Don't Call It L.A.

"Los Angeles is the most photographed city in the world, but one of the least photogenic," says filmmaker/scholar Thom Andersen, who takes over UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive in June. Andersen dares Bay Area cinephiles to take a look at the city we're supposed to hate with "Los Angeles Plays Itself," a month-long series of movies in which the southern sprawl is more than just a backdrop.

Now, I've been based in the Bay Area much of my life, but I've never hated Los Angeles and don't understand those who do. The city has too many facets to justify something so monolithic as loathing. This diversity is abundantly proven with a brilliant collection of films ranging from the classic (Double Indemnity) to the experimental (Los) to the documentary (A Certain Kind of Death), many deriving their power from their relative obscurity.

Andersen's own documentary, also titled Los Angeles Plays Itself, makes an excellent series introduction. His treatise employs a territorial, cantankerous narrator who breaks down the cinematic uses of L.A. as background, character, and subject, and whose provocative analyses of relevant local topics like modernist architecture and the LAPD make up for the withering yet dull criticisms of directors like Altman, Kasdan, and Jaglom. Also amusing are the film's provincial dictums, such as the claim that shortening Los Angeles' name to L.A. is disrespectful. "Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it," says Andersen's narrator. Right.

That doc aside, the best films in the series are those Andersen claims "get" the true Los Angeles and are, not coincidentally, hard to find in regular circulation. The Exiles (1961) is a gorgeous, moving time-capsule portrait of a community that no longer exists (Arizona Navajos in Bunker Hill). Bush Mama(1975) by Ethiopian-American filmmaker Haile Gerima is a hallucinatory drama with a documentary feel. Watts resident Dorothy sees too much street life out her window while dealing with welfare and an incarcerated man. The movie asks if her hard gaze on militant Black Power posters is a sign of dawning political consciousness or insanity, until she achieves a cathartic breakthrough. The Savage Eye (1960) combines cinéma vérité and Weegee-esque footage to trace a path through a woman's post-divorce angst.

Of course, the series also includes L.A. standards (Chinatown, The Long Goodbye) as well as a healthy dollop of noir flicks, which were frequently set in the city of naked ambition (Kiss Me Deadly, Mildred Pierce, Criss Cross), and some plain old oddities (Andy Warhol's cockeyed 1963 travel postcard Tarzan and Jane Regained ... Sort Of, the tribute to ghosts of film noir past The Decay of Fiction). Together, these pictures present viewers with a tour through SoCal they'll never forget, even if they started out watching with a chip on their shoulders. By Frako Loden