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It’s one of the unspecified goals of Los Angeles Plays Itself that, by incanting the names of these and other neglected films, such films may come to live again and be seen by new audiences — a task one hopes will soon be taken up by one of our local festivals or revival venues. (Though it’s worth noting that Bless Their Little Hearts is scheduled to screen later this year in CalArts’ new REDCAT cinema space inside the Disney Concert Hall downtown.) In the meantime, Filmforum, Los Angeles’ oldest extant exhibitor of avant-garde cinema, has stepped up to the plate and made a retrospective of Thom Andersen’s own earlier films the debut program of its fall season (and the first under its new director, Adam Hyman). In addition to the extraordinary Red Hollywood — which boldly upturns the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Communists persecuted by the HUAC didn’t succeed at introducing Communist ideals into their films — the program also includes Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974), a thorough canvassing of its subject’s career as a motion-picture pioneer and his use of ingenious animation techniques to give new onscreen life to his celebrated zoopraxography (whereby a series of still photos taken in rapid succession are used to document a moving subject). There are two early Andersen shorts on tap as well: the curiously titled “— ———” (1967, co-directed with Malcolm Brodwick), a desultory collage of color, shapes, movement and nonstop rock music; and “Olivia’s Place” (1966), in which a single 200-foot load of film and the Big Jay McNeeley recording of “There Is Something on Your Mind” are used to casually evoke the space and mood of a nondescript Santa Monica diner. All evidence of an extraordinary career in need, much like those films spotlighted by Los Angeles Plays Itself, of wider acknowledgment.

Los Angeles Plays Itself screens on Wednesday, November 5, at 7 p.m. at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater and again on Thursday, November 13, at 7 p.m. in the Lucas 108 screening room on the USC campus; admission to both screenings is free. Filmforum’s Thom Andersen retrospective runs November 2–9 at the Egyptian Theater. See Film & Video Events for more information.