Thom Andersen

Biography

Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965), Olivia’s Place (1966), and --- ------- (1967, with Malcolm Brodwick). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge’s photographic work. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he completed Red Hollywood, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. Their work on the history of the Blacklist also produced a book, Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs, published in 1994. In 2003 he completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, a videotape about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. It won the National Film Board of Canada Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, and it was voted best documentary of 2004 in the Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll. He has taught film composition at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.

Directed

1. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004) — Director
2. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975) — Director
3. Red Hollywood (1996) — Director
4. The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015) — Director
5. Get Out of the Car (2010) — Director
6. Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams (2015) — Director
7. Reconversion (2012) — Director
8. A Train Arrives at the Station (2016) — Director
9. The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014) — Director
10. --- -------- (Rock and Roll Movie) (1967) — Director
11. Melting (1965) — Director
12. Olivia's Place (1974) — Director
13. California Sun (2015) — Director
14. Act Without Words (1964) — Director
15. California Here I Come (2017) — Director

Also appeared in

1. Class Relations (1984)
2. Twenty Cigarettes (2011) — Self
3. The House, The True One and The One That Follows, Is Yet to Be Built (2019) — Voice-Over