Angel City (1977) User Reviews

angelic city

[noonward · 5 June 2010]

This was my second insight into Jon Jost's filmography with the first being, of course, The Bed You Sleep In. While having some similar elements, there was definitely a large amount of things different with them. The Bed You Sleep In was slow, bleak and almost melodramatic… this is countered by the highly styled, slightly tongue in cheek surrealism of Angel City. This film has minutes upon minutes of cars driving, a helicopter bird's eye view of LA, and 10 or so minutes of a woman reciting lines only to be interrupted each time and other much stylised sequences which really do work for the movie.

The look of the film was also something I thought was important: the reflective shot of the desert with the eruptive angles of the city's scorched sun-dried vigour. Add to that the scratchy VHS quality this release pertains and you have a perfect 70s art-house movie that's not afraid of throwing away the rulebook and making a completely uncompromising work. From what I've seen Jost is truly one of the world's proper independent filmmakers who does not abide to what anyone says. His movies are what he wants them to be, not what he thinks people will like and that is one admirable quality that's prevalent throughout his work.

Personally The Bed You Sleep In worked better it's style and it's tone was more something more relatable (I've always been a sucker for slow bleak movies with long organic shots) but Angel City is also a fascinating, innovative addition to his filmography. Angel City is a mini masterpiece in its own way. The thought of exploring Jon Jost's work further is an incredibly exciting prospect, and really there has not been a weak slot in his movies thus far. He is a true visionary and really one of the only directors that is truly independent. His low budget, idiosyncratic style has been used in many other films but none refer back to him as a credential or really pull off the enormous depth Jost submits to his work. Angel City is not his best by a long shot, though with competition from 'Bell Diamond', 'The Bed You Sleep In', 'Slow Moves', 'Homecoming' and 'Speaking Directly', it is perfectly acceptable for it to not be in the top range. This however can serve as a gateway as he touches upon many themes and styles he would go on to look at.

Movie dreams splayed on desert sand

[chaos-rampant · 3 December 2011]

I was fortunate to be exposed this past summer to a thing called Los Angeles Plays Itself. If you're not familiar, it's a lengthy film essay on the space occupied by this mecca of film inside films and a chronicle of that space as it unfolds with cinema and is informed by it. It was evocative stuff that made me fall in love again with the city.

This is one of the discoveries prompted by that piece, one of the most exciting I daresay. I was slightly worried at first because it comes by a filmmaker I don't appreciate much, who liked to rework a lot of French New Wave tricks into an American view. But it is potent stuff, this one, also an essay on the hot summer dream of Los Angeles and how it has unfolded as a movie.

The New Wave ideal was that life is a film. This meant that we might as well cobble together a life from other films, by also referencing that sort of movie life and a viewer's life of watching. All sorts of things became implicit between one camera and the next, most keenly a revelation of the illusions that we take for real.

All this is kept here, in just the ways a young Godard first imagined it to be; so an unfettered camera that explores the world as we might, here a Los Angeles unfettered by movie narrative; then all sorts of recognizable bits from movie narratives loosely threaded around a private dick who is investigating for the big scoop, here about a powerful money man that is pulling the strings from behind, a mistress groomed to be a Hollywood actress, a mysterious murder, Beverly Hills, another mistress, and escalating conspiracy and paranoia from this stuff that should have felt fresh at the time after Chinatown; constant spillovers between real and imagined, bland cityscapes and movie dreams.

It ends with violence from the make-believe conspiracy taking place before a mural of a tree, then the camera opens up to reveal a real tree standing a few feet away, and a 360o panorama of a smoggy, featureless Los Angeles extending in every direction.

It's a sublime shot to end the film but the one I will cherish the most is the lengthy point-of-view as we drive into Los Angeles, into view of downtown and through a sprawling network of highways out again for the suburbs. Its ordinary magic and sense of discovery enthralls me like the Tokyo roads in Solyaris.