Oscar Mealia, Matthew Holtmeier, Adam Cook, Maarten Coegnarts, Drew Moron, Gregory Brophy and Shawn Malley. Watch here.
The latest issue of Screenworks launches with a video essay by Phoebe Hart. Watch and read here.
The latest rolling issue of MOVIE, Issue 11, includes new video essays by John Gibbs and Ian Garwood. Watch and read here.
Evelyn Kreutzer reflects on creating videos for Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary as part of an ongoing series of blog posts at Critical Studies in Television Online. Read here. David Martin-Jones has also written a reflection. Read here. And another by Lindsay Nelson! Read here.
New issue: The Journal of Film Preservation #109, November 2023.
More Notes
Catherine Grant and Rob Stone engaged in a conversation on the evolution of the scholarly video essay. Watch here.
Read this interview published in Notebook: “Nourished by Time: Facing the Future of Cinema with Locarno's Kevin B. Lee”
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