Sep
25
|
An
evening with Lewis Klahr
Los Angeles premieres!
New York <> Los Angeles
N.Y. and L.A., King Kong versus Godzilla. Two silents, two trilogies,
the nineties to the zeros, all local premieres.
Currently based at the California Institute of the Arts, renowned filmmaker
Lewis Klahr brings several new films to Filmforum.
The program includes:
Green ‘62 (1996, 6 min. silent)
A curved restaurant window on the Bowery-- a portal to an older New York.
The Aperture of Ghostings (trilogy, 2001, 12.5 min., sound)
the trilogy includes:
Elsa Kirk (5 min. 1999)
Catherine Street (3 min. 2001)
Creased Robe Smile (4.5 min. 2001)
In the mid 1990’s I unearthed three photographic contact sheets
of 3 different women in a thrift store in the East Village. Only one was
named and dated-- Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 ‘63, but all looked like they
were from the same photographer and time period. There were 12 images
per sheet of these Models/Actresses and I found myself intrigued by the
strong sense of fiction and document in these photos. At first, I was
unable to translate these images into collage animation. So I reversed
my usual process and began making xerox enlargements of the sheets which
became backgrounds for a series of flat collages. Gradually, these
became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style
of the completed trilogy---an approach that I had intuited when first
attracted to the potential of cutouts two decades before, but had never
been able to capture on film.
A House Is Not a Home (2004, 16mm, 15min., b&w, silent)
By Travis Preston & Lewis Klahr
with: Joan Macintosh, Marissa Chibas, Henry Stram, Andrea LeBlanc and
Jeff Williams.
“A House Is Not a Home uses 1940’s trance films, an indigenous
genre to Los Angeles, as a jump off point. A guided improvisation shot
on a Saturday morning and afternoon, our challenge was to create a psychodrama
with trained as opposed to amateur actors. On the editing table we discovered
our “story” and that the modern house (circa 1965) that served
as our set had become as important a character as any of the performers.”
-- Lew Klahr
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003-04, 33 min, color,
sound, color)
Two Days to Zero (2004, 23min.)
Two Hours to Zero (2004, 9min.)
Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1min.)
Music by Glenn Branca an excerpt from “The Ascension” (1980).
Film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival “Just A Minute”
program.
A feature length narrative
compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration
until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told 3 different ways
concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately
following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy,
art world sanctioned term for stealing) from 4 issues of an early 1960’s
comic book version of the then popular, American TV show “77 Sunset
Strip”.
More on Lewis Klahr:
Called the “reigning proponent of cut and paste” by critic
J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, master collagist Lewis Klahr has been
making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental
films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the
United States and Europe. New York’s Museum of Modern Art
has purchased four of Klahr’s films for their permanent collection
and curated 3 one person shows with him since 1989. Klahr has also been
included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American
Art (1991 & 1995). His epic cutout animation “The Pharaoh’s
Belt” received a special citation for experimental work from the
National Society of Film Critics in 1994. From 1995 to 1997 Klahr’s
shorts (“Altair”, “Lulu” & “Pony Glass”)
were included in the New York Film Festival. Lulu was commissioned by
Copenhagen’s Gronnegards Theater for their critically acclaimed
production of Alban Berg’s opera that ran in August 1996. Klahr’s
“Calendar the Siamese” was included in the 1997 New Directors/New
Films series as a featurette. Klahr’s series “Engram Sepals”,
a feature length sequence of seven collage films was the subject of an
Image Innovators program at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater
in May of 2000. The Rotterdam Film festival commissioned Klahr to create
“Two Minutes to Zero” for a series of 10 one minute films
produced for the 2004 festival. Klahr premiered two new series at
the 2004 Toronto and New York Film Festivals. In the latter he presented
a one person show. Klahr is a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow and has also
been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the N.Y. State Council
of the Arts, Creative Capital, the N.Y. Foundation of the Arts, The Jerome
Foundation and Creative Artists Public Services.
“Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific film artists
of his generation. Intensively archeological in his approach to autobiography
and cultural ephemera he created two major series in the eighties and
nineties- PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS and THE TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE.....
J. Hoberman has called Klahr “ the reigning proponent of cut and
Paste.” one reason the casual viewer might find surface resemblance
to the work of experimental animators like Harry Smith, Stan Vanderbeek
and Larry Jordan. But Klahr more appropriately belongs to the lineage
of filmmakers like Anger, Harrington, Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists
who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood
while forging permanent departures through radical form. And like Jacques
Tourneur, Klahr is a creator of atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood
and setting but ontological terrains where event and emotion register
with archetypical power and dreamlike intensity.”
- Mark McElhatten , curator,Views From the Avant-Garde, N.Y. Film Festival
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Lewis
Klahr's Elsa Kirk |
