Synopsis
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously divided cinema into two categories: action-image and time-image. Californian filmmaker Thom Andersen turns Deleuze’s writing into a template for his latest film essay. Using an idiosyncratic array of clips – from Marx Brothers slapstick to Debra Paget’s erotic snake dance in Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb – Andersen builds a complex, free-flowing enquiry into the forms and preoccupations of 20th-century cinema. In some ways, this film is a companion piece to Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma.
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With the collaboration of:
Filmmaker
Thom Andersen
(Chicago, 1943). Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965) and Olivia’s Place (1966). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge’s photographic work. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he finished Red Hollywood, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. Their work on the history of the Blacklist also produced a book, Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs, published in 1994. In 2003 he completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, a videotape about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. He has taught film composition at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.
Filmography: The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015), Reconversão (2012); Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003); Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975)
