A documentary by Thom Andersen. Rating unavailable. Plays Wednesday and next Thursday, June 8 and 9, at the Pacific Cinémathíƒ ¨que

As a long-time Vancouverite and ex-Montrealer, I am used to living in cities that, on-screen, usually pretend to be someplace else. This is a reality that I have somewhat grudgingly come to accept.

Not so Thom Andersen. This proud Angeleno makes the rather astonishing claim that the geographical heart of the studio empire must also deny its true identity.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 169-minute documentary consisting almost entirely of clips taken from Hollywood films, painstakingly describes the ways in which the city that movies built has been delegitimized in celluloid.

To an outsider, some of the director-archivist's complaints might seem a tad quirky. His extreme partiality for certain modernist homes and equal antipathy toward others, for instance, will likely strike some viewers as more a matter of personal taste than universal truth.

Happily, Andersen's other pet peeves are more solidly grounded.

The clips he appropriates to show how the movies have tried to turn a surpassingly horizontal city into a vertical metropolis are extremely well chosen, documenting Hollywood's attempts to create a West Coast New York that can never be.

Even more poignant is the director's account of the ways in which the funky film noir locales that populate the moviegoers' collective unconscious have systematically fallen to the wrecking balls of developers who are bound and determined to expand L.A.'s downtown-Andersen considers the use of these two initials to be insulting, by the way-in directions that leave the locals stone cold, at best, and frequently hostile.

How the L.A. police department has been cinematically sanitized provides Los Angeles Plays Itself with its most volatile-and convincing-material. Interestingly enough, the corruption and brutality that characterized the force throughout most of the 20th century have not been entirely obscured by establishment filmmaking, the arrogance of the LAPD being present in even the most "positive" depictions of this frequently frightening organization.

Ironically, some of Andersen's strongest themes-the quasi absence of ethnic L.A.; the systematic cold-shouldering of the flat urban squares that are usually seen only from the heights of Hollywood-are not well covered, for the simple reason that motion pictures situated in these neighbourhoods are so painfully rare. (Although one does wonder why he didn't include footage of the "dingbat" apartment houses found in Tamara Jenkins's 1998 memory piece, Slums of Beverly Hills.)

Los Angeles Plays Itself is a cinematic polemic, but it's the kind of polemic that invites everyone to hoist a cudgel. In other words, it's great fodder for postscreening conversation.