Over the past decade, the geography of creative life in Los Angeles has changed. New galleries, museums, black box theaters, independent bookstores, pop-ups, and other venues have rapidly emerged. However, L.A.’s spirit in film and filmmaking has not diminished; it has dispersed. The gravitational center of film culture has moved eastward and beyond.

In a city long shaped by the studio system and premiere theaters, moving-image culture now emanates through artist-run cinemas, living room screenings, rooftops, garages, cemeteries, bridge walls, guerrilla file shares, Twitch streams, and group chats. Its social life is less monumental, more fugitive, yet still astonishingly coherent.

If L.A. once told its story through the mythmaking machine of Hollywood, it now does so in the small, shared rituals of watching and rewatching, editing and sharing, gathering and reacting. These rituals continue to organize desire, community, memory, and struggle.

To track the moving image in L.A. today is to trace how we gather around shared screens: how narrative gets circulated, recut, remixed, and recoded into new forms. Through these montages, Los Angeles comes to recognize itself.

L.A. Review of the Moving Image is dedicated to this inquiry. We approach the moving image—film, video, projection, stream, clip—as encounter rather than content. We are interested not only in what appears onscreen, but where it appears, how it is talked about, and how it changes the people and publics around it.

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Interlude 0 - Winter 2025 (Sold Out) ↴

Issue 0 - Summer 2025 (Sold Out) ↴