The Mediated City: Los Angeles or Oslo

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2004)

Oslo and Los Angeles have one striking thing in common. They are cities basically without grids. They are cities difficult to remember, and, for a foreigner, easy to get lost in. Oslo would perhaps be the most ungraspable city in the West, had it not been for its small size. However, in both cities one can use the hills as points of orientation: Holmenkollåsen or Hollywood Hills. The funny thing that always overwhelms me in Los Angeles is the uncanny feeling of never being able to see anything for the first time. The places you visit and the streets you travel have already been photographed and shown to you several times before you arrive. The most photographed city in the world, as they call it, can nevertheless surprise you, because the movies never tell the whole story – the city is too big.

Memories aren’t innocent. They are inflicted upon us. They are social, never wholly private. Memories are often experiences more or less fixated and turned into images, mental images. But how do they appear, and reappear? In a media saturated society such as ours, memory images may increasingly be images coming solely from different media (film, radio, television or the Internet). These images are mediated images; they are not experienced first-hand, directly, unmediated. Media images have become the key source for new mental images to such a degree that the mental images we recollect aren’t necessarily lived images, but received images. Several documentary filmmakers have looked into this phenomenon. I want to focus on two filmmakers who have turned this contemporary media dilemma into the driving force of their films. They were both born in 1943, and both have lived most of their lives in a city they try to understand: Jan Knutzen and his Oslo and Thom Andersen and his Los Angeles. They have chosen two different strategies. Andersen uses disenchantment; Knutzen uses re-enchantment. While Andersen seeks to go behind the images to something more real, a more authentic memory, Knutzen seem to look upon media images as magical, as a crucial part of childhood itself.

Marcel Proust writes in his celebrated novel In Search of Time Remembered about how a strange encounter with a thing, a smell or a taste may suddenly induce one with what he calls an involuntary memory of a past event. This kind of sudden memory is actually closer to forgetting than to memory. That is, it may be truer to what really was, than a conscious, voluntary memory. Movies tend to turn this logic upside down. Movies or newsreels may replace or become mixed with our own memory of the event and install us in a situation of a double exposure in between memory and forgetting. This can develop into a condition where one’s identity becomes so discombobulated as to replace one’s own history with the history of mediated memories. This happens more than ever in our media saturated society. And can you imagine growing up in the most media saturated places of them all, Los Angeles, the film capital of the world?

Los Angeles Plays Itself

The filmmaker Thom Andersen is well known among filmmakers in the States for his highly original compilation films about movie history. He has made one of the nicest films ever about one of the forefathers of cinema, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974), and a social history of cinema together with the legendary film historian Noël Burch, Red Hollywood (1996), but his most famous film is about his relationship to Los Angeles. The almost three hour long film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary when it was first screened in 2003.[i] This grand compilation film looks at how Los Angeles, according to Andersen, has disappeared behind the images the city’s film industry has produced. Paradoxically, in an effort to try to find the city where he has lived most of his life he creates a movie about Los Angeles exclusively based on found footage from more or less well-known movies set in Los Angeles. But he looks at them in a different way. He intercuts between outtakes from perhaps as many as 200 feature films produced in Los Angeles. The film is actually a long film essay on what the images has done to Los Angeles. Andersen’s voice-over is dark and monotonous, calm, in contrast to the wild playfulness of the images that accompanies him, and early on we sense a melancholia on behalf of a hometown lost and displaced by the film industry.

In the opening of the film we see a spectacular image of LA’s freeway system from Pushover (1954). “This is the city, Los Angeles, California,” the voice-over tells us. He then cuts to images of the city shot from Griffith Park overlooking the city taken from He walked by night (1948) before we go on to Nocturne (1946) where we enter the RKO-studios. “They make movies here; I live here,” Andersen tells us. Immediately we sense a conflict between these two activities: movie-making and living. Do these two practices complement each other or are they detrimental to each other? This is a key topic in Andersen’s collage movie. What happens to your memory when the images from movies gradually become more vivid and ubiquitous than your own memory images? We see images from The Strip (1954) panning over Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard, the Strip, and he goes on:

I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it is not easy: the city is big; the image is small.

We see the beautiful Jenny Wright rising out of a car in Out of Bounds (1986) in front of a tall building. “Movies are vertical, at least when they are projected on a screen.” Then, a pan of the vast city of Los Angeles on a smoggy day taken from Hickey & Boggs (1972). “The city is horizontal, except for what we call Downtown.” The way Andersen pronounces “Downtown” indicates his dislike for this area as it is now. We see police cars chasing down the streets in Downtown from The Glimmer Man (1996). “Maybe that is why the movies love Downtown more than we do.” Here we have an implied battle between the desires of “the movies” and a “we”, we who live here. The movies commodify the city: “If it [Downtown] isn’t the site of the action, they try to stick the high rise towers in the back of the shot.” He intercuts between They Live (1988) and Out of Bounds. Then we see a helicopter shot slowly approaching the beauty of the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in California in The Thirteenth Floor (1999), before the camera glides vertically above the skyscrapers and watch the city streets in a bird’s eye view. Andersen explains: “The movies have some advantages over us, they can fly through the air; we must travel by land. They exist in space; we live and die in time.” We are confronted by the dramatic music and the lonely streets of Downtown taken from The Blade (1998). “So why should I be generous?” he asks. We cut to George C. Scott looking over the city in The New Centurions (1972). “Of course, I know movies aren’t about places; they’re about stories. If we notice the location, we are not really watching the movie.” Then, a cut to a medium close-up of a mean-looking Takeshi Kitano staring at us with the LA-skyline in the background from Brother (2001). “Movies burry their traces, choosing for us what to watch – then moving onto something else.” This aspect of a fictional geography is a returning topic in Andersen’s critique of the LA-movie. Suddenly, we see the nervous-looking gunman, Bobby Shy, carrying his restless rifle in the streets of Downtown in 52 Pick-Up (1986), before we cut to images of people jumping off the high rises in The Blade and The Million Dollar Hotel (2001). Movies direct our attention toward plot specific incidents. As we see Gena Rowlands glancing out of a taxi car window in Night on Earth (1991) Andersen reveals his strategy:

“They [the movies] do the work of our voluntary attention, so we must suppress that faculty as we watch. Our involuntary attention must come to the fore. But what if we watch with our involuntary attention instead of letting the movies direct us? If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations? And what if suspense is nothing but another alienation effect? Isn’t that what Hitchcock taught?

And we see thousands of lonely cars on the freeway at night from Safe (1995). Thom Andersen's project is critical in the sense that he wants to disenchant movies. If he can avoid the pragmatics of suspense he won’t be alienated, he believes. Interestingly, Andersen goes back to one of our very earliest written theories on film. In the book The Photoplay from 1916 Huge Münsterberg draws an important distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention. We may voluntarily listen to a bird sing, but a backfiring car may demand our involuntary attention. In one, the impetus comes from the mind, while in the other the stimulus comes from an external source. Movies engage our involuntary attention, according to Münsterberg, while an analytical gaze would rely solely on a voluntary attention. Andersen’s elaboration may be a bit confusing, but his point is clear. Rather than being controlled by the rhetoric of a narrative, Andersen instead wants us to watch movies with our voluntary attention. He wants to redirect the attention away from the narrow paths of a plot-line, to consciously see elsewhere, to rediscover the unseen and accidental. He wants to analyze the contingencies in the frame and perhaps let a forgotten past come to the fore as a “documentary revelation.” He doesn’t like high-concept movies that are licensed to do whatever they want to the city, its geography and its specificities.

Gradually in his long compilation film an alternative Los Angeles film canon takes shape. He seems to enjoy the way early film noir unintentionally reveal the seedy charms of Bunker Hill in old Downtown Los Angeles as it was before it became completely renovated and transformed into a spectacular high-rise park dictated by corporate capital, and before the automobile industry closed down all trams. For these reasons he finds Mildred Pierce (1945) and Double Indemnity (1944) interesting, and films by European directors in Los Angeles such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) seem to approach the cynicism of Los Angeles in ways more critical than what is comme il faut. His favorites above all, are the directors who document the city from below, from the point of view of the ghettos like the blacks in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) or like the displaced Native Americans in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961). Ultimately; there are movies that lie about Los Angeles and movies that momentarily reveal its essence.

The unreliable memory

While Andersen’s enlightenment program is to disenchant the movies, the Norwegian compilation film director Jan Knutzen attempts a more daring project. He seeks to re-enchant the movies to come closer to something magical, memories of childhood. Knutzen is one of Norway’s few true compilation filmmakers concerned with the history of the moving image. He is one of the country’s most prolific film essayists. His production spans from the 1960s and up until today, and consists of over a dozen documentary films, but only his last nine films are - strictly speaking - personal essay films. They are characterized by the use of found footage, mostly taken from newsreels and Norwegian feature films from the 1940s through the 1970s, as well as one film about his fascination for photography (Notes on Photography, 2007) and another about his collection of cameras (The Camera Museum, 1997). Three of his essay films have won international awards: Funkis (1993), Boplicity (1994) and Kunstens møte med filmen (The Art’s Encounter with Film, 1993). While the latter film deals with the montage and other artistic techniques, there are also portraits of the island Svalbard which is a Norwegian protectorate with a Soviet owned coal mine and portraits of artists such as Lars Hertervig, but most of his films portray the city where he has lived most of his life, the Norwegian capital Oslo, through war and peace. His fascination for the old theater on Karl Johan and the old Tivoli neighborhood that was torn down in the 1950s is a recurring theme, and so is the growing awareness of a new and modern lifestyle connected to jazz, fashion and TV-watching. All his films are mostly in black and white, the found footage is accompanied by music, mostly jazz or popular music from the 1950s, and a distinct voice-over written by Knutzen and usually read by the actor Per Christensen.

While Andersen’s voice over is geared toward enlightenment, pedagogy and social critique, seen from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, Knutzen’s narrator is more essayistic in an open and questioning way. Here is little certitude. He seems rather to seek out unnamable insights and confrontations with images of his childhood, which aren’t as of yet dissolved into meanings and conveyable knowledge. He goes below or beyond knowledge and rather toward the presence of an experience or an illumination. These magical moments in his films are perhaps closer to what Walter Benjamin would call allegorical images, that is, images that can reveal or redeem a certain lost moment in history without necessarily having the qualities of a documentary evidence.

One of the few films translated into English, is his personal essay-film, Funkis from 1993. It is about his childhood in Oslo, or more exactly, how to address your own city through images and memory. The clips bring out certain issues of media and memory. It opens with newsreel images captured before the director was born. We see people leaving their office building; an elegant reference to one of the first films in history, Auguste and Louis Lumière’s La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895). The images are simple and straight-forward, but still, the voice-over plunges us into incertitude. He narrates:

The pictures were taken a couple of years before I was born. They really have nothing to do with me. But I remember the people in the streets looking this way. The clothes they wore were different from what we see nowadays. Time had a completely different rhythm – or am I just imagining that?[ii]

After this introductory remark the film’s opening credits appear. The narrator has in other words implanted a grain of uncertainty already in the incipit. Is the narrator unreliable or is he simply trying to be as honest as possible? I think the narrator invites his viewer to take part in a series of questionings of time and memory. He remembers things but at the same time he doubts his own memory of how it was. The documentary newsreel footage comes in as external memory aid, they become our memory, and at the same time they shape our memory of what it was really like. Documentary newsreels tend to project reality as it was, because they testify through their photochemical reproduction of life as it really was. Seeing these historical pictures is, for us and for the director, like confronting your own memory with a media memory of a certain past. This is explicitly addressed in Jan Knutzen’s voice-over. He regards this take as useful because it reveals the rhythm of a certain age, but then he retorts, “or am I just imagining that?” The dialectic between memory, imagination and film is a key issue in this film. It is like an essayistic exercise in confrontation between perception, memory, imagination and the actual film clips.

The images are taken from 18 newsreels and 8 fiction films. The newsreels and the fiction films are both viewed for their documentary qualities, but significantly, they are also viewed for their imaginative and dreamlike qualities. The difference is itself questioned constantly. These clips are from Filmavisen (The Norwegian News Films), originally screened at the Palassteatret on Karl Johan where the shopping mall Paleet is now. The newsreels were called ”Ukerevyen” (The Weekly Review), and were produced by Norsk Film AS, directed by Erik Hurum from 1945 to 1963.

A Secret World

Significant sections of the film are shown from the point of view of a child. Scenes are analytically slowed down or arrested in the middle of motion, like the clip of the ice dancer Marit Henie in the middle of a pirouette. These analytical arrests of images do not exist in Andersen’s film. Knutzen seems to allow the composition of the images, their speed and transitions, follow even more closely the narrator’s hesitations and fascinations. The arrest of the beautiful Marit Henie on the ice allows the viewer to be equally fascinated by the dance and by the camera’s capture of a spectacle and by the analytical arrest done in the reedit of the rushes. The Henie take is intercut to a children’s carousel. The associative jump-cut is almost surrealistic. The narrator follows: “the meaning for us children is that everything should turn around while we wait.” The soundtrack is from the radio program “While we wait” which was broadcasted in the hours before the kids were allowed to open their Christmas presents. This is followed up by a cascade of rushes where things rotate: the membranes of loudspeakers in commercials, his father’s hands working on ceramic bowls, commercials for nylon stockings, the huge clocks on the Thorsted building, a circling table in an interior etc. These images direct our attention toward a nausea and dizziness, which is characteristic of this time, according to the narrator. In these rapid montage sequences the film compilation seems to mimic the saturation of new merchandises and images that overwhelmed and gradually transformed the average citizen into the media age of the leisure class in the post-war decades.

The child’s perspective isn’t straight-forward in Funkis, it is rather narrated in an indirect or mixed way as with Marcel Proust. The child’s perspective is mixed with say a belated reflection of some kind. There is in other words a complex temporal position in the narrator’s voice, rather than a simple point of view. This opens up for temporal displacements and reflexivity. This is a narrative with several instances interpolated and entangled. This variability in the voice justifies or imposes distinctions and contrasts that add to the multimodality of the impressions conveyed. Gradually the child’s view of the world becomes a cinematic view of the world. The children watch the world as if “half asleep, half dreaming,” we are told. This is actually Siegfried Kracauer’s definition of a movie theatre audience. Furthermore, for the children, the world of grown-ups passes by as “a constant flow of flickering silhouettes,” Knutzen prompts. The world as seen from a child’s perspective turns out enigmatic and dreamlike, in the sense that they do not really know what is happening. The adult’s world is like a secret world. He intercuts between several Norwegian feature films, not for the sake of revealing their lies or lack of coherence, as Andersen perhaps would, but to pull out a particular fascination with the subjects. “It seems as if they [the grown-ups in these films] play an intricate game,” he says. A child’s sense of the world is nuanced in relation to their eager sense of expectation. They see the world through a veil of suspense, which is lost as we grow up. Knutzen seems to approach and embrace this moment of the veil. How is the world seen from this perspective? His magical interpolation of the voice of a child and his own mature reflection plays out all the possible intricacies of this. In this way his approach is very different from Andersen’s, who thinks that dramatic suspense is just a form of alienation. To Knutzen, suspense is not simply an industrial management of attention, but a specific mode of being in relation to the world that can also perhaps be a critical tool in relation to history and the movies’ relation to this history. The child’s way of watching the world as if it was a film enables Knutzen to come up with new perspectives on Norwegian film history. He splices together fragments of newsreels and fiction films to create a temporal collage analyzed not as entertainment or information in the ordinary sense, but as signs witnessing a certain truth, a certain perspective.

The waspie waistline of Sonja Wigert

Many of the feature films Knutzen directs our attention to in Funkis are unfortunately only available in the film archives. These films were generally slaughtered by the critics when they premiered during the 1940s and 50s. This is not Ingmar Bergman, they said. Knutzen told me in an interview: “Only very few people were able to see these films, back when they originally were projected on the big screen.” To me, it has been a revelation to go through Knutzen’s list of films. The film Den hemmelighetsfulle leiligheten, 1948 (The Mysterious Apartment), by Tancred Ibsen, is truly fantastic. Knutzen uses a particular scene from this film, but again, he is not interested in the story or the plot, but reads it as part of a document of the times. In a significant montage we move from a newsreel shot of a beauty contest where we see half naked ladies in swimwear into the interior of The Mysterious Apartment. In this fictional scene we follow the Norwegian film diva Sonja Wigert raise from her chair to lustfully embrace her new lover. When she bends over to kiss him on the other side of his writing desk the image is frozen, and the narrator tells us:

The waspie waistline of Sonja Wigert was a signal – The New Look. The New Look was a bomb released by the house of Dior. The target zone was the corset industry. The secret behind this dramatically shaped woman’s figure was soon discovered by us children. Time was obsessed by this intense version of Woman. She was the embodiment of time waiting breathlessly and femininity in a compressed form.

Rather than elaborating on this obsession verbally, Knutzen let’s a montage sequence of female figures in corsets circle before our eyes in combination with insertions of close-ups of legs in nylon stockings. We understand that these images are not simply representations, but a montage mimicking the dizziness induced upon a child who had access to the secret boudoir of the young mothers at the time. The image is in other words representative rather than a representation, mythological rather than real. The image figures as an image of a time and a certain sense of time rather than as an image of a specific woman or a specific film. The way Knutzen analyzes the sequences of Sonja Wigert in The Mysterious Apartment is in other words not simply a reading of the rhetoric of casting and costumes, but an attempt at approaching that specific sense of a time lost and perhaps regained in a moment of dizziness.

Coda

In an almost unnoticeable way Knutzen’s melancholic essay collage may remind us of Walter Benjamin’s or Siegfried Kracauer’s style of reflecting upon the world as enigmatic. He tries to get to that other side of history which is a living, experienced sense of history, where traditional film history or analysis would only present a deflated image of the world, where meaning or the sense of a lived experience are evacuated, where things and images have become silent, dead, nothing but of the past. Knutzen restores the vigilant eye, or the allegorical gaze, as Walter Benjamin calls it, and is able to awaken a certain meaning. “Allegory views existence, as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation and ruin,” Benjamin writes. Knutzen’s montage of fragments turns the past into a present, a dreamlike present, under the child’s eye. The images and their representations are reread as enigmatic surfaces. Ultimately, this phenomenology of the surface is an exploration of superficialities of cultural ephemera and marginal domains. As viewers of Knutzen’s film essay we sometimes get the feeling that we will ultimately transcend this ephemera and reach a conclusion, something definitive, but we never do. He deals with a problem, rather than a solution. He creates constellational exercises in the confrontation with images. They activate less the film historian’s tone of certainty, and more the tone of the performative essay writer. Images and memory, the past and the present confront each other. The strange contingency it carries with it, launches another memory, which doubles the expression and reaches us as viewers on a deeper level. The filmmaker reanimates the archive and writes a history of time and its images (past as present, and present as past). The idiosyncrasies of an insignificant film scene become a sudden moment of historical revelation. Nevertheless, what Knutzen shares with us, is not certitude, but a living incertitude. He shares the unsharable, the inarticulate, the hidden somewhere in between memory, imagination and film. And this journey into the magic of a different historiography and a different aesthetic experience, is what both Knutzen with his re-enchantments and Andersen with his disenchantments exemplifies in two different but striking ways.

Notes

[i] Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself has unfortunately never been commercially released due to constant problems with Hollywood copyright holders, many of whom so far hasn’t accepted the fair use of the clips compiled in the film.

[ii] All translations from the film’s voice-over are taken from the English subtitles.

Originally printed in Wuxia 1, 2012