Larry Gottheim: Entanglements

Entanglement, by Larry Gottheim

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Sunday October 12, 2025, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Larry Gottheim

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

https://link.dice.fm/Yb3bc3dbdff6

Renowned filmmaker Larry Gottheim returns to Los Angeles Filmforum with a classic film and the LA premieres of two new digital works!

Larry Gottheim taught film-making and cinema aesthetics at Binghamton University until 1998. This was a program he started in the late 1960’s, the first regular undergraduate program dealing with film as a personal art. His early silent films such as FOG LINE, DOORWAY, BARN RUSHES are widely known. In the 1970’s he made ELECTIVE AFFINITIES, a set of 4 long films that explore complex relationships between sound and image. While still formal and concerned with sound and image, some later films include material that would ordinarily be seen in a documentary mode (MACHETE GILETTE.... MAMA.) His many years’ involvement with Vodou in Haiti led to a video work CHANTS AND DANCES FOR HAND. His works have been included in numerous museums, festivals and other venues throughout the world. https://www.larrygottheimfilms.com/

Natural Selection

1983, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 35 min.

My own vision is superimposed on the free creative work of others. My friend the Swiss/Austrian artist Alfons Schilling uses his sculptural viewing devices to experience landscapes around Binghamton as though his vision was different from the normal human one, for example if his eyes were wider apart, or if he were a cyclops, or they were connected to a space not the one he inhabits. My students at the same time film him and the nature he is looking at, but we cannot see what he sees. Two friends, one Japanese and one American, read their poems as the other tries to translate. Some of them improvise in a large space in a ruined building where they only think to break the windows, and climb out one. In discussions with the students about where we are headed, the translation issues lead us to think about glossolalia, speaking in tongues. We eventually go to Montreal, where we are invited to the laboratory of André Roch Lecours, who is studying the relationship between glossolalia and the brain. Noah improvises a lecture in a made-up language that is subjected to the same computer analysis that is done in the laboratory’s research. Within this nonsense language a Swedish phrase, or something like it, is discovered: “I love you.”

I edited the film adding my own material, some from Darwin texts, some from New Mexico petroglyphs, sounds from the Beethoven house in Bonn and some words of Schoenberg. The figures of Alfons and Roch become avatars of my self. Noah is a mock professor. There is some connection between the alteration of normal vision and of normal speech.

Entanglement

2022, video, color, sound, 24 min. Los Angeles premiere!

An exhilarating cinematic train ride at the speed of sound through a quantum landscape. Music. The dance of death. Do you remember? Phil Spitalny and his All Girl Orchestra. Pianist Alfred Cortot. Deadly serious, but comic.

A Private Room

2024, video, color, sound, 10 min. Los Angeles premiere!

The story of quantum Alice and quantum Bob. Words, and music. A film within the film. What is in the mind of an autistic baby? An animal baby. What is in the mind of Bob and Alice? The pathos of Bob and Alice. Looking for my ghost.