April

Los Angeles Plays Itself [rewatch]
During the Q&A, Andersen mentioned a certain dissatisfaction with the original form of Los Angeles Plays Itself in 2003—in comparison to the decade-later remastering that replaced many clips with HD counterparts—feeling that it didn’t quite correspond to his desire to make a “real movie.” This statement felt consonant with something which I had only truly grasped when watching the film for the first time theatrically: there’s actually less constant narration than I remembered, with a good deal of the film clips playing out unabated. The film’s (simplified) aim is to critique and challenge the Hollywood machine and its pillaging of a beautiful, weird city, and the magpie-like assortment of sources holds up a mirror to the flaws. But Andersen has at the very least some affection and admiration for spectacle, and showing all these clips in full yet shorn of context, especially in a space where they would have been originally seen, magnifies all aspects: the crassness and inaccuracy, but also the attention to behavior and action, the immaculate craft (or lack thereof), the underlying politics. Additionally, by placing this range of works alongside each other (even/especially The French Connection, The Rookie, and a few Hitchcock films as a direct contrast) and the shock of Stratman’s grainy, pointedly unglamorous location footage, the viewer’s ability to distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow, artistic and commercial is largely subsumed into something almost hypnotic. Andersen uses the spectacle as both Trojan Horse and an end unto itself, just one of countless, brilliant contradictions laced throughout.

Leviathan [rewatch]
It’s easy to construe Leviathan as a case of man against nature, but there’s a certain irony in how (considering their centrality in most of the film’s publicity material) the seagulls aren’t generally considered largely separate from the marine life. In effect, they form a third part of the food triangle in the film, swarming the bloody mess strewn from the hulking fishing vessels, a quasi-parasitic relationship that skirts the line between natural and unnatural more fitfully than the most common interactions (man and fish). If the film’s interest can be broadly said to be work and its detritus, the latter part of the equation is both exterior and interior: the carnage of dead and dying sea creatures is juxtaposed with dirtied and weathered human bodies. In both the film’s most mordant and telling gesture, the workers can’t even escape the fishing life even in what little downtime they have, watching Deadliest Catch while slowly drifting to sleep. Is it because they seek identification, to see even dire circumstances? What Castaing-Taylor and Paravel provide is something else, something more awful and wondrous entirely.