Catalogue > At random

Film history can be written in many ways. One of the more speculative takes is due to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and it is his famous two-volume `Cinéma I-II` that the American essayist Thom Andersen has adapted as a collage of extracts from hundreds of films. And even though there are both cult hits and canonised classics among them, we are light years from a traditional introduction to the bumpy history of cinema. Who would have thought, for example, that you could create a colour theory about black-and-white films? Deleuze draws new and unexpected connections across the film medium`s one hundred year history, and the poetically named `The Thoughts That Once We Had` draws lines between the dots that the French thinker had at the time. Just like Andersen`s magnum opus `Los Angeles Plays Itself`, his new essay is a cinematic whirlwind that blows through the history of the moving image without showing consideration for chronology. A film for everyone who is bitten by the cinephile bug – and for those who share a healthy enthusiasm for the infinite potential of both the film medium and the mind.

Thom Andersen (born 1943, Chicago) is a filmmaker, film critic and teacher. He attended Berkeley in the early 1960s and then returned to his hometown of Los Angeles to attend USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he studied with Arthur Knight and eventually assisted on Knight`s project The History of Sex in Cinema. While at USC Andersen met long-time friend and collaborator Morgan Fisher, who assisted on Andersen`s student film Melting, a portrait of a sundae. He regularly attended local screening series including shows by the Trak Film Group and Movies `Round Midnight and famously wrote about an unpopular screening of Andy Warhol`s Sleep. After USC, Andersen attended UCLA and completed his experimental documentaries Olivia`s Place and Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. During the 1970s, his films screened at Los Angeles` Theatre Vanguard and Berkeley`s Pacific Film Archive. He was the programmer for LA Filmforum in Los Angeles during the late 90`s. Andersen`s film Los Angeles Plays Itself won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, was voted best documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice Critic`s Poll, and was voted one of the Top Ten Films of the Decade by critics at Cinema Scope. In 2010 he completed Get Out of the Car, a portrait of signs and abandoned spaces set to Los Angeles music. In spring 2012, Andersen took part in the three month exposition of Whitney Biennial. He has taught at the SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. He currently teaches film theory and history at the California Institute of the Arts.