Cinematic Visions of Los Angeles: Representations of Identity and Mobility in the Cinematic City

LT-H-111111423-i ai3890 iýýmX ýw Cinematic visions of Los Angeles: representations of identity and mobility in the cinematic city Kenneth James Fox Queen Mary, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2006 Cinematic visions of Los Angeles: Representations of identity and mobility in the cinematic city Table of Contents Thesis Abstract Acknowledgements (ii) Foreword: From Ballyshannon to Los Angeles 1-4 Chapter One 5-54 The Cinematic City Chapter Two 55 - 85 Los Angeles: interweaving the material and the cinematic city Chapter Three 86 - 118 Reconstructing past visions of Los Angeles: mobility and identity in the noir cinematic city Chapter Four 119-158 Cinematic visions of future Los Angeles Chapter Five 159 -191 Cinematic visions of contemporary Los Angeles: Chapter Six 192 - 228 Cinematic visions of Latina/o Los Angeles Chapter Seven 229 - 260 Los Angeles: A cinematic city of hybridity? Chapter Eight 261 - 281 Cinematic Los Angeles: a new imaginary? Bibliography 282 - 309 Filmography 310 - 320 Appendix 1 (Stills in Volume 2) 1- 65 THESIS ABSTRACT Kenneth James Fox Cinematic visions of Los Angeles: representations of identity and mobility in the cinematic city. Accounts of 'filmic' Los Angeles are often pessimistic, focusing upon the geographies of segregation and exclusion evident in both the 'material' and 'cinematic' Los Angeles. In contrast to these more familiar readings, I propose a less pessimistic and more nuanced picture of Los Angeles as cinematic city. I offer an analysis of the cinematic city that, on the whole, shows a greater willingness to deal with 'differences' and to examine the city's multiple geographies and identities. I examine these multiple geographies with particular attention to themes of mobility and identity which, I argue, are a central preoccupation of many Los Angeles films. Moving beyond previous work on the 'geographies of film', however, I contend that in order to address such themes in film analysiswe need a fuller engagement with film theory. Hence, in analyzing these themes I pay particular attention to two issues. First, I give careful consideration to particular film techniques, specifically, mise-en-scene, camera movement and editing, to enable a more detailed analysis of the relationship between urban and cinematic space. Second, I turn to the function of genre, not as'system of classification, but as a mode of "cultural instrumentality", to examine what films do culturally. Through the evidence of the film analysis I propose the potential of cinematic city narratives to represent more fully the identities and mobilities of material Los Angeles providing a revision, and in some cases, a re-imagining, of its over- determined image of social chaos and ethnic conflict. Acknowledgements The production of this thesis would not have been possible without the support and love of many people. Immeasurable thanks to my supervisor Dr. Jon May for his patience, kindness and the robust and detailed responses to the developing drafts of this work. Thanks to Dr. David Pinder for his input as second supervisor which was always constructive and helpful. A big thank you to my colleagues in the Media Department, Canterbury Christ Church University, particularly Dr. Karen \ Shepherdson, Alex Choat and Goran Stefanovski for their close reading and sound advice. Thanks to Jane Wright for her proof reading. I dedicate this thesis to my wife Antonia and my two daughters Niamh and Orla. Their love and support has got me this far. Cinematic visions of Los Angeles: representations of identity and mobility in the cinematic city Foreword Situating this researchwithin subjective memory is a way of explaining the genesis of the work and my commitment to it. My fascination with the study of the representations of identity and mobility arises out of where I come from, and that interest continues to be sustained by my passion for popular culture, in particular, cinema. As Stuart Hall (1990: 222) states: "We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific." I was born in Ballyshannon, county Donegal, a small town on the estuary of the River Erne feeding the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean in the north-west corner of Ireland. The town is bisected by the river and joined by a bridge that is the only road link you can take into or out of Donegal without crossing the border into Northern Ireland. The border lies five miles directly east along the course of the river. From a very early age I was aware of the importance of lines on maps and the territorialized spaces and identities they helped to create, the mobilities they restricted and facilitated. When I was nine years old the Troubles in Northern Ireland were beginning to get increasedcoverage on television. Although I lived acrossthe border in the Republic of Ireland, these representations of the island where I had my home filled me with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Excited by the notion that places like Derry, only sixty miles away, were being seen all around the world, and anxious because I thought the Troubles might move from being on our television to outside our door. 1 While the Troubles across the border and the Vietnam War dominated the news narrative on television, in the local cinema, westerns, war films and Elvis musicals were the regular fare. So when The Fighting Prince of Donegal (O'Herlihy, 1966) was advertised, I quickly forsook the Wild West for this representation of my own place. The story of Red Hugh O'Donnell, a sixteenth century Donegal chieftain who fought against the English colonisers, starring the British actor Peter McEnery and produced by Disney, showed me castles and countryside I didn't recognise as being part of the landscape of Donegal (Figure 1). I was however very willing to suspend disbelief as these representations of my place flickered across the big screen and seared into my memory. I continue to wonder why this cinematic geography of my own place had such an impact on me years after I knew the film had not been shot in Donegal but still retained for me an element of essential Donegal-ness. Perhaps it had something to do with the mention of the place I was from in a big screen story that would travel all around the world. This memory is one of the first instances where, for me, film, geography and identity coalesce. In the light of the research I am now engaged in on Los Angeles it is probably easy for me to misremember or reconstruct ideally the impact of another film viewed at the local cinema about eight years after The Fighting Prince of Donegal. Chinatown (Polanski, 1974), starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, also found an important place in my memory (Figure 2). Thinking back I realise that one of the many features of Chinatown that stayed with me was the focus on the developing urban landscape of Los Angeles, a place I had never visited, but one that somehow seemed more familiar to me than the cityscapesof Derry and Belfast. The Troubles, my own cultural identity, and my age, restricted my ability to visit these cities across the border but the cinema, apart from the price of admission, placed no 2 such restrictions allowing me to travel to the imagined spaces of America's cinematic cities, an often twice-weekly occurrence for almost ten years. What made Chinatown (1974) stand out was the lush use of colour together with the downbeat ending, suggesting there was something out of kilter in this film. I was left with a strange sense of unease, not just about the film's content but also by the film's form. The place, Los Angeles, seemed to declare itself in the brightness of the colour to be the film's main story and the identity of the central detective figure seemed to be tied to his navigation of the spaces of the city. I had been gripped by what Cawelti (1992) describes as the 'generic transformation' of a 1930s private eye film from recognizable black and white to the vivid brightness of a 1970s reconstruction of a 1930s location. What the colour, together with Jerry Goldsmith's edgy music, made me aware of was the importance of the locations, not just as a backdrop to the action, but also how they served the functions of character and metaphor. As I have reviewed the film regularly in the intervening years it became more apparent to me that the growing awareness of my own sense of place was inextricably bound up with the images I had seen of far away places, in the local cinema and on television, in magazines and newspapers, and in the 'official knowledge' of the geography textbooks in school. I seemed to recognise these places as well as, if not better than, aspects of my home landscape. I moved to London in 1986, settling in Canterbury the following year where I had an economic mobility not afforded my father and his nine siblings who became part of the Irish diaspora in England and America. However, since the death of my parents, and the sale of the house where I was born, I am conscious now of my reluctance to name Ballyshannon as home. My emotional geography has changed. I now have two 3 children of my own and a partner who has ties with Cyprus, England and Ireland. While I don't long to return to the country of my birth I am fascinated by the shifting versions of mobility and identity that impact on my own life.

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