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public history / secret history
Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Craig Baldwin's Spectres of the Spectrum (1999), two movies I've seen in the past month, are both comprised mostly of collaged footage from other sources, but beyond that the two of them couldn't be more different. In fact, although I enjoyed both immensely, they essentially function as counterpoints to one another.
Los Angeles Plays Itself uses footage mostly culled from mainstream or studio movies filmed in and around Los Angeles. Andersen is interested in examining the documentary information embedded within these films: he's interested about what we can learn about the history of urban institutions (a neighborhood, a building, the police force), by noting the shifts that occur in their representations over roughly a century of cinema.
Spectres of the Spectrum's approach is very nearly the exact opposite: where Andersen makes documentary out of fictional films, Baldwin makes fiction out of documentary-matter. He's dug up what appears to be hundreds of educational films and 1950's kinescopes, and he uses them to tell a science-fictional tale of time-traveling anarchists in the year 2007.
Baldwin's film isn't totally fictional: his anarchists are fighting an "electromagnetic conspiracy" which has tentacles which sprawl through the real history of electricity and electronic media. The first half of the film is a helter-skelter recounting of this history, and the real names and events which crop up will be familiar to anyone interested in electromagnetic imaginary or experimental energy: Tesla, Edison, Watson and his spirits, RCA, General Electric, United Fruit, David Sarnoff, Bill Gates. As with any good piece of conspiracy-art, Spectres gets a lot of mileage by blurring the line between fact and fiction, and by the end of the film you may begin to believe that a secret war for control of electrical transmission is the real battle of the twentieth century (and that everything you ever learned about the magnetosphere is all part of a cover-up).
Andersen's film, by contrast, is interested in the "real" Los Angeles, and eschews the notion of secret histories. He has special ire, in fact, for films like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential (and, to a lesser extent, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) that reframe the "public history" of Los Angeles as conspiracy. Andersen suggests, rather convincingly, that the power-grabs that most disenfranchise the masses usually happen right out in plain sight: they're front-page news, not back-room deals. Andersen points out that people often end up voting for their own disenfranchisement, believing that they're acting in their own best interest.
This point has perhaps never been more relevant. |
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
2:40 PM
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