Thom Andersen Keeps Playing With L.A.

By The Style Notebook

Thom Andersen recently landed in Hollywood North, and we like to think that we were his first phone call welcoming him back to the city: it’s the director’s first time here since Los Angeles Plays Itself played TIFF back in 2003.

Andersen’s first filmic treatment of L.A. catalogued the city’s various appearances in movies throughout the twentieth century, from Double Indemnity to The Big Lebowski. His second film, Get Out of the Car, which screened on October 10 as part of TIFF’s Wavelengths program—a staple for avant-garde filmgoers—is in many ways a response to his earlier work.
Andersen’s fascination with Los Angeles pervades Get Out of the Car, but instead of the glitzy, glamourous façade of Hollywood, he proffers a glimpse of the kitschy, decaying wasteland over-populated by empty adverts and vibrant Latino frescoes of Jesus Christ—frame-by-frame and song-by-song. The soundtrack features American standards, popular Latino music, and even some Frank Zappa.
A lyrical film of sorts, Get Out of the Car does for L.A.’s urban eyesores what Bruce Baille’s Castro Street did for San Francisco’s industrial zone—and it’s just as delightful to watch.
When you first decided to make Get Out of The Car, did you envision it as a continuation of the same themes you developed in Los Angeles Plays Itself?
Thom Andersen: Yes, in a way I saw it as a response to Los Angeles Plays Itself. I complained in there about people’s efforts to represent the city, so I figured I’d make a little movie that represented my view of the city and what I liked about the city. In that sense it’s a response to the first. I call Los Angeles Plays Itself a city symphony in reverse; the new film is just a plain old city symphony.

How did you begin to plan out what landmarks, locations, and ephemera would be included in this city symphony? Was there much premeditation or was it something that sort of just emerged after hours of miscellaneous shooting?
Actually, the original idea was to make a short, little movie dealing with billboards, which always appealed to me. I always thought they were very beautiful. I guess my original intention was to make a film that would destroy my reputation as a filmmaker.
It all started in a very casual way, just going around the city and seeing things that interested me. Also, the idea of representing a musical history of the city and a survey of aspects of the city’s popular music; from there it sort of just grew into something else. You know, it was going to be an eight-minute film, originally.
The City Symphonies have often been regarded by historians as documentations of places, people, and things. Do you think this film shores up the belief that film and photography encapsulate the object placed in front of the camera?
One of the ideas I’ve always been interested in is memorializing places in Los Angeles’ cultural history of which there is no trace. The city has no real official markers, so I decided to make up my own markers and just put them there. These markers are modeled around old signs used for boxing matches, and more recently, for concerts, which you can find on fences and telephone poles. I actually used the same company to make the markers that I use in the film.

You’re not the first filmmaker or artist to express a fascination with advertisements, signs, and letters, and investigating their connotative and denotative capacities. I think of Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma or the Wonder Bread sequence at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. In your mind, are there any precursory texts or artists that inform your work?
For me, the most obvious references that I was aware of and that originally stood in the way of me making this film were the billboard photographs of Walker Evans and the most abstract, ruined billboards of Aaron Siskind.
Why did these works stand in the way of you making this film?
Well, you know I thought people would say that I was copying them.
Has anyone said that?
If they do, they do; I don’t care. It’s just something that I liked and I wanted to share with people.
You’ve photographed the refuses of our modern society. Is that what you wanted to do?
Well, not entirely. There are definitely many objects that are in various states of decay and there are a number of things that aren’t. A good example are the religious paintings and the series of Christ, the crucifixion, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. In those paintings, you see different stages of painting—some are fresh, some are defaced by graffiti, some have faded away. I try to show stages of this development.
These paintings, as well as a large part of the soundtrack, are all aspects of the Latino culture. Was this spotlight on Latino culture something that was always integral to the making of this film?
Latinos are the largest ethnic group in the city and county of Los Angeles. I wanted to make a film that would reflect a reality and that would also give the sense of the immigrant experience, and the Latino immigrant experience. This is why a large part of the film is in Spanish, and to a certain extent, in order to fully comprehend the film, it’s necessary to speak both English and Spanish. A lot of the music is Mexican music by Los Tigres Del Norte, who are kind of the tribunes of the immigrant population. Their songs speak more eloquently than any other music I know about that experience of being caught between two cultures.
Article by Justine Iaboni/The Style Notebook.
Stills from Get Out of the Car courtesy of TIFF.