READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE
Thomas Comerford, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 42 min
Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked / Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and ‘Indian Territory’. In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape – as well as the consequences – which have accompanied the transformation of the New World.
www.thomascomerford.net

FLAG MOUNTAIN
John Smith, UK, 2010, video, colour, sound, 8 min
In Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a display of nationalism is taken to its logical conclusion. Moving between macro and micro perspectives, Flag Mountain sets dramatic spectacle against everyday life as the inhabitants of both sides of the city go about their daily business. (John Smith)
www.johnsmithfilms.com

WHY COLONEL BUNNY WAS KILLED
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2010, video, b/w, sound, 27 min
Triggered by the writings of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, a distant relative of the filmmaker, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people. (Miranda Pennell)
www.mirandapennell.com

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SUBLIME PASSAGES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SHUTTER
Alexi Manis, Canada, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shutter tracks the rising sun, the lengthening shadows and the darkening day of a total solar eclipse. Shutter is a formal exploration of the phenomenon of the sun eclipsing objects in the natural world. Inspired by footage of friend and amateur astronomer Andreas Gada’s 16mm recording of the 1980 total solar eclipse, this work captures the beauty, complexity and terror of the shifting light that precedes and accompanies an eclipse. Shadow, focal variance and illumination of earth-bound nature conspire along the course to the incomparable moment of totality. (Alexi Manis)

DRIFTER
Timoleon Wilkins, USA 1996-2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
Drifter is the title; it’s essentially a collection (memoir) of footage dating back from 1996 to the present. The title, the theme, is drifting; mentally / physically. People who’ve drifted into and out of my life, and the visual themes (clouds, snow, highways, trains, oceans) that (finally) tie all my various Bolex-Kodachrome escapades together. Soft movement across the screen. My own wanderlust is in there as well. (Timoleon Wilkins)

SHRIMP BOAT LOG
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 6 min
Shrimp Boat Log, the first reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boats. I started keeping track of these boats in 1994 when I first began visiting Seabrook Island, South Carolina, for family vacations. I’ve returned to this spot many times since, making a series of underwater, cameraless films there (the What the Water Said series), and always continuing to watch for the shrimp boats. I filmed these images during the summer and fall of 2006 and cut them – using Leonardo’s Notebooks as guide – over the next several years. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

BLUE MANTLE
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min
blue mantle was shot along the Massachusetts coast, on Cape Cod and Cape Ann and around the South Shore. Images include paintings by Winslow Homer and illustrations from Harper’s Weekly accounts of disasters and rescues at sea. The main musical sources are Debussy’s ‘La mer’, Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ and ‘Lowlands,’ a sea shanty. Texts range from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Thoreau to Melville to various other 19th-century (and earlier) writings. The only cinematic representations supplementing my own footage are Edison’s 1900 A Storm at Sea and a model-size Eidophusikon (a pre-cinematic 18th-century theatrical spectacle described in its day as ‘moving pictures, representing phenomena of nature’). The 40 miles of sea between Chatham and Provincetown came to be called an ocean graveyard due to the thousands of wrecks that occurred there during a time when sea-going vessels were the primary means for ‘bringing man nearer unto man’ (Longfellow). Today, among the not-invisible memorials and markers in Gloucester and along the cape of maritime histories, one can also find the remains of The Frances, a ship sunk in a December gale in 1872 and still visible at low tide at a popular Truro beach (most people walking by assume it is some kind of strange rock formation). US Life Saving Service men dragged the boat from the bay across the Cape to the outer beach and rescued all aboard. The captain died several days later from the effects of exposure and is buried in Truro. There are hundreds of stories like this one and many more with much more tragic outcomes. Cape Cod was also the site of two major developments in transatlantic communication: the termination point of ‘le Direct’, a 3200-mile submarine telegraph cable laid between France and Massachusetts in 1869, and the location of the first US wireless transmitting station established by inventor Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century. Such historic moments of human progress striving to overcome nature’s vastness stir the imagination. (Rebecca Meyers)

TRAVELLING FIELDS
Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Shot in Northern Russia, Travelling Fields is the third film in Inger Lise Hansen’s inverted perspective trilogy, following Proximity (2006) and Parallax (2009). The films focus on a particular phenomenon occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography. In these films sections of the landscape are documented by moving the camera one frame at the time, along a track. As each of the earlier films focus on one particular location, Travelling Fields offers a more complex viewing as it moves between different topographies and locations in the Kola Peninsula.

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EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Daniel Barrow, Canada, 2008, live performance, 60 min
Awarded the 2008 Images Prize at its premiere, Daniel Barrow’s ‘manual animation’ combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage, collecting personal information and then traces pictures of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloguing efforts obsolete. The garbage man is a failed artist who fears becoming subject to the grip of something overwhelming. This animation traces his attempts to slow down and creatively reflect, in a process of coming to terms with his own self-loathing and fear.
www.danielbarrow.com

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry. Yeah, that title makes me a little nauseated, too. And I would be lying if I said that wasn’t one of the many feelings that came to the surface in the midst of Daniel Barrow‘s show last night; funny, though, how nausea can feel so satisfying when paired with a helluva lot of other emotions. Barrow’s tour de force is notable in the way it combines many things: live narration, video, music, drawings and an overhead projector. Yes, a real, live overhead projector, unseen since your eighth grade biology class, on which Barrow layers and manipulates multiple transparencies. It is not the mere novelty of the tool that makes Barrow’s work worth it, but rather his complete and utter mastery of a machine more commonly considered a bygone clunker than a medium for high art. During a Q&A after the performance, he described a nun-cum-professor at his art school who had been giving the same, refined lectures for nigh on 50 years, conducted via slide and overhead projectors. Barrow was inspired to riff on her method as a parody, but soon found that the medium sincerely appealed to the ‘control freak’ and isolationist in him (‘I don’t like to work with crews, or other people, really,’ he admitted). The projector is the vehicle for Barrow’s harrowing, dreamscape-like tale of an erstwhile garbage man, art school dropout and social outcast. He spends his nights picking through residents’ detritus and peeking through their windows; he’s inspired, in his own earnest and perverse way, to create a special kind of phone book based on these findings. Each citizen will get a page of info and illustration; it’s an ‘art project for everyone,’ our garbage man intones. For reasons that remain hazy but may include childhood trauma and psychic revenge, it is slowly revealed that a serial killer stalks our stalker, the malicious and psychotic foil to his harmless voyeurism. But by the time this oddball is thrown into the mix, the audience is too thoroughly entrenchedin Barrow’s elegant, elegiac projector world to put up any sort of fight. Every Time I See Your Picture has a plot, but it is cushioned and obscured by the very narration around it, which is at once a diary entry, a cautionary tale and a philosophical tangent. A lot of it makes very little sense; some, in that illogical way personal confessions have, makes a frightening amount. Above all, though, this performance is ultimately enjoyed in the craft of the man and his machine. If the animation potential of an overhead projector has never entered your brain, see this and prepare for revelation. Barrow is fluid and holds perfect time; his narration matches the sweeping movements of transparencies placed and replaced, and the original score by Amy Linton buoys you up and into the garbage man’s musty-sherbet-toned world. I sat three rows behind Barrow (whose projection outpost is ensconced in the middle of the auditorium), and can heartily recommend this position. You watch the master make the product. It is a bizarre live experience, unlike any I’ve seen, unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. (Caitlin McCarthy, Willamette Week)

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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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BREAK ON THROUGH
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

GHOST ALGEBRA
Janie Geiser, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word ‘algebra’: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts. (Janie Geiser)

STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING
Phil Solomon, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min
Still Raining, Still Dreaming tracks film’s ‘wind in the trees’, those ostensibly open-air spontaneities of flickering shadows and leaves that a whole tradition of avant-garde artists (including Solomon) has tried to return to, and shows them as a Silicon Valley programmer’s machinations in a hollow, digital city from the post-apocalypse where the images again don’t always register fast enough for the camera. Buildings bend and catch up as mirages. Leaves fall and children skate by, and any video-game player wonders, as usual, whether they’re gone from the program altogether once they’ve left the screen. Solomon films only the urban after-effects of a natural world of seasonal and solar changes never seen. It’s his best Grand Theft Auto film yet, as the portrait of a world going on over the graveyard of an abandoned civilization. (Johnny Lavant)

SO SURE OF NOWHERE BUYING TIMES TO COME
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 text ‘Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk’ are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window panes of a tiny shop, in a tiny snow covered town, on a mountain top in Colorado: a pocket watch, a postal scale, a small mirror, a stop watch, some stamps, a knife, some bandages, an hourglass. Time is short. Time is running out. The time left is all the time we have. (David Gatten)

FORMS ARE NOT SELF-SUBSISTENT SUBSTANCES
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min
The film was borne of an interest in ‘medieval’ perception through images and philosophy, the latter taken in particular from Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ and ‘Metaphysics’, which were highly influential within medieval scholarship. It uses certain passages and concepts from these works (also the origin of the title) on the themes of substance and being. It includes medieval imagery from the Cathédrale Saint Lazare, Autun – the stone carvings attributed to Gislebertus, depicting humans at the mercy of beasts and devils – and colour plates from a reproduction of the Bestiary ‘M.S. Bodley 764’. The sounds of ‘medieval’ bells, recorded in Autun and at the Basilique Saint Denis are also important. There is an interest in themes of animality and flesh through the imagined medieval sensibility. The proximity to their own bodies heightened, paradoxically, by their aspirations toward purity of spirit through the denigration of the flesh. This imagery is juxtaposed against live ‘beasts’; animals filmed in such a way as to attain a sense of distance / strangeness akin to the medieval illuminations and carvings. The idea of ‘substance’ is thrown into relief through playing with the possible ways of understanding the term through the words of Aristotle, or the tactile / haptic apprehension of the screen imagery, filmed mainly in close up. Stone, flesh, milk and blood are filmed as ‘beings’ in their own right, with thecloak of language removed on order to reveal a reality of ‘things’ ordinarily hidden from view. The tension between ‘medieval’ perception and our own is explored. Due to their remove from us, the words of Aristotle or the Bestiary imagery ignite another way of perceiving within the film. Ordinary things become out of the ordinary, on the way towards the essential. (Samantha Rebello)

FACTS TOLD AT RETAIL (AFTER HENRY JAMES)
Erin Espelie, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 9 min
In his introduction to the 1909 edition of ‘The Golden Bowl’, Henry James wrote, ‘My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts retailed … by the given help of some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole business.’ In this film, James acts as the confessed agent, and the glass through which every image is reflected or filtered takes on a kind of consciousness. (Erin Espelie)

COSMIC ALCHEMY
Lawrence Jordan, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
Cosmic Alchemy is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier films and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters. (Jonathan Marlow)

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PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

DE MOUVEMENT
Richard Kerr, Canada, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
As an extension of his Industrie / Industry project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid.
A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm. (Andréa Picard)

MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST
Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, UK, 2009, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of I’m not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn?), all the while moving onward … but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from Dictaphone recordings, old 78s,
hiss and scratches and whines. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com

BRUNE RENAULT
Neil Beloufa, France, 2009, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Brune Renault is a kind of looped fiction that happens in a car sliced in four parts resting on small wheels; basically a sculpture. Since we can open the car, we can make impossible camera shots, moving in and out of the object. The goal of the piece was to have this car cut in four parts to give the illusion of movement, which is a paradox. I wanted the sculpture to mutate into a functional object (real car), once viewers were starting to follow and ‘suspend disbelief’ for the fiction. And then, to lose the fiction and utilise video’s function to mutate into a document about the usual contemporary art sculpture. The impossible camera shots showing the cuts of the cars had to be the disturbing element that betray the fiction, but then again the power of fiction is hard to break down. (Neil Beloufa)

VOT
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2010, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Alimpiev’s videos focus directly on his characters while avoiding specific narrative – close-ups reveal intimate details and personal expressions; moments of awkwardness or tension becoming magnified. Repeated gestures, passing through the group as one, are imbued with new, fugitive meaning. Meticulously staged, the videos trace the simplest of movements heightened to form a collective ritual. Group identity is further emphasised not only by carefully controlled actions and sound, but also through a uniformity of pale tones and muted colours. (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham)

KINDLESS VILLAIN
Janie Geiser, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while battles wage in the waters beyond. Seemingly alone in their island world, they succumb to fatigue and to boys’ games of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet surface, including a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com

COMING ATTRACTIONS
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2010, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24 min
Coming Attractions and the construction of its images are woven around the idea that there is a deep, underlying relationship between early cinema and avant-garde film. Tom Gunning was among the first to describe and investigate this notion in a systematic and methodical manner in his well known and often quoted essay: ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’ (in: John L. Fell [ed.], ‘Film Before Griffith’, Berkeley 1983). Coming Attractions additionally addresses Gunning’s concept of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’. This term is used to describe a completely different relation between actor, camera and audience to be found in early cinema in general, as compared to the ‘modern cinema’ which developed after 1910, gradually leading to the narrative technique of D.W. Griffith. The notion of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing of the audience. At some point it occurred to me that another residue of the cinema of attractions lies within the genre of advertising: here we also often encounter a uniquely direct relation between actor, camera and audience. The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film. (Peter Tscherkassky)

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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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