EVENT: Guckst du Kinoklub - Los Angeles Plays Itself

Our monthly movie nights “Guckst du” goes into the third round, organised by Tanja Bresan.

Tanja Bresan is a film enthusiast with a master degree in cultural management, lives and works in Berlin. Tanja is eager to explore and show (or program) movies that are dealing with sustainability and circular economy principles.

We show films on the topics such as environment, human interaction with nature, sustainable energies, social issues. Movies, feature or documentaries that forces us to question our actions and ruminate our place on Planet Earth.

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This Guckst Du Edition will screen:

Architecture on Film:

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) - Thom Andersen

A 169-minute documentary on the way LA has been represented in the movies using clips from more than 100 films ranging from the very familiar to the unknown called Los Angeles Plays Itself. 

It takes us to the steps up which Laurel and Hardy struggled with the piano in The Music Box, examines the way the Bradbury Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and Union Station have been exploited, and how the city has functioned as background and as character. 

It is an urban essay on the disappearance and changing tastes of one specific architecture in one very specific city.

The Documentary shows that derivative styles once taken to represent falsity and bad faith now stand in for sincerity and old-fashioned values, while modernism, formerly thought of as liberal and progressive, now provides the domestic ambience for the cruel, the criminal, the exploitative. 

One of cinema’s most intelligent and entertaining essays, it charts Hollywood’s ‘war against modern architecture,’ alongside an examination of the starring roles certain buildings have played across multiple movies. From Blade Runner to Laurel and Hardy; a keen look at the truths and fictions a life in the movies has woven into LA’s urban fabric.

Watch the trailer here

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About the director:

Thom Andersen (born 1943, Chicago) is a filmmaker, film critic and teacher.
Andersen’s film Los Angeles Plays Itself won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, was voted best documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice Critic’s Poll and was voted one of the Top Ten Films of the Decade by critics at Cinema Scope.

In 2010 he completed Get Out of the Car, a portrait of signs and abandoned spaces set to Los Angeles music. In spring 2012, Andersen took part in the three-month exposition of Whitney Biennial.