Thom Andersen: ‘I became a little monster’
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Version 0 of 1. Thom Andersen is an unusual film-maker. Not only does he believe in nostalgia – a bogey word to many artists who see it as conservative or reactionary – he likes to talk about the value of “militant nostalgia”. “Its original meaning was ‘a longing for home’,” he explains. “But it’s also about values from the past that have been lost. In a socialist country like the Soviet Union, workers were told to forgo all of theirs in the name of the immediate future. In the end they had nothing left of the better life.” Is he nostalgic for America? “Sure! For a time before those values that people have since come to accept: state torture, the dismantling of social security … ” Andersen, who was born in Chicago in 1943 but has lived much of his life in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the prestigious California Institute of the Arts, is one of the US’s foremost film essayists. Painstakingly assembled over many years, his slender but influential body of work – often made collaboratively – fuses history, geography, trenchant political analysis and visual criticism with a forensic rigour closer in spirit to that of European directors such as Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky than the more amiable, sometimes folksy documentaries of prominent compatriots Errol Morris, Michael Moore or Ross McElwee. His earliest films – among them Melting (1965), which examines a sundae’s migration from solidity to waste, as well as --- -------- (Rock and Roll Movie), a heady and hyper-kinetic evocation of the emergent rock culture in LA – were witty, formally ambitious and strangely poignant studies of the nature of time. But he really found his stride with Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975), his graduation-film investigation of the 19th-century English expatriate famous for his technical and conceptual innovations in capturing movement and for his landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley. Red Hollywood (1995), made with theorist Noel Burch, is a compilation film about the Hollywood Ten, those screenwriters and directors barred because of their communist sympathies from working in Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s. Its originality lies in its refusal to focus on what the opening credits calls “their politics or their martyrdom”, and also its desire to disprove Billy Wilder’s frequently quoted dismissal of their work: “Of the 10, two had talent, the others were just unfriendly.” Andersen had previously claimed that “it would be an injustice to those who were blacklisted to say they did nothing to deserve it”; now, featuring interviews with blacklistees such as Paul Jarrico, Alfred Levitt and Ring Lardner Jr, he revealed a secret history of the sly and often brilliant ways in which a generation of idealists had smuggled subversive readings of class and gender politics into commercial films. Abraham Polonsky, one of the 10 and utterly unrepentant, argues: “All films about crime are about capitalism because capitalism is about crime. I mean morally speaking. At least that’s what I used to think. Now I’m convinced.” Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), his most celebrated essay film, which takes its name from a 1972 gay porn movie, is a work of controlled rage in which Anderson explores what he sees as the paradox that a place synonymous with movies has rarely been seen on the big screen itself: the city’s working-class neighbourhoods, its black and Native American population, its industrial heritage – all have been erased. “Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeway,” insists the narrator. “They say nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk.” Taking issue with the widely held belief that “movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories; if we notice the location, we are not really watching the movie”, he creates a kind of filmic DJ set, sampling 200 films – from avant-garde works such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to Boyz N The Hood (1991) – to make a case for the idea that “like dramatic license, geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness. Silly geography makes for silly movies.” Andersen is well placed to comment, as he worked as a taxi driver in the 1970s. “I became a little monster in a way,” he says, “I was trying to make as much money as I could. I enjoyed the camaraderie with drivers, the freedom of sometimes driving alone, ending the day with cash in my pocket.” For a long time Los Angeles Plays Itself, like Andersen’s other films, was commercially unavailable. This was partly because he hadn’t cleared rights for the scenes he’d used, but also because of the costs involved in remastering the films for digital release. As a result, Andersen’s work circulated in samizdat fashion, through VHS-to-VHS copies, hand-labelled DVD-Rs, illegal torrents. It held a seditionary promise of another kind of cinema. For Peter Bo Rappmund, director of Psychohydrography (2010), “The way Thom explored psychogeography and offered new ways to understand space; his encyclopaedic approach, how effortlessly he traverses between high and low culture – it was a revelation.” Film-maker and video essayist Kevin B Lee says: “Los Angeles Plays Itself had a monumental influence on me. It completely transformed my idea of what film criticism could do. It asked: what can film criticism do other than evaluate movies for consumers? Are there more urgent questions? Can we cast our questions about cinema against a broader set of questions about the world, about human lives, about social realities? Thom has a concrete, capacious intellect that allows you to have a great conversation about movies. He even makes you want to see terrible films like Cobra with Sylvester Stallone. For anyone interested in sustained and critical inquiry, he is the gold standard we’re all trying to uphold.” The heart of Los Angeles Plays Itself, as in later films such as Get Out Of the Car (2010), lies less in its theoretical concerns than in its wistful evocation of localism. Mom’n’pop grocery stores, old petrol stations, minor-league baseball games, community murals: far from the billboards and bling of TMZ Hollywood, it’s this intimate, quotidian realm, full of yearnings and struggles, that Anderson is drawn to. The films that he champions – independent, outsider works of poetic realism such as Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979) – share this sensibility. Anderson’s latest film, The Thoughts That Once We Had, takes its name from a Christina Rossetti poem. It’s inspired by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema – the concerns of his 1983 volume entitled The Movement-Image allow Andersen to re-engage with some of the questions around motion and reality that he grappled with in his Muybridge film – and uses some tricky terminology (such as the “affection-image” – related to but not the same as “closeup”). “I didn’t want to make this film for people who are familiar with Deleuze’s texts,” Andersen insists. “Also, as a general rule, films should have humour in them.” Indeed, The Thoughts That Once We Had is less a lecture than a wordless, associative, haunted journey – sometimes rueful and sobering, sometimes very funny – not just through the history of cinematic innovation, but through the 20th century itself. There are clips from many films including those of DW Griffiths, Laurel and Hardy and Jean-Luc Godard, to whose Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998) it bears comparison. A powerful sequence shows footage from and about Leningrad, Hiroshima, Vietnam; after we learn of the two million North Koreans who died during the 1950-1953 war as a result of US imperialism, titles in block letters appear: ‘NO REPENTANCE. NOT EVEN AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT.’ The film ends with Marianne Faithfull singing As Tears Go By and a dedication: “To those who have nothing must be restored … the cinema.” It recalls the end of Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which a character from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) laments: “So many men unneeded, unwanted, in a world where there is so much work to be done.” What makes Thom Andersen’s work so potent and enduring is not just its formal control and analytical acuity, but its passionate belief that, against the odds, cinema can be a tool of imaginative restitution. • The Essay film festival runs from tomorrow until Sunday. Details: essayfilmfestival.com |