Social Distance Cinematheque
Since it looks like we’ll all have plenty of indoor time in the near future, we thought we’d suggest a few films to help pass that time. For now, we’ve focused on selections available on Kanopy, a free service accessible to anyone with a Los Angeles Public Library card (and via libraries in many other locations).
Film descriptions taken from the Kanopy site.
Because we tried to include a diversity of styles and topics (and there are a few we haven’t watched yet ourselves), not all films will suit all tastes or be appropriate for all viewers.
Note that Kanopy has a limit of 10 views per month per patron.
L.A. Documentaries
Thom Andersen's landmark documentary LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF explores the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown as seen entirely though the films themselves. From its distinctive neighborhoods to its architectural homes, Los Angeles has been the backdrop to countless movies. In this dazzling work, Andersen takes viewers on a whirlwind tour through the metropolis real and cinematic history, investigating the myriad stories and legends that have come to define it, and meticulously, judiciously revealing the real city that lives beneath.
From the producers of DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS and BONES BRIGADE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY comes a look at an expressive, explosive world that is known about but almost never entered by outsiders. The film, directed by renowned photographer Angela Boatwright, explores the young, mostly Hispanic, Punk scene in L.A. and finds an undeniably gritty, yet creative environment.
With unprecedented access to backyard parties, concerts, and daily ups and downs, the film shares a verite look at the realities of the 21st century, our need for community, the importance of self-expression and of course, the power of rock & roll. The sense of belonging is palpable; emotional bonds fostered among good families and those broken, poverty and wealth, adolescence and maturity, with the music emanating a magnetic chorus for all to sing together. LOS PUNKS: WE ARE ALL WE HAVE portrays this vibrant DIY community with candor and rough beauty.
Beginning at origins in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY tracks the flow of water, step-by-step, through Owens Valley, aqueducts, and concrete troughs in the city of Los Angeles, to Long Beach delta and the Pacific Ocean.
Constructed from tens of thousands of still images and their neighboring sounds, the film is also a journey through a natural and industrial topography of striking conflicts and contradictions. In its contemplation of the natural process of an essential element of life, and the banal, unseen system that supplies Los Angeles its water, PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY is a meditation on our dependence on and alienation from the natural world.
A historic documentary about one of the most important feminist cultural events of the 1970s. Judy Chicago (best-known as the creator of THE DINNER PARTY) and Miriam Shapiro rented an old Hollywood mansion and altered its interior through decor and set-pieces to "search out and reveal the female experience . . . the dreams and fantasies of women as they sewed, cooked, washed and ironed away their lives."
WOMANHOUSE is a fascinating historical look at feminism, its reception in the 1970s, and the ever-important relationship between art and social change.
Catching Hell in the City of Angels
Having worked with gang members from the infamous Imperial Courts housing project on their previous documentary The Art of Rap, the filmmakers returned to South Central Los Angeles to record the day-to-day life of those who call one of the world's most notorious neighborhoods "home."
An unflinching vision of a place surviving beyond the margins of mainstream society and whose principal conduit to the outside world appears to come via police cars, ambulances and sensationalist news reports.
Made in L.A. is an Emmy award-winning feature documentary that follows the remarkable story of three Latina immigrants working in Los Angeles garment sweatshops as they embark on a three-year odyssey to win basic labor protections from trendy clothing retailer Forever 21. In intimate observational style, Made in L.A. reveals the impact of the struggle on each woman's life as they are gradually transformed by the experience. Compelling, humorous, deeply human, Made in L.A. is a story about immigration, the power of unity, and the courage it takes to find your voice.
The Decline of Western Civilization
Their message is brutally clear: Destroy the old and make way for the new. This is the punk's violent revolution; Their lawless world. This is THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: A Riveting, unflinching account of the punk rock phenomenon and its alienated, reactionary subculture. This fierce, bleak portrait documents L.A.'s infamous punk bands as they perform on stage and discuss their lives, music and philosophy off stage.
Through interviews with punk fans, music critics and club owners, it is a crucial, compelling statement of the most significant and influential youth movement and musical transformation of the past 3 decades. It is perhaps a prophetic glimpse of the forces that will inherit our world.... Witness THE DECLINE.
An immigrant story with a (glazed) twist, THE DONUT KING follows the journey of Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy, who arrived in California in the 1970s and, through a mixture of diligence and luck, built a multi-million dollar donut empire up and down the West Coast.
After Ngoy escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, he eventually was able to start his first donut shop in Orange County, California, and his Christy's Doughnuts became a rapidly expanding chain of success. Over the next decade, Ngoy also sponsored hundreds of visas for incoming Cambodian refugees and offered them steady employment in his donut shops. But after living his version of the American Dream, everything came crashing down for Ngoy.
L.A. Films
A longstanding director of ingenuity, heart and meticulous detail, Charles Burnett has earned his reputation as "one of America's very best filmmakers" from The Chicago Tribune. Focusing on everyday life in Black communities rarely featured in American cinema, Burnett's films combine lyrical storytelling with a starkly neorealist, documentary-style approach most famously seen in Killer of Sheep, the chronicle of a slaughterhouse employee's daily struggles and the emotional baggage he carries home. Burnett once said of the film, "[Stan's] real problems lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don't necessarily win battles; you survive."
Eli (Justin Chon) and Daniel (David So) are two Korean American brothers that run their late father's shoe store in a predominantly African American community of Los Angeles. These two brothers strike up an unlikely friendship with 11-year-old African American girl, Kamilla (Simone Baker).
As Daniel dreams of becoming a recording artist and Eli struggles to keep the store afloat, racial tensions build to a breaking point in L.A. as the infamous L.A. Riots break out.
A group of fame-obsessed teenagers living in the suburbs of L.A. use the internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their empty homes. Ringleader Rebecca leads Marc, Nicki, Sam, and Chloe on the ultimate heist of designer clothes and jewelry — and what starts out as teenage fun quickly spins out of control.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Melvin Van Peebles' groundbreaking classic. A young hustler's aimless pleasure seeking turns to radicalism after witnessing the beating of a black revolutionary by two white cops. Driven to a state of blind rage, Sweetback takes brutal revenge on the cops, forcing him into a desperate life on the run.
Despite a humble opening at only two theaters followed by a torrent of negative reviews, SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG mushroomed to $10,000,000 at the box office, landing it on Daily Variety's list of top-grossing independent films. It is credited as the film that kicked off the so-called "Blaxploitation" film movement.
Sean Baker's STARLET explores the unlikely friendship between 21 year-old aspiring actress Jane (Dree Hemingway) and elderly widow Sadie (Besedka Johnson) after their worlds collide in California's San Fernando Valley.
Jane spends her time getting high with her dysfunctional roommates and taking care of her chihuahua Starlet, while Sadie passes her days alone, tending to her garden. After a confrontation at a yard sale, Jane finds something unexpected in a relic from Sadie's past. Her curiosity piqued, she tries to befriend the caustic older woman. Secrets emerge as their relationship grows, revealing that nothing is ever as it seems.
In the dark karaoke rooms of Los Angeles's Koreatown, Kasie works as a doumi girl, a young hostess paid to cater to rich businessmen. As she struggles to hide her troubles through soju-and-MDMA-fueled nights, her mind is focused on one thing: earning enough tips to continue providing for her bedridden father. When her father's caretaker unexpectedly quits, Kasie seeks help from her estranged brother, and the siblings are forced to reconnect and reconcile their years long separation. From acclaimed filmmaker Justin Chon.
Places and People
A documentary that uses the rat as a passageway into the dark, complicated history of Baltimore. A unique blend of history, sci-fi, poetry and portraiture, RAT FILM brilliantly breaks documentary norms and dissects how racial segregation, redlining, and environmental racism built the Baltimore we see today.
What begins as an examination of our interactions with rats — portraits of rat afflicted citizens, use of rats in labs, development of rat poison — becomes a deeper exploration of Baltimore. Director Theo Anthony investigates the history of the city, and the systemic racism that established the low-income and predominantly black neighborhoods that are still plagued by rats today.
London Orbital is an extraordinary and visionary film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair about the world's largest by-pass, the M25. London Orbital is a road movie, a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past, and a film dialogue between two writers who are also filmmakers (and vice versa).
London Orbital is, among other things, a meditation on the difference between driving and walking. On Bram Stoker's "undead", on H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. On time and memory. On the difference between film and tape, sound and image. On trance states and the terror that lies beyond boredom; on shopping and terrorism; on Kabul and the leisure mall. On the invisible triangle of Thatcherism (covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, and drug dealing). On Pinochet and Thatcher as vampire lovers.
Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha's influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, REASSEMBLAGE reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.
It began as a housing marvel. Built in 1956, Pruitt-Igoe was heralded as the model public housing project of the future, "the poor man's penthouse." Two decades later, it ended in rubble — its razing an iconic event that the architectural theorist Charles Jencks famously called "the death of modernism." The footage and images of its implosion have helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe's creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
An essential documentary, Brett Story's incisive, investigative and wide-ranging THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is an examination of the prison and its place — social, economic and psychological — in American society.
Filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often-unseen links and connections that prisons — and our system of mass incarceration — have on communities and industries all around us; from a blazing California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires to a Bronx warehouse that specializes in prison-approved care packages to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of new prison jobs to the street where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson (and to the nearby St. Louis County, where African-Americans are still fending off police harassment, but of a different form).
The immigration debate is at a fever pitch, and some politicians insist that a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico will solve our problems. But what does the common person know about topography of this border? With approximately 350 million crossings per year, the Mexico-U.S. border is the most frequently traversed international border in the world. Beginning where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico and working its way backward, step-by-step, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, TECTONICS explores the landscapes and physical qualities of this 2,000-mile border.
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.
Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin's original words and flood of rich archival material. I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
This film festival favorite follows a group of African-American gay and transgender youth in one of Washington D.C.'s most violent neighborhoods. After being subjected to constant torment and assault, the group formed their own gang for camaraderie and protection.
Photography, Art, and Film Documentaries
Agnes Varda: From Here to There
The much-anticipated follow up to Agnes Varda's The Beaches of Agnes, FROM HERE TO THERE is a five-part documentary series that chronicles the peerless and indefatigable director's travels around the world, meeting friends, artists and filmmakers, for an expansive view of the contemporary art scene.
Each spring artist Tom Phillips walks a nine mile circle taking photographs in 20 specific places. These photographs are, as far as is possible, taken from the same spot in the same direction with the same framing. The project was begun in 1973 and over the years some views have changed dramatically while others seem virtually untouched by time. The photographs when seen together reveal the quirky and sometimes inexplicable effect of human beings on their surroundings. The result is an eternal, evolving portrait of Phillips' neighborhood in South London.
A revelatory documentary by Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) and film critic Noel Burch, RED HOLLYWOOD examines the films made by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist and offers a radically different perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema.
A striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of "manufactured landscapes" — quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams — Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization's materials and debris.
The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
Robert Frank revolutionized photography and independent film. He documented the Beats, Welsh coal miners, Peruvian Indians, The Stones, London bankers, and the Americans. This is the bumpy ride, revealed with unblinking honesty by the reclusive artist himself.
If we’re missing any of your favorites that you’ve found on Kanopy, hit us up on Instagram and let us know!
And, if you missed our screening of short videos about L.A. a couple summers ago at Los Angeles State Historic Park, many of them are available online, linked here.
Finally, an even larger trove of experimental films (not necessarily spatial awareness–related) can be found in this article on Hyperallergic.