For most people, Los Angeles is a city understood first and foremost through cinema. Thom Andersen’s celebrated essay film turns that familiarity inside out, asking how Hollywood’s depictions have shaped our understanding of the real city. Composed almost entirely of film excerpts, Los Angeles Plays Itself reveals the vast distance between the physical city and its many cinematic doubles.

Over nearly three hours, Andersen moves effortlessly between architectural history, urban politics, and film analysis. Familiar landmarks become recurring actors, neighbourhoods are repeatedly transformed into anonymous backdrops, and modernist houses are cast with surprising consistency as the homes of villains. As Andersen observes, Hollywood often wages “a war against modern architecture,” assigning moral value to buildings as readily as it does to characters.

The project took four years to complete, in part because of the immense labour involved in assembling and organising hundreds of film clips into an argument about place, history, and ideology. Regarded as a foundational work of the contemporary essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself has become essential viewing not only for cinephiles but also for scholars of urban space and film historiography. It demonstrates that every city in cinema is also an interpretation, and that learning to watch films closely may also teach us to look differently at the world beyond the screen.

TW