Lewis Klahr
A striking elaboration on a signature style, with “story” all but evacuated, Circumstantial Pleasure’s six episodes proceed less like an album of potent recollections and more like a stream of agitated consciousness.
An associative montage with color flicker accents that riffs off the mythology of hedonistic musicians and seedy Hollywood hotels. The song is by my good friend Bryan Senti who performed under the moniker of Ex Mykah for this his pop Lp debut.—L.K.
Music by Dick Connette from his album, Too Sad for the Public Vol. 1: Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade. Suzzy Roche sings the vocal. Dick’s lyrics were inspired by the reknowned photography book, Wisconsin Death Trip.
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.
“The Occidental Hotel is a “city” film—I was inspired to emulate the Surrealists’ sense of wandering, of flaneury, of the way a hotel and its rooms is a temporary resting place inhabited by many many people, a shared public/private space. I am interested in a creative geography of the city I've constructed. For instance, the front of the hotel is from Berlin, its interior was photographed in Copenhagen. The film offers the elliptical “scent” of espionage films (largely because of its Berlin locations) and offers that genre’s lubricating sense of voyeurism, danger, and sexuality. My source materials are Mexican comic-book figures, and these urban photos I snapped on my honeymoon with my wife Janie Geiser in the summer of 1996.” —Lewis Klahr
Muscular, patriarchal images of comic book superheroes from yesteryear are illuminated on a light box and juxtaposed with tactile skill.
"Saturn's Diary is just that-- a diary of the God's mundane, earthly existence, including his busy romantic life, during the first 4 months of 1966. Here the comic book noir characters and L.A. landscape of Ichor re-emerge. In the film's final section, as representation is replaced by the abstraction of silence and pure color flicker, Saturn disappears, and the film transforms into a color diary." --Lewis Klahr
This cut-out animated collage picks out the detail to artfully expose the types and tropes of Hollywood crime thrillers with a dadaesque dynamic.
"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 eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It's my paradise lost-- a place that can't exist yet always will." --Lewis Klahr
"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
Music Tom Recchion Cast: Henry Stram, Kate Valk, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Zippi, Kevin O’Brien
“Kiss the Rain and The Street of Everlasting Rain are part of The Rain Couplets, a new subset of my ongoing Prolix Satori project. Like my other Couplets, they grapple with romantic love, time, and the nuances of repetition.”—Lewis Klahr
An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn’s early 80’s film script, “A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes”. I consider “Well Then There Now” a “list” film since Zorn’s text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image, but a playful one.
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
April Snow is a couplet juxtaposing two pop songs by The Shangri-Las and Bruce Springsteen
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
This is a film that explores the two sided-ness of the comic book page. Although I’d been wanting to make this film for many years, I couldn’t resolve the technical challenges with 16mm. However, Digital Video’s sensitivity to low light allowed me to use a lightbox to harvest the superimpositions created when the two sides of a comic book page are backlit. Another “Couplet” from my ongoing Prolix Satori series.
Lewis Klahr has started a new series of short animation films under the title of 'Couplets'. The project is intended to eventually result in a feature-length animation film. The theme is love, and each part focuses on a pop song. Wednesday Morning Two A.M., the powerful opening of this huge project, tells the story of a lost love. The music is by The Shangri-Las.
“False Aging expresses a sense of lost time, of not moving in step with the rest of the world. In one sequence Jefferson Airplane's Lather asks the question, ‘Is it true I'm no longer young?’ Time makes us prisoners locked in ourselves, like the a small yellow bird who slips behind the back of a playing card, then comes back out in front of it. In rapid alternation, they make a kind of thaumatrope, that spinning parlor trick that suggests a sense of movement in the flapping wings of a caged bird. Here the birdcage has been replaced by chance, underscoring the momentary illusion that the bird is free." - Genevieve Yue
Lewis' first digital film from 2007, a precursor for his feature-length series Circumstantial Pleasures
An tactile exploration of World War 2 comic books through the abstraction afforded by a magnifying glass.
A crime story told two 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 four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American television show 77 SUNSET STRIP. Music by Rhys Chatham ("Guitar Trio"). - Lewis Klahr
Same formal approach as with the War Comics– but this time to Baseball Cards– with a completely different emotional result.
"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 feature-length narrative crime film compressed two different times into two separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American television show 77 SUNSET STRIP. Music by Glenn Branca (an excerpt from "The Ascension"); film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival's "Just a Minute" program. - Lewis Klahr
Part of a feature length narrative compressed 3 differnt times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized (The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy). 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".
"Lewis Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered. In Daylight Moon, he reaches even further back, to try to recall the moments in which a small child configures the world out of patterns of visual fascination, a mode of seeing that relies on touch and the feel of things rather than deep space. One of his most abstract films, Daylight Moon rarely reveals a human figure. Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime" Tom Gunning
A trilogy centered on photographic contact sheets of three different women from the mid-Sixties. Klahr builds imaginary settings for each: Elsa Kirk (99) has the trappings of film noir while Creased Robe Smile (01) is the closest the filmmaker has come to making a Hollywood musical.
Crafted from contact sheets found in the 1990s at a thrift store in the East Village.
The dead body remembers. The Tibetan book of the dead meets film noir. An elliptical narrative of adultery and corporate espionage set to a score by Morton Feldman and shot in high contrast B&W. There's a glimpse of Eternity in those deep, luminous blacks. The title film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's.
Children in a garden of outsize fruit dream of food and love, then grow up to have unhappy office affairs in the glamorous Manhattan of the late 1950s.
A three act (a song an act) melodrama about the coming of age of the American counterculture in the 60's and 70's as a generation moves from innocence to experience; idealism to disillusion to attempted re-integration. Highlights include rephotographed super 8 home movie footage of an alternative high school and a full blown hippie wedding. The climactic film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's.
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.
"Seemingly in a hyperglycemic fugue state, a boy goes on a domestic Odyssey as his living room becomes an interstellar macrocosm that contains all the dangers and wonders of the mid-century popular imagination." - Chris Stults, Film Comment
Per Mark McElhatten, it "unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations."
"Arguably the definitive portrait of the postwar America of secretly toxic dreams and treacherous surfaces," is how critic Michael Atkinson describes Tales of the Forgotten Future. Klahr’s breakthrough series traces an alternate history of 20th-century America in a collection of 12 diverse shorts. From the nuclear paranoia of The Organ Minder's Gronkey to Hi-Fi Cadets, where JFK is employed as a janitor in a neighborhood high school, Klahr's lo-fi animation style astutely captures the anxieties, dreams, disappointments, and promises of our recent cultural history. (wexarts.org)
“Her Fragrant Emulsion is an obsessional homage to the ’60s B-film actress Mimsy Farmer. The film’s visceral collage images act as a metaphor for sensuality and move in and out of sync with the soundtrack to evoke the distancing and intimacy cycles that are common in love relationships.”—Lewis Klahr
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."
Calendar the Siamese is the story of Roger Simmons, a downtown musician in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Roger believes that if he just had a year to concentrate on his composing, he could turn his life around. In desperation to buy time, he risks his life by selling a slice of his liver on the biological black market.
A decade ago, Klahr and several Wooster Group all-stars improvised their way 'through a series of photo shoots trying to determine exactly what a "Diptherian" is. Here's the first definition - an elliptical narrative of what could become an ongoing serial of feature length duration.' (LK)
A personal love story of the artist’s life in New York City
This aint no Pixar. This is aint no Disney. This aint no foolin around. ANXIOUS ANIMATION presents six contemporary film artists who take us into surreal worlds of delirium and paranoia The reigning proponent of cut-and-paste, LEWIS KLAHR nourishes intensely private visions on the compost heap of collective fantasy through old magazines, comic books, and cocktail iconography.Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of loss, JANIE GEISER simultaneously creates and deconstructs fantasies through doll-like figurines, cut-outs, and found objects in her cryptic narratives.JIM TRAINORs handmade animations explore the inner lives of animals that appear strangely self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.The Bay Area collective of RODNEY ASCHER, SYD GARON, and ERIC HENRY conjure diabolical visions with digital savvy, accompanied by the manic music of Buckethead and DJ Q-Bert.
Marietta' Lied is an animation set to Korngold's exquisite song from his opera Die Tode Stadt. The piece uses cutouts of German cabaret performers from 1935 to render in mythic shorthand the tragic story ...
Same address, different buildings. “Put the rope in the can.” Mark Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius) and I became friends because our sons were classmates. He played me his new album and I showed him some of my recent films and we got excited about collaborating. This is the result. —LK
