A still from Thom Andersen's short Get Out of the Car. (TIFF)

By Lee Ferguson, CBC News

"I thought it was going to be just a tiny little film, really just about billboards," Thom Andersen says of his stunning new work, Get Out of the Car. Short, sweet and fizzy as soda pop, the film starts small. It's only as the 34-minute short draws to a close that you realize that it's about much more than billboards -- it's an impassioned tribute to the city Andersen calls home.

The film is structured as a roving, on-the-fly tour of some of Los Angeles' most overlooked signs, billboards and murals. In short: static shots. Andersen's camera captures them in all their (often faded) glory - the sizzling stick of dynamite drawn on a wall of a nightclub known as La Boom; the hypnotic neon of open-all-night massage parlours and burger joints; the vibrant primary colours of various Latino religious murals; and the remains of the pale yellow faade of a beloved 1950s diner once known as Harvey's Broiler.

As the camera records these sights in quick succession, snippets of on-the-scene noise can be heard off-camera. There is Andersen's wry commentary, on subjects ranging from the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim baseball team to a misspelled "Goodies" sign. Then there are the unsolicited, often amusing statements made by people walking by, one of whom tells Andersen, "When you make a movie about something, call me."

"It's kind of a film about absence," says Andersen in Get Out of the Car. The picture is never less than breezy, unfolding to an array of pop music performed by Los Angeles musicians, but it is also an essay film, in the same style as the more sprawling Los Angeles Plays Itself. In both cases, the images conspire to show a side of the City of Angels that is rarely captured on film.

The director, who is probably best known for directing a previous TIFF favourite, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), is most animated when discussing the historical sites he loves. He describes a graffiti-marred church that appears in Get Out of the Car.

"That building was actually designed by Rudolph Schindler, one of the great architects of Los Angeles in the 20th century, and it's his only public, non-commercial building - the only one that he built in his career here. It was originally called the Bethlehem Baptist Church -- it was done for a fairly small Black congregation in South Los Angeles."

After describing the building's tumultuous history in vivid detail, Andersen adds: "That building is threatened with destruction, not because anyone wants to tear it down, but simply because of neglect and deferred maintenance."

The topic of neglect crops up again, as Andersen describes a print essay he's written to accompany the film. In it, he criticizes "the way in which the cultural leaders of the city neglected [the art] that's indigenous to Los Angeles," using the problematic history of L.A.'s famed Watts Towers as one example.

"I think in the 30-plus years the city has been in charge of the towers, they've spent maybe five million dollars on restoration efforts, which is woefully inadequate," Andersen says. "It's nothing compared to what they spend to buy a painting for an art museum, which is identical to a painting that you could go see in any other city in any other museum in the world. Whereas, the art that's really of Los Angeles is not valued."

These concerns are never made explicit in Get Out of the Car, and yet they inform every frame of the film. At one point, a passerby can be heard asking, "What are you doing, taking pictures?" to which Andersen replies, "We're just trying to document what's left."

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