New Films by Lewis Klahr
Lewis Klahr in Person
Program notes from Thursday, March 20, 1996 at San Francisco Cinematheque
A prolific filmmaker since 1977, familiar with many styles of experimental film practice, Lewis Klahr has established a formidable reputation through his work with found-footage, collage and cut-out animation. In his extensive body of Super-8mm work, including two multi-film series entitled Picture Books For Adults and Tales of the Forgotten Future he initiated the articulation of and developed a signature style which draws on the oneiric, atemporal work of Larry Jordan, Harry Smith and especially Joseph Cornell as well as the pop sensibilities of Kenneth Anger. Rich with an odd, unfixable nostalgia reinforced by seductively layered and yet ultimately irreconcilable images-made-strange, Klahr's films play with distance, the soulless stares and inscrutable blankness of his figures frozen-in-motion reflecting a longing for a past which is - necessarily - irretrievably lost.
(1994); 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes
(1995); 16mm, color, sound
(1994); 16mm, color, sound, 43 minutes
In The Pharaoh's Belt, Klahr engages in a sort of fantastic history of childhood, using the attribution of incoherent significance and the perverse joy of irrational association characteristic of games of make-believe to fashion an allegorical narrative of adolescence. A dizzying melange of resonant images and shocking - yet always coyly astute - juxtapositions of objects, actions and effects, this film uses the familiar and banal to tear open the Pandora's Box of suburban childhood, and revels in the terrors it releases. A narrative of incommensurate events, chronicle of a dream always on the verge of waking into adulthood, it explores an uncharted terrain of linoleum floors and the living room couch, wondering at the mysterious wonders implicit in the birthday cake and the vast unknown expanse of an outer space which equals in wonder any uncharted wild or misty ruin. And as we float through this lost space, breathing only the forgotten ether, these images assume their own sort of truth, naming a story which need not be told, but remembered, and their sense becomes clearer as it becomes less so.
"I have been deeply inspired by Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic Feature. It is the main filmic model for The Pharaoh's Belt with its epic length, use of sound effects, and sublime dynamic of transcendence and horror. A short-hand way to communicate the differences between Smith's masterpiece and my fllm is in the use of the dripping liquids. For Smith the liquids are usually urine or semen, for me mucus and tears."
- Lewis Klahr, 1995
interview with Patrick Friel