Vatican to Vegas: Director’s Cut - A live presentation by Norman Klein

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Vatican to Vegas: Director’s Cut
A live presentation by Norman Klein

Sunday April 27, 2025, 3:00 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057 
NOTE THE EARLY START TIME

Tickets: $20 for both programs today, $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
Link: https://link.dice.fm/Rb61a7ecf0b4

In person discussion following the screening with Norman Klein and Tom Leeser

After a dinner break, there will be an associated program of short films with additional guests Courtney Stephens and Chris Peters.

Narratives of distortion are not new. Artists have been using the history of perception to understand their surroundings for centuries. Norman Klein’s cult classic The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (2010, 2023) traces this lineage over four hundred years as special effects are seen as narratives of distortion. Klein coined the term scripted spaces to refer to Elizabethan masques, machina versatilis, Rococo Gizmos and Fireworks, 19th-century magic lanterns and panoramas, and Gilded Age amusement parks from Coney Island forward. In this special director’s cut, Klein excavates cinema’s architecturally engineered illusions, historic CGI effects. Norman Klein’s live narrative mines the links between techno illusion and power within Hollywood's dark noir and blockbuster classics such as scenes from the 1995 BBC-TV special The Mall, Killer of Sheep, Kiss Me Deadly, The Crowd, Ko-Ko’s Earth Control, Punch and Judy, and many more.

Curated by SeeVa Dawne Kitslis.

Norman M. Klein is a critic, urban and media historian and novelist. His books include: The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; Seven Minutes:The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86; The Imaginary 20th Century (also an online site); Tales of the Floating Class: Essays and Fictions in Globalization and NeoFeudalism. Both The Imaginary 20th Century and Bleeding Through were pioneering “database” novels—and docufables-- that now have expanded new editions: Bleeding Through and Vatican to Vegas available online as well (from Transcript).  He also has published numerous essays across the arts, architecture, cultural history; along with museum and gallery exhibitions.

Klein’s work centers on the relationship between collective memory distortion and power, especially in cities, entertainment culture, cinema and animation, within the context of national politics-- and the scientific "imaginary." He investigates histories of forgetting, ironic scripted spaces, and social imaginaries. In his docufables, he emphasizes how facts dissolve into fiction in our daily life. is now completing Archaeologies of the Present: The Dismantling of the American Psyche, on the emergent feudal condition brought on by global shocks since 1973. As Klein often points out in lectures, progress keeps running off the rails, but we must avoid any form of nihilism, now more than ever.

Tom Leeser is a media artist, curator, educator, and writer. He is the Director of the Center for Integrated Media and he is the Founding Director of the Art and Technology Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Tom received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). His film, video, online work, interactive installations, public lectures and performances have been presented at Navel, Harvestworks, Eyebeam, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Echo Park Film Center, The Alabama Center for Contemporary Art, Machine Project, Knowledges at the Mount Wilson Observatory, MassMoca, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, REDCAT, The Kitchen, The Millennium, Siggraph, and film and video venues, worldwide, with support from the CalArts Faculty Development Grant, Art Matters, Creative, Time, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Tom Leeser founded the Provisional Collective in 2012 to explore the intra-action between art, life and media in a technological age. The Provisional Collective’s intent is to explore collaboration through temporary experimental and networked based projects that can occur in public media spaces and alternative cultural and educational institutions. As a multi-relational practice, the collective has engaged in topics such as climate change, radical pedagogies, cultural memory and speculative futures. He is an editor and producer for the web-based journal and curatorial project viralnet-v4.ne