Hollywood will re-cut, delay, or undersell its films if it suspects they’ll pose economic or political risks, but it rarely shelves productions entirely. But unfortunately, this is exactly what it did with Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982), a movie about a canine trained to attack black people. Paramount has never domestically released the film outside of festivals, but the American Cinematheque screened it last night as part of its “Movies Not Available On Video” series. And Fuller’s film is a powerful, inspired critique of racism, tapping into the relationship between humans and animals in a way that places it within the ranks of cinematic masterpieces like Au hasard Balthazar (1966).

Why was the movie suppressed? According to the filmmaker’s widow, Christa Lang (who acted in the film and attended the Cinematheque’s screening), a representative of the NAACP visited the set of the film and decided it was racist, threatening Paramount with repercussions. But representative organizations have challenged Hollywood films for years, and few movies are ever shelved; such an explanation seems pretty weak, particularly when Fuller’s film is so clearly anti-racist. It not only presents the dog’s behavior as gruesomely savage and tragic, but the result of conditioning that has corrupted its true nature. Further, the only character who remains committed to de-conditioning the dog despite its behavior is Keys, a black animal trainer played by Paul Winfield.

Although they sound like allegory, “white dogs” are gruesome historical realities, having been systematically abused in order to instill fear and aggression towards people of color. They have been utilized for many years, from slave control to police actions in South Africa. White Dog is adapted from French writer Romain Gary’s novel, who based his story on a dog he owned with his wife, actress Jean Seberg, when they lived in Los Angeles. Paramount offered the story to several directors (including Arthur Penn and Roman Polanski) before enticing Fuller and Curtis Hanson to write their own adaptation.

As a young man, Fuller wrote crime reports and pulp fiction, and although he later became a cult B-movie filmmaker of the ’50s and ’60s, he channeled his interests in lurid films brimming with violence and sentiment that can sometimes bewilder the uninitiated. (As Michael Dare put it in his essay for the Criterion DVD of 1964′s The Naked Kiss: “To an American, Fullerís films might seem like routine pulp melodramas, straight off the pages of dime-store crime magazines. But to a foreigner, those very qualities make his films consummate portraits of America.”)

White Dog foregrounds such elements with its unusual premise, violence, and surprisingly sentimental narrative about a young actress named Julie (a spunky Kristy McNichol) and her love for the dog, which she adopts before discovering its condition. The beginning of the film establishes her attachment through scenes at a vet clinic, a dog pound, playing with the animal at her home, and having the dog defend her from a would-be rapist.

Eventually, however, the dog’s sporadic rage is identified as racially-motivated, and Julie enlists the aid of a Hollywood animal trainer (the grandfatherly Burl Ives) and his partner, Keys, to rehabilitate it. The latter half of the film depicts Keys’ de-conditioning routines as he goes tÍte-‡-chien with the animal in an iron cage, gladiator-style, in an attempt to break the dog’s fear. But such de-conditioning could only confuse the animal more and precipitate its complete psychological breakdown.

That Fuller manages to mine such a thematically rich and effective film from this basic plot is a testament to his considerable talents. His moving camera and staccato editing create an energized film that maintains tension throughout, bolstered by Ennio Morricone’s sensitive, ruminating score. The dog is never anthropomorphized, its raw animal instincts and paradoxical behaviors foreground its mystery yet encourage the audience’s empathy. Conversations about the how the animal was conditioned simply but eloquently convey ideas about racism without offering trite solutions. And the film even works in commentary about animal use in the film industry: when Julie first meets the trainer, his R2-D2 dart board represents his anger at Hollywood’s transition from animal stars to droid feverdom. It’s a unique, provocative, and passionate mixture of elements that develops into a poetic film of genuine philosophical force.

After extended runs in New York, Chicago, and London–among other places–Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) has finally opened in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque. Of course, this bit of irony is completely in tune with one of the documentary’s central theses, that despite being the host city for the film industry, Los Angeles–its people, places, and character–is virtually absent in the movies. Multimillion dollar productions by “tourist” directors, absurdly over-privileged and removed from the realities of the majority of Angelenos (less than 3% of whom actually work in the industry), continue to perpetuate myths about America’s second largest city.

Although I live in Los Angeles, I’m not a native–I moved here about four or five years ago. But I’ve experienced enough of the city that I can readily appreciate the divide between its popular image and everyday reality. Having only recently acquired a car, I spent several years commuting by bicycle and public transit through neighborhoods the SUV-clogged freeways completely elide. I’ve been systematically exploring the city’s rich plethora of authentic Asian, Mexican, and South American cuisines that remain off the tourist maps, in the process finding myself in unfamiliar suburbs where I’m a conspicuous ethnic minority. But even this limited experience has been fun and enlightening; every restaurant, bazaar, or cafÈ has revealed its own community and story.

Writer-director Thom Andersen, however, is a Los Angeles native who teaches at CalArts and has established a reputation for making thought-provoking documentaries. Los Angeles Plays Itself is his latest, a three-hour “video essay” told in two parts: the first catalogues the way movies have represented the city; the second looks at specific films more closely. I didn’t count but there seems to be well over a hundred films cited and several hundred clips, from films noir to feel-good comedies, independent productions to Joel Silver disaster movies. It’s catnip for film buffs, but it’s also a loving and iconoclastic tribute to what is often called “the most photographed city in the world.”

Like the essay films of Chris Marker, Andersen writes in the first person but enlists someone else (Encke King) to narrate, describing the ways the industry has marginalized the rest of the city. “Hollywood” is a place in Los Angeles, but the word is a metonym for the movie industry, an idea-word that obscures the surrounding diversity of Los Angeles. (Andersen suggests it’s no coincidence that the industry was the first to begin nonsensically abbreviating the city’s name.) The industry initially moved to Los Angeles to take advantage of its diverse terrain, making it Chicago or Switzerland, dismissing its unique identity. Movies commonly claim “geographic license” and erroneously connect locations in opposite parts of town, alter and rename sites, and provide the city’s few universally recognizable landmarks (like the Hollywood sign or Grauman’s Chinese Theater).

One of the documentary’s primary subjects is the filmic representation of Los Angeles architecture. Landmark buildings like the Bradbury, Union Station, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house are routinely filmed to represent a variety of places, from hospitals to airports to haunted houses. And the city’s modernist residential homes have become shorthand for the greed and avarice of the countless cinematic villains and psychopaths who inhabit them. The gradual disintegration of public housing in downtown Los Angeles was documented by the film industry over the years as middle class affluence (’40s), shady and mysterious nightlife (’50s and ’60s), and postapocalyptic desertion (’70s and ’80s).

Chinatown (1974) opened the door to a mainstream discussion of Los Angeles history, including an idealization of its past and the search for its “original sin” in order to address the political failings of the present. But Andersen points out that Chinatown takes serious liberties with history. Further, its thematic postulation that it’s better not to know, or act upon, the truth reflects a history “written by the victors in crocodile tears,” promoting a deflating cynicism toward social issues. The water politics that sustained Los Angeles were no secret history, but a public history of political campaigns and popular votes. Similarly, the history of police brutality in Los Angeles (idealized in the TV series Dragnet) was no cover-up a la L.A. Confidential (1997), but scandals emblazoned on the front pages of the newspaper. The astonishing future of Blade Runner (1982) may impress with its dystopian excess, but it makes no effort to explain how or why such a society could come into being.

Such examples are cited by Andersen to illustrate the way genuine political engagement is commonly softened or redirected by movies in order to replace real conflicts with romanticized (sentimental or cynical) recapitulations. Race riots and public transportation battles are reduced to nostalgic spectacles and conspiracy theories rather than probing representations of history.

Andersen therefore concludes his film with an example of authentic, indigenous Angeleno cinema–the group of independent black filmmakers in the 1970s such as Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, and Julie Dash, who provided a neorealist wake-up call to everyday life far removed from Hollywood’s isolated dream factory. It’s a moving and poignant end to the film’s passionate plea for a more accurate account of the diverse struggles, hopes, and joys to be found throughout the city of angels.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one of the nation’s premiere film restoration institutions, and they’re currently screening a series of restored films. Last night, they showed one of the most renowned of American independent films, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, completed in 1973 but unreleased until 1977. Burnett made it while he was a student at UCLA, shooting on 16mm with nonprofessional actors on weekends for an entire year, and edited it with a fine assembly of classic musical recordings.

Accordingly, music rights have kept it from being commercially released, making it a film that has been referred to more than it has been seen–despite the fact that it was one of the first selections of the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Fortunately, Milestone Films have been sorting out the legal issues for several years now, and UCLA’s Ross Lipman has fully restored the film and blown it up to 35mm for an eventual theatrical and DVD release.

Lipman spoke before the screening, and talked about the unique challenges of restoring independent films, largely related to the fact that independent filmmakers rarely have the financial resources to ensure quality control at the labs that process their films. Hollywood studios can reject and tweak a virtually infinite number of prints, making minute adjustments to exposures in scene after scene, whereas independent filmmakers usually have to contend with whatever results they’re given. Even famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Lipman noted, had to settle for inferior lab work done on his films late in his career.

Because of this, restorationists have to decide whether to go back to a film’s original camera negative (if it exists) or dig through the various prints that have been actually screened, a process that can involve surprising subjectivity. Before the UCLA screening, Lipman projected samples of Killer of Sheep‘s original print beside his new “restoration,” and the clarity and definition of the new print (developed in direct dialogue with Burnett) was clearly superior.

As for the film, it deserves every bit of the acclaim it has received as one of the few authentic, sensitive, and complex portraits of inner city life in Los Angeles. In some ways, it reminded me of the semi-autobiographical works of Terence Davies, the British filmmaker whose emotional memory films are constructed as dramatic vignettes layered with evocative music from the era. But Burnett’s film is less austere and tableaux, his charming and observational scenes of everyday life in Watts are more spontaneous and documentary-like. The film’s style has been compared to neorealism, but Burnett claims to have discovered postwar Italian films after making his feature.

Killer of Sheep describes the existential struggles of a meat-plant worker who attempts to raise a small family on his meager salary without having to acquire money through the desperate and illegal means that lurk on the edges of his community. But it’s an ongoing struggle that takes its toll on his emotional well-being, dampening his spirit and making it difficult to relax, enjoy life, or maintain a relationship with his wife. “What do you think you are, middle class?” a friend chides him, but he fervently argues that he’s definitely not poor; his ongoing gloom, however, makes his defense virtually moot.

If this sounds depressing, it’s not, largely due to Burnett’s ability to highlight warmth, humor, and unexpected moments of compassion. There are many scenes involving children at play–exploring dark cellars and dirt lots, jumping from roof to roof in public housing–that are lively and joyful; revealing moments of dialogue that allude to the simple pleasures of life; and true-to-life moments of endearing irony. In one scene, two men buy a second-hand motor and labor to load it onto a truck; exhausted, they leave it on the edge of the truck bed, and when they drive off, the motor promptly crashes to the ground and tumbles down the hill; the two men simply gaze through their rearview mirrors.

The characters’ battle for economic stability and freedom can, in fact, seem so daunting that it’s tempting to read Burnett’s recurring images of the sheep factory–hanging animals, prepared and processed–as a metaphor for the systematic way in which the poor are dispirited. As Thom Andersen notes in his excellent documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, “The protagonist has a job: he is the killer of sheep. But a job can break your heart, too.”

The characters are eccentric, unpredictable, and complex. Conversations over coffee, post-dinner relaxation, afternoons of mechanical repairs, and good-natured teasing define much of the film’s running time. Arguments over schoolyard fights or an unexpected flat tire, or the hopes shared in a living room dance are conveyed with vivid authenticity, and each of the performers exhibit a profound naturalism before the camera.

Many of the performers were friends of Burnett’s who appeared in his first student film, Several Friends (1969). At UCLA, Lipman also screened this short work, and Burnett’s talent for making ordinary events teem with drama (three men argue about how to move a washing machine through a door) was already strikingly evident. One can only hope that this film–along with many of Burnett’s subsequent works–will accompany any future DVD.

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News update, Spring ’07: Milestone has finally secured the commerical rights to the film and will be distributing it theatrically in the US this year, with a Charles Burnett DVD box set forthcoming.