Notes on Los Angeles

George Clark
Thom Andersen Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003, still

In one unnervingly true sense, Los Angeles is the Middle West raised to flashpoint, the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolt against them colliding at critical mass under the palm trees. Out of it comes a cultural situation where only the extreme is normal, and the middle way is just the unused reservation down the centre of the freeway.

~ Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971

Mapping the various cultural movements, topographies and histories that have filtered through Los Angeles past and present has become an increasingly rich field. The city’s complex economy, population and geography are reflected in the diverse range of film and art that is produced and exhibited there. In May 2010 I spent a month in the city and started to explore its historical and contemporary film scenes prior to moving there later in the year. For someone like me used to London or European cities, Los Angeles is equal parts baffling and fascinating. Here I’ve assembled some notes on my experience of the city and the way I’ve started to try and understand it.

For a city built around and saturated by the cinema, films are surprisingly elusive guides to Los Angeles. But in recent years a new historiography of the city has emerged that reads the city with and through the films produced there, both in the commercial industries of Hollywood but also the many independent or, in David E. James’s term, ‘minor cinemas’ that have thrived there and existed in a complex relationship with the industry since its inception. As Thom Andersen notes in his essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)[1] “if we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.”[2] With this in mind my experience of Los Angeles and attempt to understand its cultural scenes was guided by the distinct readings of the city’s history and culture by these two theorists.

As well as Hollywood, Los Angeles has been home since the 1970s to the increasingly powerful pornographic film and video industries, indeed it is the underground pornographic film L.A. Plays Itself from which Thom Andersen takes the name of his film (although crucially he restores the city’s full name, rather than what he calls the city’s more common ‘derisive diminutive’). The original film by Fred Halsted was independently produced in 1972 and is closer to experimental cinema than commercial pornography. Described by Los Angeles based artist and Halsted champion William E. Jones, as “capturing the city as few other films could […] Halsted’s first film, has come to be regarded as a classic within the genre of gay porn.”[3] Halsted’s work is surprisingly symptomatic of Los Angeles cinema in the way it connects desperate groups, from contemporary artists such as Jones, to Chantal Akerman who funded her first film by stealing from the box-office during L.A. Plays Itself’s New York run in the 1970s[4], and lead to Andersen grouping Halsted amongst “experimental high tourist film-makers like [Roger] Corman, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol” who “discovered a pastoral arcadia near the heart of Los Angeles.”

These unusual groupings and complex cinematic connections are fascinatingly drawn out by David E. James in his book The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, a study of the many influential and pioneering film and video cultures that have existed in Los Angeles throughout the 20th century. James’s exploration is concerned with how “the different representations of the city […] have been determined by the specific spatialities that produced them.”[5] Both Andersen and James explore ways in which the films produced in the city can be explored in parallel with the city, as James notes:

Just as all avant-garde films allegorize the mode of their production and their situation in respect to the industry, telling the stories of how and for whom they are made, they also tell the story of where they were made, the story of their own spatiality. They document the spatialities in which they are set but also the spatialities in which they come into being, the geography and the specific local institutions it contains.[…] [T]he relationship between the way a city figures in a film and the way it figured in the filmmaking.[6]

The ‘minor cinemas’ that James celebrates are folded into the unusual fabric and special geography of the city and need to be approached in different ways. Los Angeles, as Andersen argues, is a city as much misunderstood by those who don’t live there as from those who do. Who then does know the city? For Andersen the answer is simple:

Only those who walk, only those who ride the bus. Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say, nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk. They claimed nobody takes the bus, until one day we all discovered that Los Angeles has the most crowded buses in the United States.[7]

Andersen’s new film, Get Out of the Car (2010) takes this statement to heart, as its very title suggests or perhaps demands, the film seeks to capture and pay attention to city and its complex and often unseen communities. I saw the film at CalArts where Andersen teaches. It is due to have its first UK screening at the upcoming London Film Festival in October, and will be shown publicly in Los Angeles at the Silent Movie Theatre, home of the excellent Cinefamily[8] on 19th August. The half-hour film is constructed around Los Angeles signage and various “unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks,” yet as Andersen can heard explaining off-screen to a passerby “its kind of a movie about absence” (only to get the reply “when you make a movie about something call me.”)

Still from Get Out Of The Car by
Thom Andersen, 2010

Dense and allusive, the film combines a rich array of music recorded in the city (recalling the brilliant fragmented soundtrack for Short Line Long Line, 1966-67) and snippets of interactions recorded while filming on the street. The images taken from all over the city are geographically determined by the cultural landmarks the film uses as its thematic and geographic locus. Landmarks vary from Harvey’s Broiler, which was demolished without a permit in 2007 and was once Southern California’s largest drive-in, to the Barrelhouse in Watts, the first rhythm and blues nightclub in USA, established in 1948. The significance of these lost monuments is spelt out by an anonymous voice off-screen “we lose a little bit of focus of what this really means for the community. It is as if I went to your community and took down your temple, I took down your church, that’s what we are talking about. These are sacred things and you are taking away our way of life.”

The film contrast abandoned or torn commercial signs with the murals and improvised signage for small businesses, reflecting though these temporary displays the cities many unseen migrant communities. The city’s strange juxtapositions are explicit in many of the home-made signs which often combine cultural and commercial iconography (from advertising murals with portrait of the pope to the macho illustration for ‘Rambo’s Taco Truck’). Many of the signs and murals, as with many communities and cultures in the city, have now disappeared. The fascination with even the most ephemeral of the city’s many lost sites is important in a city that discards its history so easily. As Andersen states “images of things that aren’t there any more mean a lot to those of us who live in Los Angeles, and practically nothing to everyone else, except perhaps when they represent things that have disappeared from urban centres everywhere, like drive-in restaurants or drive-in movies.”[9]

Restoring Los Angeles

The lost and the disappearing are a fundamental part of Los Angeles life and its transient communities and cultures. Even the cities most iconic architecture was generally not built to last and often is slowly collapsing or have been knocked down. In Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972)[10], a fascinating time-capsule of the city and Banham’s critical style, he visits Tiny Naylor Drive-in on Sunset Blvd (which unsurprisingly no longer exists) where Ed Ruscha recommends he should visit gas stations or “any kind of edifice that has to do with the car.” Ruscha qualifies his fascination with these ephemeral buildings with the same opaque wonder as his paintings: ”sometimes its takes longer to tear down an old building than it does to put up a new one.”

The impermanence of architecture by which to read the city’s rich history leaves it open to the influence of the most powerful of its cultural forces, namely the real estate and financial industry, leaving the many diverse communities to attempt to register themselves in only the most ephemeral manner – a street sign or temporary mural. Even the Hollywood sign, one of the cities key icons was recently saved from demolition by celebrity contributors.[11] The destruction of Los Angeles that is so often envisioned in Hollywood films is perhaps a way of recording the city’s temporary nature and its own failure to retain its own history.

Despite this apparent disregard for its history the city is home to a vibrant repertory film culture and many of America’s most progressive film archives. UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive, have both restored many neglected works and in recent years focused increasingly on experimental film. Ross Lipman, the archivist at UCLA produced the brilliant Kenneth Anger restorations and also helped reinstate various seminal independent Los Angeles films such as Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), a pivotal work in African American cinema and Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961) about native American community in historic Bunker Hill, which I saw at the Hammer Museum at an event to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of ethnic studies at UCLA. UCLA ran various courses to support independent filmmaking in the city, most important of which was the Ethno-Communications programme, which as James states “became the chief crucible for new ethnic cinemas”[12] in the late 60s and 70s and supported a whole generation of filmmakers including Haile Gerima, Sylvia Morales, Robert Nakamura (now director of the Ethno-Communications Centre at UCLA) and Ben Caldwell among many others. Black independent filmmaking was particularly strong at UCLA and the group referred to as the L.A. Rebellion, including previously mentioned filmmakers Burnett, Caldwell and Gerima together with Larry Clark, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry whose iconic film Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), about a struggling unemployed African American father in Los Angeles and shot by Burnett, is currently being restored by Lipman at UCLA.

 

At the Academy Film Archive, Mark Toscano has preserved countless avant-garde films, including those of Stan Brakhage, whose entire output is housed at the Academy. Brakhage was celebrated with two screenings by LA Film Forum[13] in June of the directors rare sound films to coincide with the release of By Brakhage 2 the Criterion Collections brilliant DVD set drawn from Academy materials (a copy which was won at the post-screening raffle by none other than William E. Jones!). Other recent Academy projects include restorations of Morgan Fisher’s films and those of the largely unknown Chris Langdon, a CalArts graduate who made a few films with Fred Worden while at college (including the great Now, You Can Do Anything, 1972, a glimpse of 70s Californian teenage surf idolatry made on the day of Picasso’s death, which was recently shown at Oberhausen) and assisted Jack Goldsmith and John Baldessari while also completing over 40 films of her own, leading Andersen to claim that Landgon is “the most important unknown filmmaker in the history of the Los Angeles avant-garde.” When I visited Toscano he showed me Gary Beydler’s brilliant newly preserved Hand Held Day (USA, 1974) a remarkable landscape film of striking beauty and simplicity. The film juxtaposes two different temporalities and two different spaces, as it is shot frame by frame filming light changes on a mountain range seen in the reflection in a mirror held in front of the camera. It is one of three similarly economic landscape films he produced in 1974, the others being Mirror and Pasadena Freeway Stills.

Through a city wide grant from the Getty Foundation, these excavations will continue as part of the Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 project which involves over 18 museums and arts organisations in the city. It is an immense project designed to map and explore post-war art in Los Angeles and Los Angeles Film Forum will mount an extensive screening series as well as a conference in November and are preparing a oral history publication for later on in the year, all as part of the Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945 – 1980 project[14].

Beyond the City

These attempts to capture or restore the city’s past in archival, curatorial or historical projects are also informed by Los Angeles geographic position on the west coast and the Californian desert. The city, as people are constantly aware, is built against the odds on the edge of an arid desert, most of its vegetation (especially its iconic palm trees) and water are imported or channelled into the city from outside. Many artists have explored this unusual geography, the scale and complexity of its many different regions. Filmmakers such as James Benning and Babette Mangolte have made key works about the Californian landscape, its suburbia, agriculture and the bordering Nevada desert, home of the Wild West and key works of Land Art. While in Los Angeles I saw two vastly different works which brought the desert into the city in radically different ways.

Laida Lertxundi, Footnote to a House of Love, 2007, still

At the reading series Mommy, Mommy [15], held periodically in downtown and organised by Les Figues Press,[16] Los Angeles based Spanish artist Laida Lexthundi [17] showed her film Footnote to a House of Love (2007) in a programme including readings by locally based writers. Shot in an abandoned house on the edge of the Californian desert, the film is tightly constructed from a series of interconnected tableaux which play with sound image relationships and on and off screen space. The Californian desert, is a arid playground, an open canvas for a series of gestures or rituals, bodies are framed within the abandoned house or against the square of a white sheet. Music comes in and out, from a vintage cassette player or performed live in the house. Seen alongside her new film My Tears Are Dry (2009) a beautifully poised melancholy tribute to Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966), her work seek to explore the ephemeral sense of place, space that is specific but malleable and elusive. One of the remarkable things about Baillie’s film now, its elegant single tracking shot along a fence, is the way it evokes a specific place and time, the same is true of John Baldessari’s 70s films, which despite themselves, are remarkable for presenting another image of Los Angeles through glimpses of sun soaked streets and rundown flats. Lexthundi’s films operate through minimal means in order to capture California’s sunny isolation, permeated with the weight however apparently absent, of history. Her films resonate and comment on what James described as “the loneliness that only Los Angeles allows.”[18]

In a completely different and a satisfyingly excessive register was the monumental new project by Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, realised with the public arts organisation West of Rome[19]. A Voyage of Growth and Discovery is the artists’ first collaboration and first project in the city for over 10 years. Presented at Kelly’s gigantic studio, the Farley Building in Eagle Rock, east of the city, the project filled the warehouse space with its enveloping soundscape (available on CD as Dance Beats for Baby), dynamic lighting, five projection screens and numerous steel sculptures, not to mention an abandoned VW van and a line of porter loos. The work depicts the existential journey of Baby IKKI (Michael Smith’s man-baby persona), who attends the annual four day rave in the Black Rock desert in Nevada, and as the title suggest embarks on an enlightening journey. Oddly juxtaposed with the festival revellers, Baby IKKI moves through the temporary structures, the unusual cars, the different dance tents and events that populate the desert sometimes interacting, other times observing, rendering the festival’s non-conformity as a futile gesture of defiance, that despite its scale and energy is remarkable for its insignificance, especially as its enveloped in a dust cloud on the final day.

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, 2010, installation view at West of Rome, Los Angeles

The project encompasses both artists ambivalent relationship to alternative culture and especially Kelly’s fascination with obscure rituals that emerge when popular culture is filtered through society. Here in the desert Kelly and Smith find a suitably grand arena to enact their own critique of the aspirations of self organisation and personal growth that underpins this techno-hippie free-for-all. Like with Smith’s New York persona, Mike, a pathologically banal struggling artist, their critique operates through an attempt to take things on their own terms, to endure and revel in their face value, or in this case, seeking to ‘improve’ on the original though grotesque recreations and embellishments. The brilliant sculptures, installed in the warehouse rather than the barren desert, are strange skeletal forms, familiar but stripped of their use, or so obsessively constructed as to be almost nauseating, such as the huge quilt made of abandoned teddy bears underneath the Fulleresque geodesic dome.

David E. James describes films by artists in Los Angeles as historically having been isolated individual forays with few coherent interrelations among themselves or with other avant-garde film traditions.”[20] Work produced in the city often found unusual allegiances with later generations or artists in other areas, yet was often produced in isolation, such as the substantial and individual body of work by Chick Strand. Paradoxically part of the fascination of the arts and film culture in Los Angeles is how it doesn’t conform to traditions from elsewhere that are often oppressive and arbitrary in their very configuration. What is striking about Los Angeles is how diverse its history is, the sheer range of work produced in the city and the parallel cultures that have existed alongside each other at different times. It is very much in this mode that contemporary practice is characterised here, the various currents and connections between past and present and inside and outside of the city continue to filter through new work yet artists have an unusual degree of autonomy. For a novice to the city its these irregularities that are refreshing, the unusual potentials, the bizarre historical one-off works, and chance encounters between different cultures that make the city such a rich place to explore.

[1] https://lux.org.uk/collection/works/los-angeles-plays-itself

[2] From narration of Los Angeles Plays Itself (USA, 2003).

[3] ‘Halsted Plays Himself,’ Artforum, 23 Aug 2008, http://artforum.com/film/id=20966

[4] Stuart Comer, “William E. Jones,” Tank, vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer 2008) pp. 162-163. “She told me that in 1972 she had worked in the ticket booth of New York’s 55th Street Playhouse. Her co-worker […] taught her the useful skill of stealing from the box office.  During her tenure as ticket girl, Chantal managed to skim $4000 from the receipts. At that time, the sum was enough to fund the short La Chambre and Hotel Monterey, her first long film. L. A. Plays Itself was the film playing during the entire period of her lucrative job. In an important sense, Fred Halsted helped Akerman at a formative stage of her career.”

[5] The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005

[6] Ibid

[7] From narration of Los Angeles Plays Itself (USA, 2003).

[8] The programme is showing as part of the ‘Don’t Knock The Rock 2010’ festival founded by filmmaker Allison Anders and live music curator Tiffany Anders. http://www.cinefamily.org/calendar/thursday.html

[9] From narration of Los Angeles Plays Itself (USA, 2003).

[10] This BBC documentary was directed by Julian Cooper and can be watched online here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1524953392810656786#

[11] Most famous among the contributors was Hugh Hefner who has actually saved the sign twice –  http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/27/hollywood-sign-hugh-hefner

[12] The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005

[13] http://www.lafilmforum.org/

[14] More details on this project, including screenings, the aural history project and the conference scheduled for November 12-14 visit the dedicated Alternative Projections blog here: http://www.lafilmforum.org/index/Blog/Blog.html

[15] http://mommymommyreadingseries.blogspot.com/

[16] http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/index.php

[17] http://laidalertxundi.net

[18] The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005

[19] http://www.westofrome.org/

[20] The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005

 

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