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"[...] I don't like geographic license. It's hard to make a theoretical
argument against it. After all, in a fiction film, a real space becomes
fictional. Why shouldn't a car chase jump from the Venice Canals to the Los
Angeles Harbor thirty miles away? Why shouldn't the exit from a skating rink in
Westwood open directly onto Fletcher Bowron Square in Downtown Los Angeles,
fifteen miles east? But one fiction is not always as good as another, and like
dramatic license, geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness. Silly
geography makes for silly movies. The best Los Angeles car chase movie is
stubbornly, even perversely literalist. Director Toby Halicki realized Dziga
Vertov's dream: an anti-humanist cinema of bodies and machines in motion. His
materialist masterpiece was the first manifesto for a cinema of conspicuous
destruction, centered in the South Bay, the unglamorous southern coastal region
of the Los Angeles basin, stretching from Long Beach to El Segundo, that would
later become the domain of William Friedkin, Quentin Tarantino and Michael
Mann, who would accidentally rename the most familiar icon of South Bay movies,
the Vincent Thomas Bridge. Vincent Thomas was San Pedro's representative in the
state assembly for many years, but he hasn't been canonized yet, not even in
Pedro. Accidents happen, but some lies are malignant. They cheapen or
trivialize the real city. [...]"
There really isn't much we have to add to Thom Andersen's praise for "Gone in
60 Seconds" (see www.piratecinema.org/trailers/#20150906-01, from "Los Angeles
Plays Itself", itself coming to Prⅳate Cinema in the not-so-distant future) --
the film is really that good, once it picks up speed. What we can add however
is Walter Hill's "The Driver" (Isabelle Adjani's first Hollywood movie, still
pre-"Possession", even though she claims that this was the role that ruined her
career), mostly for comparison, and Claude Lelouch's "C'était un rendez-vous",
not as famous as "Trafic" or "Week-end", but certainly the most convincing
eight minutes of reckless driving in the history of French cinema.
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prⅳate cinema berlin
u kottbusser tor
sunday, september 6, 8:30 pm
9 pm
the driver
walter hill 1978 87 min
10:30 pm
gone in 60 seconds
toby halicki 1974 97 min
12:15 am
c'était un rendez-vous
claude lelouch 1976 8 min
12 seats, rsvp
first come first serve
location in separate mail
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prⅳate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
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