week 13 THE CITY IN FILM

The city as portrayed on film has one of the most important relationships to architecture. Specifically the city walk - a definitive aspect of neorealism - allows viewers to transcend the role of voyeur and become a voyageur, engaging the city in a psycho-geographic landscape, according to film historian Giuliana Bruno.  The physicality of architectural texture within the city engages us as voyageurs in an emotive sense. Bruno asserts that the city walk is "haptically driven" and that our "sensory spatiality of film...occurs through an engagement with touch and movement."  Filmic city walks are the idea of the flaneur incarnate.

L.A. Plays Itself (2003) is a fascinating 3 hour documentary made by film critic and professor Thom Andersen which discusses the role of the most photographed city in the world - Los Angeles -  as a hazy world "where the relation between representation and reality gets muddled."  He discusses over 200 films that were filmed in Los Angeles - some films actually being set in the city and many utilizing Los Angeles to portray another place.

Out of all those films, one movie that Andersen didn't mention, which I think is important, was Antoine Fuqua's Training Day (2001), a movie shot in Los Angeles which to me represents the quintessential perception of late-90's gang-riddled Los Angeles and the historic conflicts those gangs have had with the L.A.P.D. The most important aspect of the film is that the two main characters' "office" is in Alonzo Harris's souped up Monte Carlo - so we see sprawling Los Angeles and its integral suburbs from the seat of a car, exactly as everyone who lives there see's it. This is a "city walk" in a car through a city that is historically defined by car travel. The film travels from the empty, posh restaurants in downtown Los Angeles where corrupt lawmen meet to the excruciatingly poor, overcrowded neighborhoods such as the Imperials Courts housing project in Watts where resident gangs provide vigilante protection against intruders. The films strives to achieve a realistic depiction of gang violence and class struggle within Los Angeles but some of that realism is lost on the casting of supporting roles and bit parts with actual West Coast rappers and hip hop artists such as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Macy Gray which are too recognizable.  However, this being L.A. - maybe recognizable celebrities in the cast are appropriate.

Andersen claims that he dislikes most movies that are based in Los Angeles because they lack the respect to acknowledge where it came from or what the real history is. To him, Los Angeles is "a series of villages that grew together. The villages became neighborhoods and their boundaries blurred, joined together by a mutual disdain for the city's historic center - maybe that's why the movies turn their backs on the their city of origin - they claim to come from Hollywood, not from Los Angeles."  This movie could be considered the exception to that sentiment, as the story, the imagery are most definitely from Los Angeles and not Hollywood. A great interview with Thom Andersen can be found here.