Retrospective: The City Plays Itself
One of cinema’s great protagonists, the city has been endlessly imagined, documented and mythologised by filmmakers. More than a backdrop, the city moves and breathes, encloses and conceals; a place of memory and reinvention, struggle and play. Journeying across continents and decades, these films explore urban spaces and the lives that unfold within them, revealing the cinematic city as a place of wonder, conflict, aspiration and possibility.
Anchoring the retrospective is Thom Andersen’s sprawling, cinephilic film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, from which the retrospective takes its name. Across the selection, cities become sites of feminist futurism and resistance in Born in Flames; of modernity and transformation in PlayTime and Taipei Story; and of displacement and belonging in A Private Enterprise and Salaam Bombay!. Jocelyne Saab records Beirut transformed by conflict, while elsewhere, Summertime finds romance amid the canals of Venice. Curated by Alice Miller.
