Disneyland is not a film location, but a carefully planned venue laid out according to the tenets of narrative placemaking, an urban design philosophy that connects architecture and space through storytelling.

Robert Benton's elegiacal neo-noir showcases both his stellar cast of aging movie stars, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon and James Garner as well as the modernist architecture they inhabit in order to highlight Benson's vision of a decaying, ruthless Hollywood wrapped up in facades of elegance and grace.

World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.

When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011, with volumes on Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Tokyo, the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles, with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography, continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011, thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using, reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them, our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux. 

The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century, Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures, from Chinatown to Forrest Gump, Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.



This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills, demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness, as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.



Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors, iconic locations, thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features, as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.



A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Nicholas Ray, Michael Mann and Roman Polanski, World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.

 

On its reception, Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) remained insufficiently explicit for some critics, who lamented instances such as the pan shot that takes us away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) in bed together: ‘Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time, however, the camera coyly drifts over to an open window, their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood’. This response is certainly understandable, and recalls a similar rallying cry from Rose Troche's 1994 film Go Fish: ‘What would you rather our collective lesbian image be? Hot, passionate, say-yes-to-sex-dykes or touchy-feely, soft-focus sisters of the woodlands?’ Guadagnino, in making a mainstream, high-profile adaptation, has, in the eyes of some critics, opted for the ‘touchy-feely soft-focus’ route. However, I would like to suggest that the film locates its explicitness in its sound design. This clever strategy is used to clearly convey actions which are not shown directly on screen. The film is filled with the sound of clothing slipping on and off of bodies, and with the sound of bodies in contact. In the scenes in which Oliver fellates Elio, there is audible sound design that articulates the action taking place. Drawing on work that discusses the importance of sound, audio design and affect, I would like to counter the suggestion that Call Me by Your Name is overtly coy in its display of sex. By attending to the details of the film's sound design we can see that it deliberately evokes the affect of pornography in order to amplify the film's explicitness.

Rather than being a ‘blueprint’ statement of instruction, and following propositions made by Thomas Leitch, adaptation screenplays are ‘recipes’ that both record a ‘doing’ and serve as a performance space of engagement with production teams. This is explicable in terms of how they propose a new enargeia by way of clear narrative idea that they frame through quasi-recursive recontextualization of both the literary field and the specifics of originary texts and then express via an integrated set of linguistic acts by way of axiological statement of intentionality for a film of a particular sort. The progression of this logic is explained through exploration of a seminal instance of Basque literature-to-film adaptation of Bernard Atxaga’s book Obabakoak, written as a screenplay for the film Obaba by Montxo Armendáriz.