The most important recent avant-garde films made in Los Angeles have attempted to hold cinema and Southern California in a common focus. Works by James Benning (Los, June 22), Pat O'Neill (The Decay of Fiction, June 29), and Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself, June 3, 13) have brought the geography of the region to bear upon the nature and history of film as a medium and cinema as a social and economic system. These works were anticipated by a number of films made in Los Angeles in the 1970s that similarly investigated the impact of geography on the cinema (and attempted) to use some of the techniques of structural film to diagnose the media myth of the region. This era came to an apogee with Fabrice Ziolkowski's L.A.X. Progressing from the daytime aerial approach to the city to its nighttime finale of the seedy reality of present-day Hollywood, L.A.X. is a disabused, skeptical rendering of the city's grittier underside, the noir realities behind the sunshine.