Well Then There Now

Muscular, patriarchal images of comic book superheroes from yesteryear are illuminated on a light box and juxtaposed with tactile skill.

Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen gets his own story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets boy!

Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character's moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.

"Helen of T is my contemplation of aging. The third episode of Sixty Six, a projected 12 film collage series that is a mythopoetic splice of classic Greek Mythology and Mid 60's Daylight Noir. The scent of elliptical narrative lingers in the air, as vividly colored 60's comic book figures thread their way through iconic photograph settings that are often black and white and often of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. A pop associational mindscape where texture and and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It's my paradise lost-- a place that can't exist yet always will." --Lewis Klahr

"Ichor is the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. Ichor is the first episode of Sixty Six, a projected 12 film collage series that is a mythopoetic splice of classic Greek Mythology and Mid 60's Daylight Noir. The scent of elliptical narrative lingers in the air, as vividly colored 60's comic book figures thread their way through iconic photograph settings that are often black and white and often of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. A pop associational mindscape where texture, color and and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It's my paradise lost-- a place that can't exist yet always will." --Lewis Klahr

Rain themed Klahr film.

Three romantic entanglements play out in the three 'Nimbus' videos, which extend Klahr's interest in constructing almost legible narratives — but doing so in formalist terms that complicate and enhance the traditional pleasures of stories. The trilogy's closer, 'Cumulonimbus,' is a movingly mature account of grief with a puckish sting in its tail. – Chris Stults, Film Comment

"My most comprehensive working through of who this Deep Sea Diver figure is that has periodically haunted my collage animations from the first one I ever created through the last two decades. A mythic investigation of the outsider in American culture. Created as a complimentary counterweight to the series’ title film and finale, Daylight Moon." - Lewis Klahr

A year in the life of an American gambler and con man circa 1963. A diaristic montage full of glimpses, glances, decaying ephemera and elliptical narrative. An abstract crime film and, like many other crime films involving larceny, a sensorial exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism. An impressionistic collage film culled from a wide variety of image and sound sources that fully exploits the hieroglyphic essence of cutouts to ponder what appropriation and stealing have in common. Definitely the longest continuous film I’ve ever created.—Lewis Klahr

Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, the film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines.