Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Greg Allen directs us to this great little 1972 documentary about British urban planning theorist Reyner Banham puttering around LA, musing on its unique eccentricities, failures, and charms.
Banham plays everything with bemused befuddlement, eating a pineapple sundae while he interviews “painter and photographer of the local scene” Ed Ruscha in a giant convertible at the drive-in, or innocently engaging the security guard about why he can’t cut through the ur-gated community of Rolling Hills.
It can boggle, too, though. When ruminating on the city’s preference for stand-alone homes to larger multi-story housing estates, Banham actually says about Watts, “even the ghetto people have nice, little houses.