10 ge meta_film

META FILM

Documentary & Everyday Urban life

Shannon Walsh / GE3106 / Fall 2015City University Hong Kong

CLASS 10

Meta FilmMetafilm is: “A documentary on other films, filmmakers, genres or styles that expresses its main ideas visually, going beyond textual analysis…” (Alvarez, 182)

…. “A key feature of hypermodern times is precisely the ability of images to condition and determine the perception of our everyday environment, as well as the perception of those places where we have never been. It does not even matter who has produced those images: they may belong to a feature film, a documentary, a TV programme, a commercial, a photographic report, and institutional campaign, a website, a YouTube video. In practice they are interchangeable and almost anonymous, including ours, but never neutral: they always have an ideological substrate that influences our worldview.” (Alvarez, 182)

Metafilm as third space to look beyond surfaces, urban or filmic through subjective film heritage

City as both real and imagined

“They make movies here. I live here”

Los Angeles Plays Itself

“If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.”

Los Angeles Plays Itself

• Linking the setting of films to its meaning in order to expose the power of discourses

• Analytic device used previously in his film Red Hollywood about blacklisted screenwriters

• Films are bootlegged because he can not get rights for all the films he uses

Often we see more than what he talks about: mood, icons, a famous actor, a familiar sequence, genre – things that make the audience identify in their own way with what we are watching

2003, Thom Anderson

“We might wonder if the movies have ever really depicted Los Angeles?”

• Detective story structure

• Making invisible visible

• Quotes up to 210 different films & TV series from 1910s to 2000s

• Mainly films in 40s/50s and 70s/80s/90s

Prologue & three chapters1. The city as background2. The city as character3. The city as subject

Los Angeles Plays Itself

Intersection of local history and fiction

Bunker Hill

Seen through many films as well as through its multiple stages of decline and redevelopment from the 1950s to to the 1980s ‘simulated city’.

“Where hard men and their molls once plotted to rob banks, banks now plotted to rob the world.” (Davis 2001:43)

“It’s hard to make a personal film, based on your own experience, when you’re absurdly over privileged,’ Anderson says, ‘you tend not to notice the less fortunate, and that’s almost everybody.”

(Alvarez, 208)

Bush Mama, Haile Gerima, 1979L.A. Rebellion filmmakers

November 28th*Rough Cut ScreeningsPrepare to show a section of your work thus far (under 5 min)

Next Week*Editing & Shooting Prep time*Doc screening “St-Henri” or “Jeppe”