Get Out of the Car and Schindler’s Houses
Get Out of the Car
Also part of the LACMA series
Los Angeles Past, Present and Future
Get Out of the Car , by Thom Andersen (2010/color/32 min./16mm)
Schindler’s Houses, by Heinz Emigholz ( 2006/color/99 min./35mm)
Two recent films offer piercing and lucid visions of contemporary Los Angeles, including the ongoing influence of its lingering past.
Thom Andersen follows his seminal cine-essay epic Los Angeles Plays Itself with the equally incisive Get Out of the Car. In Andersen’s own words, the film is, “a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts).”
The forty extant single-family residences designed by the Austro-American modernist architect Rudolph Schindler built between 1921 and 1952 in and around Los Angeles are the subject of Heinz Emigholz’s meditative Schindler’s Houses. Schindler’s innovative, striking designs are venerated by Emigholz’s attentive framing and given life by his immersive sound design. When Emigholz’s films were first presented to Los Angeles audiences five years back, Scott Foundas in LA Weekly wrote, “Emigholz does more than just film buildings: He immerses you in entire social and architectural environments— a structure as it relates to its surroundings, and those surroundings as they relate to the larger city beyond.”
This is the fourth program that Filmforum is doing in association with Pacific Standard Time Presents Modern Architecture in L.A., with films looking at the built environment and personal meanings of architecture in Los Angeles. The first is a program called This Is the City on Thursday, July 11 at MOCA; the second is July 14th at the Egyptian; the third, featuring Fabrice Ziolkowski’s L.A.X, is July 21st at the Egyptian; and the fourth, featuring Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses and Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car, at LACMA on July 26th.
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This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Get Out of the Car
(2010/color/32 min./16mm)
Direction: Thom Andersen; camera: Madison Brookshire, Adam R. Levine; editing: Adam R. Levine; sound: Craig Smith
Get Out of the Car is a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts). The musical fragments compose an impressionistic survey of popular music made in Los Angeles (and a few other places) from 1941 to 1999, with an emphasis on rhythm’n’blues and jazz from the 1950s and corridos from the 1990s. The music of Richard Berry, Johnny Otis, Leiber and Stoller, and Los Tigres del Norte is featured prominently. —TA
Schindler’s Houses
by Heinz Emigholz ( 2006/color/99 min./35mm)
The forty extant single-family residences designed by the Austro-American modernist architect Rudolph Schindler built between 1921 and 1952 in and around Los Angeles are the subject of Heinz Emigholz’s meditative Schindler’s Houses. Schindler’s innovative, striking designs are venerated by Emigholz’s attentive framing and given life by his immersive sound design. When Emigholz’s films were first presented to Los Angeles audiences five years back, Scott Foundas in LA Weekly wrote, “Emigholz does more than just film buildings: He immerses you in entire social and architectural environments— a structure as it relates to its surroundings, and those surroundings as they relate to the larger city beyond.”