Thom Andersen
Film Tourists in Los Angeles
By Thom Andersen | | CS97, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni. They weren’t interested in what made Los Angeles like a city; they were interested in what made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew.
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Fire in Every Shot: Wang Bing’s Three Sisters
By Thom Andersen | | CS54, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Thom Andersen “Films have no interest unless one finds something that burns somewhere within the shot.”—Jean-Marie Straub, Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1984, p. 34 Wang Bing’s Three Sisters (2012) tells a simple story. Three sisters, aged four, six, and ten, live like orphans in Yunnan province, in the village of Xiyangtang (elevation: 3,500 feet;…
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Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 4:32 pm, July 28, 2011-5:02 pm, July 29, 2011
By Thom Andersen | | CS48, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Thom Andersen 1. The Clock is certainly dumb: a 24-hour movie made entirely from other movies in which the depicted screen time corresponds precisely to the actual time of the screening with plenty of clock inserts and shots in which clocks appear, sometimes incidentally. I’m sure I’m not the first to ask, why didn’t…
Read More Features | Unchained Melodies: The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector and It Felt Like a Kiss
By Thom Andersen | | CS44, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Thom Andersen “Is it dumb enough?” Phil Spector asked Sonny Bono as they listened to a playback of “Da Doo Ron Ron” one day in March 1963. In other words, is this record something you can understand in a flash but listen to forever? Is it both art and kitsch? It’s a profound question,…
Read More The Decade in Review | Thom Andersen
By Thom Andersen | | The Decade In Review
Okay, I have a fascination with lists: best of, worst of, whatever. I would even claim they’re useful as a quick sketch of history, revealing which films are remembered, which are forgotten. In Film Comment’s best-of-decade poll, for example, I was pleased to see that so many films I admired were remembered by others, and…
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