<\/p>\n
LEWIS KLAHR: ENGRAM SEPALS (MELODRAMAS 1994-2000)
\nMonday 25 October 2010, at 7pm
\nLondon Tate Modern<\/strong><\/p>\nALTAIR
\nLewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cAltair<\/em> offers a cut-out animation version of colour noir. The images were culled from six late 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan<\/em> magazine and then set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky\u2019s Firebird<\/em> (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets<\/em>, the narrative is highly smudged, leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist\u2019s story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman\u2019s 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.\u201d (Lewis Klahr)<\/p>\nENGRAM SEPALS<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 2000, USA, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 6 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cThe 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.\u201d (Lewis Klahr)<\/p>\nELSA KIRK<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cIn 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 \u2013 Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 \u201963 \u2013 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] \u2013 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.\u201d (Lewis Klahr)<\/p>\nPONY GLASS<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 1997, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cPony Glass<\/em> is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen\u2019s secret life. In this 15-minute cut-out animation, Superman\u2019s 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 \u2013 each act has its own song \u2013 filmed in my signature collage style that \u2018unmasks\u2019 our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do.\u201d (Lewis Klahr)<\/p>\nGOVINDA<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 23 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cA 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\u2019s hippie wedding, Govinda<\/em> charts a path from innocence to too much experience.\u201d (Lewis Klahr)<\/p>\nDOWNS ARE FEMININE<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cLewis Klahr\u2019s Downs Are Feminine<\/em> unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr\u2019s oneiric collages graft 1970s porn of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping \/ Architectural Digest<\/em> d\u00e9cor (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.\u201d (Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival)<\/p>\nA FAILED CARDIGAN MANEUVER<\/strong>
\nLewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cChildren 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.\u201d (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)<\/em><\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2010","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}