Reimagining place

Abstract: In the beginning of the 2004 video essay Los Angeles plays itself, the Hollywood critical film theorist Thom Andersen states ‘The city is big. The image is small’. What Andersen refers to, as a long-time citizen of Los Angeles, is the way Hollywood tends to create a romanticised and narrowed image of its city through film. The three-hour long documentary by Andersen is built up mainly by the use of clips from different Hollywood movies through its history of filmmaking. By representing and reproducing these clips, he examines the ways the city has been depicted through decades. Utilizing and disassembling these misinterpreted images and stories, Andersen creates his own story which further reveals what he believes to be the truth. What interests me in Andersen’s case is the way he works with a city and its architecture, displaying the embedded social and political structures, by twisting the perspectives through the use and repetition of these historically recognizable clips. When he takes something that already exists and alters its presence or meaning, other questions might be evoked, making it more visible by exposing its opposites.