ABSTRACT
In the film LA Story, the central character Harris Telemacher is looking to impress a female journalist working for The Times newspaper, who has come to write a piece on Los Angeles. They are both in front of a painting in an art gallery in Los Angeles, the camera fixed on them from the vantage of the painting so that we do not actually see it. With Harris’s goal to impress the journalist, he begins describing what is going on in the painting, getting more and more absorbed, moving closer to it, walking back and moving closer again: he talks about the set of people who are being depicted, saying that each character has its own story, that there are onlookers peering from a doorway at a man and woman entranced by one another, that the puppy is probably superfluous but that you have to forgive such things with these kinds of paintings, and so on. He finishes his interpretation by saying that when he comes across a painting like this he gets emotionally aroused. The camera angle then changes so that we now see the backs of Harris and the journalist, Harris then moving away slowly to the side while gazing at her. The journalist is left looking at a huge, completely red painting with some vague dark red splodges.
