Documentários 3
Aproveitando a balanço da gripe dediquei-me hoje a ver as 3 horas do documentário Los Angeles Plays Itself. Muito bom. O filme é um pouco desequilibrado, no sentido que as 3 horas deixam espaço ara o autor/narrador divagar e aprofundar temas vários que por vezes parecem um pouco acessórios à ideia inicial do filme. Mesmo assim não deixa de ser um dos documentários sobre filme mais interessantes a que eu já assisti. Acho que não vou voltar a ver da mesma forma um filme (ou uma série, fiquei a pensar que este raciocínio se aplicava muito também às séries americanas) ambientado em Los Angeles.
"Dividing his film into three umbrella sections—“The City as Backdrop,” “The City as Character,” and “The City as Subject”—Andersen traces Los Angeles’s onscreen evolution from the anonymous to the distinctive, and the distortions, misrepresentations, and cultural violence that followed every step of the way. Urging the viewer to reawaken “conscious spectatorship” from the uncritical acceptance usually thrust upon one by the machinery of narrative filmmaking, Andersen plumbs the unconscious of the films themselves: their unthinking recording of the city which most have treated as a useful prop at best, the inadvertent, epic-length documentary record of Los Angeles contained in the innumerable films which have made it the “most-filmed city in the world.” In his voluminous assortment of clips—everything from classic Hollywood staples to experimental cinema, from sci-fi flicks, action films, and straight-to-video erotic thrillers to European art films and even some poetic pornography—Andersen charts the use and misuse of Los Angeles landmarks (the Bradbury Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, Union Station), the mingled fascination and scorn heaped upon the city’s famously eclectic architecture, the decades-long, caught-on-film disintegration of regions like Bunker Hill or the once-thriving downtown, and the intriguing hints that Los Angeles may have been far more comfortably racially integrated in the first half of the century than today."
(Tem um pedacinho no fim sobre o Cassavetes ;)