Thom Andersen: Work on Film

In person: Thom Andersen.

Thom Andersen is no stranger to Los Angeles cinephiles, and his extensive work as a filmmaker, programmer, critic, teacher, writer, historian, and movie lover has had an enormous and meaningful impact on generations of audiences and students alike. With Red Hollywood (1996) and Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Andersen established an international reputation as one of contemporary cinema’s most keen-eyed and thoughtful essayists, with a singular and deeply committed perspective on the complexities and particularities of film history, which he has continued to develop.

Years prior to these watershed films, Andersen’s first flurry of filmmaking activity in his 20s reflects a similar diversity, engagement, and interest in the layered and reverberating implications of cultural and historical moments and the images that seek to represent them. His interest in exploring and responding to experiences and spaces of resonant ephemerality prefigure his later opuses in which the incidental subtexts in cinema history are revealed to be much more meaningful than we could have imagined.

This program will survey Andersen’s three influential short films from the 1960s, all in restored prints from the Academy Film Archive, along with his personal and elegiac return to 16mm, the acclaimed Get Out of the Car (2010). Thom Andersen will then join us for a discussion about his work, followed by a presentation of his ambitious and illuminating documentary, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974).