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A documentary about rock 'n' roll. The Canned Heat, City Lights, Seeds of Time, LA Tymes, Llyn Foulkes, Charlie Watts, Chris & Craig, Duke of Earl, Seeburg, Wurlitzer, The Trip, The Lynch Bldg., Top's, Pandora's Box, Maverick's Flat, someone's backyard. Riot in cell block number nine, riot on Sunset Strip. Hotrod, coin slot, go cart, bomp club. Hound Dog Man, King Creole. Kim Weston, The Shangri-Las, The Supremes, Earl - Jean. The Rainbows, Wolfman Jack, Ernie Bushmiller, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, The Who, The Coasters. Standing at the crossroads of love. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, John Cale, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Howlin Wolf, James Brown - The King. Wax reclamation. Frankie Avalon, The Beatles, The Yardbirds, Great Balls of Fire, an early clue to a new direction. Standing, walking, jumping, singing, surfing. Radio, jukebox, scopitone, pinball, poolhall. Mick Jagger/Earth Angel. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2008.
Thom Andersen's hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds.
Created from material developed during "The Thoughts That Once We Had," this short film presents an anthology of 26 scenes from films made between 1904 and 2015, each depicting trains arriving at stations. The sequences are arranged in a serial structure, with black-and-white scenes in the first half paired with corresponding color sequences in the second half, forming a symmetrical visual progression.
A documentary that examines the films made by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist and offers a radically different perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema.
A city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks in Los Angeles.
With Reconversão (Reconversion), Thom Andersen opens another fascinating chapter of his ongoing investigation of architectural landscapes, their filmic representation, and their relation to history, by focusing on 17 buildings and projects by the often-controversial Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura—winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize. Echoing Dziga Vertov’s concepts and Eadweard Muybridge’s techniques (shooting only one or two frames per second), Andersen masterfully brings forward what makes Souto de Moura an original: the incorporation of the passing of time into architectural designs, positing them within a history fraught with class struggle and societal changes, in a continuum with ruins—from which they may originate, and to which they will return—and with nature—which they frame, and by which they are framed.
Melting shows the natural monostructural disintegration of a strawberry sundae, its passage from rigidity to softness, from edibility to waste. The spoon resting on the plate refers to the human presence, which lurks behind the screen, declining to interfere with what transpires. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.
Olivia may have felt no need to change, but the world around her was not bound by such an impractical sentiment. Olivia’s Place is gone. The site where it used to stand is now a sort of plaza between two large old wood frame houses that were moved to their present location from elsewhere in the city. One of these houses is occupied by a restaurant, the other is occupied by the California Heritage Museum. (Morgan Fisher) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2008.
One of America’s foremost practitioners of the essay film presents a major new work inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze on cinema. Andersen’s The Thoughts That Once We Had is a richly layered journey through cinematic history, masterfully edited as it playfully moves across decades and genres, and suffused at every turn by the renowned filmmaker and critic’s lifelong passion for the movies.