Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
It's not easy for me to watch a film that's shot in London. I become overly wrapped up in the backgrounds and stop paying attention to the story. A quick establishing shot from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2008) which is incidental to the plot leads me down a dreamy passageway of wondering how a car was brought into the turbine hall of Tate Modern, the opening dialogue of The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950) features a plethora of directions and street names that I know like the back of my hand, and starts me playing my own psychogeographical games, instead of following what's happening.
It's also interesting to consider what London means when it's on film. Is the film trying to elicit feelings of tradition and Britishness, or is it presenting a portmanteau of classes and accents? What is the film saying by using London as a backdrop? Are the characters poor? Are they rich? Why use London, why not another location? These are important questions regarding the choice of location, and they're often overlooked. For some people they're inconsequential. They don't care that the film they're watching is set in New York, but is using Vancouver as a stand in. Or that the New York they're watching is all constructed from sets in a studio. And why should it matter?
The choice of the location, and the use of that actual location can present a character unto itself. I would argue that Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) is a far richer film precisely because of its use of New York as a real location. In addition to that, there is a story there that doesn't need to be told via exposition. What you're looking at onscreen is the accidental capturing of a city at a very specific point in its history: New York as morally and economically bankrupt. We all know that watching a documentary will teach us something about its subject, that's the whole point. But what is far less considered is the fact that we can learn something from fiction: that the recording of a specific place at a specific time is invaluable. It's more than just background, or scenery, it's a story. Don't believe me? Go watch the New York of 1928 in Speedy (Ted Wilde, 1928), particularly the Coney Island sequences, and tell me it's not fascinating.
The next time you find yourself watching something filmed in New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, or London, or anywhere, allow your eyes to drift away from the characters talking about stuff in the foreground, and let them come to rest on those streets, people, signs, cars and buildings in the background. There's gold to be found in there.