Los Angeles Plays Itself

"Los Angeles Plays Itself" (2004) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM — a nearly three-hour essay film by Thom Andersen built almost entirely from footage borrowed out of other people's movies.

Andersen's argument is simple and quietly devastating: Hollywood has replaced the actual city with a film-set version of it, and most people now see the fake one first. He moves through LA's neighborhoods, its modernist houses, its working-class streets, picking out the moments when cinema got the city right — and the far more common moments when it flattened it into a backdrop for car chases.

Narrated by Encke King, the film doubles as urban history and a dissection of how cinema colonizes the places it touches. It asks something most films about movies never bother to: what does the city itself lose when it becomes a location? Stream Los Angeles Plays Itself online on iFILM.