Date: 24 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags: London Film Festival
LEWIS KLAHR PRESENTS PROLIX SATORI
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Collage artist Lewis Klahr introduces PROLIX SATORI, an ongoing series which appropriates images from comics, magazines and catalogues. A filmmaker since the 1980s, his signature style is saturated in mid-century Americana but addresses universal experience and is resolutely contemporary. Retaining distinctive handcrafted qualities across a recent shift to digital, Klahr choreographs comic book characters in fractured landscapes of patterns, textures and architectural details. Going beyond abstraction and nostalgic cliché, he builds high melodrama from modest means, conjuring elliptical narratives that evoke complex moods and emotions. Within PROLIX SATORI, a new project of ‘couplets’ elicits different atmospheres through repetitions of soundtracks or imagery. An emotive mix of classical, easy listening and iconic pop music carries viewers through tales of lost love and wistful reverie. This screening is a chance to be immersed in the idiosyncratic world of a widely acclaimed artist making his first UK appearance.
Lewis Klahr, False Aging, USA, 2008, 15 min
Lewis Klahr, Nimbus Smile, USA, 2009, 8 min
Lewis Klahr, Nimbus Seeds, USA, 2009, 8 min
Lewis Klahr, Cumulonimbus, USA, 2010, 10 min
Lewis Klahr, Sugar Slim Says, USA, 2010, 7 min
Lewis Klahr, Wednesday Morning Two A.M., USA, 2009, 7 min
Lewis Klahr, Lethe, USA, 2009, 23 min
Also Screening: Thursday 21 October 2010, at 4:15pm, NFT3
Lewis Klahr will present a screening of his early films at Tate Modern on Monday 25 October.
PROGRAMME NOTES
LEWIS KLAHR PRESENTS PROLIX SATORI
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
This screening marks the UK premier of my new series Prolix Satori. I have often worked in series before – Daylight Moon (A Quartet), Tales of the Forgotten Future, Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000), The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy – but never quite like this. The main difference is that Prolix Satori is both open ended and ongoing, with a variety of thematic focuses instead of a single, centralized one. As the series title suggests, it will include films that are very, very short (under a minute) and films that are feature length. Prolix Satori will also act as an umbrella for various sub-series: this program offers five films from The Couplets (Wednesday Morning Two A.M., Sugar Slim Says and all three Nimbus films). The Couplets will generally, but not exclusively, organize themselves around the pairing of various pop songs and, just as in the songs’ lyrics, the theme of romantic love. (Lewis Klahr)
FALSE AGING
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 15 min
False Aging is a haunting, evocative, expertly crafted film by Lewis Klahr, using his signature style of animation made with cut-out figures, often from comic books and other nostalgic sources, and a great variety of small objects such as plastic ice cubes and trading stamps. The physical movement in the film, with individual cut-out figures moving in and out of the frame awkwardly, in a crude form of animation, effectively recreates the feeling of daydreaming, or the way one would mull through one’s deepest, least expressible emotional jumbles just before falling asleep. The fact that the imagery is not directly interpretable, not clearly and readily translatable into easily explained symbolism, yet every image in every frame clearly is a swirling vortex of powerful associations, is what gives this (and Klahr’s other films) their peculiar and transcendent power and beauty: they take you on a journey into a strange, powerful and beautiful place, without telling you where you are going or what you will find there, and so they open up many doors into hidden pavilions of feeling, without locking you into an overly narrow and intellectualized explanation of what you are seeing. (David Finkelstein)
NIMBUS SMILE
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
NIMBUS SEEDS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
CUMULONIMBUS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
In this grouping of three related videos on the subject of romantic triangles, Klahr expands his explorations of memory, love, repetition, narrative and loss in surprising new ways until the films build into complex emotional and artistic experiences. His approach to inter-film montage (the interconnected relationship of different films to each other) reaches its fullest expression with these new works. 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)
SUGAR SLIM SAYS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 7 min
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. He gave free reign to create a piece coupled with two tracks together: ‘Lump’ and ‘Hold Me Like A Nurse’. (Lewis Klahr)
WEDNESDAY MORNING TWO A.M.
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 7 min
An intimate and poetic study of the darkness of love and the beauty of texture. Wednesday Morning Two A.M. combines figurative realism with pure abstraction to remind us of the value of the small and the handmade. (Tiger Award Jury Statement, International Film Festival Rotterdam)
LETHE
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 23 min
One of Klahr’s longest films, and one of his most straightforward narrative melodramas, Lethe conjures up the full emotional spectrum and storytelling potential of a film by Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk, even though the only sets and actors are cut-out pieces of paper brought to life by Klahr’s imagination and storytelling abilities. Without sacrificing his signature forms of poetic abstraction and uncanny imagery, Klahr tells a tale ripped out of a pulp novel. An older scientist devises a way to win the love of a beautiful younger woman, and the film deals with the psychic fallout that this relationship rains on the woman. (Chris Stults)
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