Northwest Film Forum

A video essay depicting the city of Los Angeles through films that used its landscape as a backdrop, Los Angeles Plays Itself is the film that finally heralded Andersen as one of the finest working filmmakers in the world. Carefully weaving together footage from dozens of films made in or about the city, Anderson gradually builds his thesis about how Hollywood has represented—and misrepresented—its hometown. Surveying both well known (Chinatown, Blade Runner) and underappreciated (Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep) Los Angeles-set movies, Andersen employs his keen understanding of cinema and his native city to expand their definitions—and entertain his audience. Voted Best Documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice.

"Four Stars (Masterpiece rating): Compulsively watchable, endlessly quotable...It lies outside the mainstream because it lacks studio backing and distribution, yet it’s far too plainspoken and witty to qualify as esoteric or marginal. It’s an essay that qualifies as social history, as film theory, as personal reverie, as architectural history and criticism, as a bittersweet meditation on automotive transport, as a critical history of mass transit in southern California, as a wisecracking compilation of local folklore, as “a city symphony in reverse,” and as a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill and unchronicled lifestyles such as locals who walk or take buses." —Jonathan Rosenbaum

“Andersen’s film frees images from the yoke of instrumentality, revealing the city for what it is and allowing us to see what we otherwise cannot. It is at once theory and practice; not content to simply describe the new cinema, it embodies it… It teaches us how to see.” —Bright Lights Film Journal

"The most rambunctiously entertaining journey through the movies as we are ever likely to embark upon. It also plays like a history of Twentieth Century America as refracted through the movies." —Seattle Post Globe

"SW Pick: Outside of a film school, this is the best lecture—and architectural tour—you’re going to find about a misunderstood city that’s long overdue for its close-up." —Seattle Weekly

"Will enrich or outright transform your mode of thinking about moving pictures, space, history, and the city." —The Stranger