Date: 25 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags: London Film Festival
LEWIS KLAHR: ENGRAM SEPALS (MELODRAMAS 1994-2000)
Monday 25 October 2010, at 7pm
London Tate Modern
Collage artist Lewis Klahr introduces Engram Sepals, his celebrated sequence of seven films which traces ‘a trajectory of American intoxication’. Appropriating the imagery of pop culture from the aspirational 1940s through the free-loving 1970s, Klahr’s cut-out animations draw us into a dreamlike world of intrigue, anxiety and lust. A surreal and atmospheric epic propelled by an evocative soundtrack featuring Frank Sinatra, Morton Feldman, Mercury Rev and The Stooges.
Lewis Klahr, Altair, 1994, 8 min
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals, 2000, 6 min
Lewis Klahr, Elsa Kirk, 1999, 5 min
Lewis Klahr, Pony Glass, 1997, 15 min
Lewis Klahr, Govinda, 1999, 23 min
Lewis Klahr, Downs Are Feminine, 1994, 9 min
Lewis Klahr, A Failed Cardigan Maneuver, 1999, 15 min
Lewis Klahr’s work has been featured in three Whitney Biennials and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is a faculty member at CalArts, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, and was ranked 4th in the Film Comment avant-garde poll of this decade’s most important filmmakers. The Wexner Center, Columbus, recently presented a retrospective of Klahr’s films and contributed towards the preparation of a DVD box set.
Curated by Mark Webber and presented in association with The 54th BFI London Film Festival.
Lewis Klahr will introduce a screening of new work at BFI Southbank on Sunday 24 October 2010.
PROGRAMME NOTES
LEWIS KLAHR: ENGRAM SEPALS (MELODRAMAS 1994-2000)
Monday 25 October 2010, at 7pm
London Tate Modern
ALTAIR
Lewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
“Altair offers a cut-out animation version of colour noir. The images were culled from six late 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and then set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky’s Firebird (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged, leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist’s story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above, but instead a fascination with the colour blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s.” (Lewis Klahr)
ENGRAM SEPALS
Lewis Klahr, 2000, USA, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
“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.” (Lewis Klahr)
ELSA KIRK
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
“In the mid-1990s I unearthed three photographic contact sheets of three 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 quite moved by the strong sense of aspiration in their poses, by the poignant blend of fiction and reality. At first, I was unable to translate these images into collage animation. So instead, I began making Xerox enlargements of the sheets that I turned into a series of flat collages. Eventually these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style of the completed [work] – an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of cut-outs two decades ago, but had never been able to capture on film.” (Lewis Klahr)
PONY GLASS
Lewis Klahr, 1997, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
“Pony Glass is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen’s secret life. In this 15-minute cut-out animation, Superman’s pal embarks on his most adult adventure ever as he navigates the treacherous shoals of early 1960s romance trying to resolve a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. A three-act melodrama – each act has its own song – filmed in my signature collage style that ‘unmasks’ our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do.” (Lewis Klahr)
GOVINDA
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 23 min
“A three act countercultural coming of age melodrama told from a generational rather than individual point of view. Beginning with appropriated student, Super-8 footage of a 1970s alternative high school and finishing with footage I shot a month after college graduation of my brother’s hippie wedding, Govinda charts a path from innocence to too much experience.” (Lewis Klahr)
DOWNS ARE FEMININE
Lewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
“Lewis Klahr’s Downs Are Feminine unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr’s oneiric collages graft 1970s porn of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping / Architectural Digest décor (varicoloured crab-orchard stone foyers, modacrylic sunbursts, jalousie windows and orientalist metal scrollwork), interior states where characters despoil themselves in Quaalude interludes of dreamy couplings. In this out-of-touch realm, touching is intelligence gathering for a carnal knowledge that will never attain its platonic ideal. The whole atmosphere is pervaded with euphoria, a hopelessness without despair, a contentment beyond longing.” (Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival)
A FAILED CARDIGAN MANEUVER
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
“Children in a garden of outsized fruit dream of food and love, then grow up to have unhappy office love affairs in the glamorous Manhattan of the late 1950s.” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)
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