Los Angeles, the City in Cinema:
Alien Nation & Blade Runner.
I discovered these video essays here; the ones about Alien Nation & Blade Runner were my favorites:
Colin Marshall says a lot of interesting things about his city, how it feeds from chaos & movement. These words about LA carry many of the emotions that remain after watching the films:
In drawing up our blueprint for a new metropolis, what can we learn about its layout from sprawling, stateless Los Angeles — whose grotesque size and dizzying variety of form surely repudiate the very notion of an ideal city? As soon as you think you’ve identified how it looks, how it acts, the condition to which it aspires, or even which nation or culture it belongs to, the opposite conclusion inevitably rushes up to confront you mere minutes down the road. [via The Guardian]
Marshall’s beautiful film about LA & Blade Runner: