Lewis Klahr - The Pettifogger

 

Apstraktni krimić u kojem se re-animiraju slike iz stripova, reklama, fotografija i drugih efemeralija američke komercijalne i popularne kulture sredine 20. stoljeća te uklapaju u priču o prevarantu opsjednutom kartanjem.

Studio Visit with Filmmaker Lewis Klahr


Pettifogger: 1560s, from petty; the second element possibly from obs. Du. focker, from Flem. focken “to cheat,” or from cognate M.E. fogger, from Fugger the renowned family of merchants and financiers of 15c.-16c. Augsburg. In German, Flemish and Dutch, the name became a word for “monopolist, rich man, usurer.” A “petty Fugger” would mean one who on a small scale practices the dishonourable devices for gain popularly attributed to great financiers; it seems possible that the phrase “petty fogger of the law,” applied in this sense to some notorious person, may have caught the popular fancy.—The Etymology Dictionary A year in the life of an American gambler and con man circa 1963. A diaristic montage full of glimpses, glances, decaying ephemera and elliptical narrative. An abstract crime film and, like many other crime films involving larceny, a sensorial exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism. An impressionistic collage film culled from a wide variety of image and sound sources that fully exploits the hieroglyphic essence of cutouts to ponder what appropriation and stealing have in common. Definitely the longest continuous film I’ve ever created.—Lewis Klahr. - www.filmlinc.com/

One fundamental reason for the enormous success of TV’s Mad Men may be found in The Pettifogger, the avant-garde collage-based film gem by Lewis Klahr that gets a free screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox on April 11.
Mad Men revels in superficial symbolism derived from the early ’60s self-destructive hedonism, its non-stop smoking and mid-morning martinis. In a deeper sense, though, the Matt Weiner-created series channels the “optimism felt in early ’60s American culture and the kind of modernity found in The Pettifogger,” says Klahr, himself a Mad Men fan.
Finished in 2011 but set in 1963, The Pettifogger chronicles a year-in-the-noir-movie-life of a petty crook. In his carefully articulated flow of print-based symbols clipped from decades-old magazines, Klahr’s antihero petty crook encounters iconic advertising imagery, chrome car bumpers big as battleships and hard-boiled women who go to their hotel rooms “alone” but maybe not. Days and nights are counted in an endless stream of numbers and playing cards. Familiar symbols appear like ancient hieroglyphs. Time passing is a still life.
The antihero’s images were based on early ’60s Gold Keys Comics drawings of Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo in TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Klahr has even allowed fragments of the typed comic book thoughts to appear in this handsome lowlife’s coiffed hair.
“Like a lot of experimental filmmakers I’m describing consciousness,” Klahr tells me on the phone from the Los Angeles area where he teaches at CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts. (“With the kinds of films I make there aren’t many options” but to continue teaching, he says with a laugh.)
“I’m an associational thinker. I’m interested in the way things layer and filter.”
The Pettifogger’s iconic symbols are drawn from the image bank Klahr assembled first as a child. Born in 1956 he studied in Buffalo in the mid-‘70s.
Isn’t cut-and-paste itself one of the earliest art-making experiences? Childhood is a leitmotif in all of Klahr’s work. Yet sound as much as image connects us with the “hard drive” of Klahr’s childhood.
The Pettifogger floats through the cool jazz pre-rock 1960s where all the hip cartoon dudes did their business amid the glassy tinkle of dubious cocktail lounge life, all sounds Klahr sourced from a live Miles Davis recording in a club.
“In the last 10 years I’ve been organizing things around music,” he says. “Jazz was the cultural dominant form until 1965. I wanted the piece to be driven by that sound.” - Peter Goddard



Artist Lewis Klahr re-animates iconic images from comic books and advertisements to create collage-like films. He chose the BFI London film festival last week to debut his first feature-length collage production, The Pettifogger. Here, Klahr talks us through some of his favourite images from this abstract crime film

As told to Louisa McGillicuddy:
 
'My film chronicles a year in the life of an American gambler and conman circa 1963. This image depicts my protagonist, the Pettifogger, deeply engaged in his greatest passion. The drawing is a comic book version of the actor Robert Vaughn from the hit 1960s American TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (it ran during the James Bond craze). I love to use these comic book characters drawn from TV shows because the likenesses to the actors they portray are so inconsistent – an inconsistency that in this film parallels my protagonist’s occupation as a conman. As you can’t help but notice, various fragments of text balloons and captions are embedded in The Pettifogger’s hair. I could have blacked these out but liked the metaphor they created – that the character’s history is visible in these remnants'


'The Pettifogger is a diaristic, first person montage full of glimpses, glances and the quotidian. This soap dish is the first image in the film and immediately establishes the significance of the everyday. I spent years collecting various gambling imagery for the film, and this was the very first image I found. It was in a photocopied 1950s industrial plastics instructional manual in a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from where I live in Los Angeles. I leafed through the bound lesson pamphlets until I happened upon this image, which I instantly knew would be important to me. I didn’t know how it would be important but the book was only a dollar. It wasn’t much of an investment so it seemed like a good risk'

'The Pettifogger is also a world of decaying ephemera – this has always been an important aspect of my collage films – a kind of overtonal montage that asks you to taste colour and texture with your eyes. But since I began working with digital technology full-time in 2007, I have found the impact of these explorations greatly enhanced. Every pore and abrasion of these analogue relics seems to come even more alive on HD'

'My visual world is an 8x11 universe. A world of miniatures turned into giants when projected on a movie screen. It is a world of transposition and slippage, of collage substitutions: an envelope window becomes an actual window but never stops being an envelope window. My illusions simultaneously assert and unmask themselves, create their own fiction while puncturing and deflating it. For those who trespass here you must beware of the guard dog of believability'

'Swizzle sticks are an important element in the Pettifogger’s alcohol-fuelled jazz world. 1963, the year my film is set, is a kind of pop borderline in American culture between jazz and rock culture. This swizzle stick is my favourite of my collection – it gives off a sublime kind of Joseph Cornell eternal blue when lit properly. When I started creating experimental collage animations back in the early 1980s, the rules were that shadows weren’t allowed unless they were drawn on. But I had no use for this notion of "proper technique". I thought, if shadows were so expressive in so many other kinds of film-making, why couldn’t they work with cutouts? To this day I still look for the expressive value in so-called "mistakes"'

'I found these leaves pressed into a page of an encyclopedia I bought in a restaurant/bookstore on the Massachusetts Turnpike driving from Boston to New York City in the 1990s. Sometimes I keep things around for a very long time in my archives before I can find the proper context to use them. Other times I have no choice, and have to use things quickly. Since I’ve moved to Los Angeles I’ve been incorporating more and more local flora and fauna. But these plants always have to be used on the day collected if I’m interested in the brilliance of their colours'

'The late, great blacklisted Hollywood writer-director Abraham Polonsky stated that all crime films (especially about larceny) are really about capitalism. The Pettifogger is an abstract crime film, an allegory set within this booming period of America. It is an elliptical narrative that stands just out of reach at the edge of consciousness, inducing a fog of reverie pitched somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. But it still is a crime film – one that offers a sensory exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism, something I’ve always been very anxious about. A crime film that ponders, on a formal level, what appropriation and stealing have in common. This bird image appears right at the end of the film, and lends a great sense of summation to the Pettifogger’s life gradually crashing and burning'

'Cutouts have a hieroglyphic essence, an ability to make metaphor out of simple juxtaposition. This blue shirt floats in front of a nocturnal bridge, suggesting the presence of a man unseen (the Pettifogger). The bridge suggests his travel, his unsettled rootlessness. Shorthand and compression – the poetic lifeblood of the elliptical collage narrative'

'I can’t remember where I found this Las Vegas street-scape. (But there’s so much I can’t remember – people usually think my films are about remembering, but they’re really about the inevitability of forgetting.) This large image – bigger than 8x11 for a change – had much to unpack. It figures prominently throughout my film as the Pettifogger makes several visits to this city of luck and chance, opportunity and despair. This photo had many secrets but none greater and more relevant for me as a collage artist than the discovery of the musical group’s name on the marquee to the left of the Pettifogger: The Cutups'





Lewis Khlar's trinket dreamscape

Guy Dixon

For three decades, avant-garde filmmaker Lewis Klahr, a transplanted New Yorker now based in Los Angeles, has been widely regarded as a master of cut-and-paste animation. In his cramped garage, he collects images from old comic books, magazines and catalogues, along with the detritus of life – old keys, a leaf, a pack of playing cards – and assembles them into moving collages.
Although taken from comic books, Klahr is most interested in ordinary-looking characters from TV show comics or movies. “Now things go in the other direction. They go from comic books onto the screen,” he says with a laugh.
Images appear in flashes for a second or two at a time. For example, in his hour-long 2011 film The Pettifogger, playing on Wednesday as part of Toronto’s Images Festival, there are quick glimpses of an illustrated male cutout from a 1960s comic, placed askew and shot with a digital camera.
Next to the man, Klahr puts a female cutout, curvy under a tight jacket, yet drawn equally hard-scrabbled in classic comic-book fashion. Behind them is an old postcard from the Las Vegas strip, or a gas station sign channelling Kennedy-era Americana.
The soundtrack also consists of found tidbits, bits of TV dialogue or snippets of clapping from old jazz albums from days gone by. Klahr – who came into prominence in the late 1970s and ’80s when found footage became the in-thing in experimental film circles – records each ambient sound in a room, accentuating the fact that it’s coming from a TV or stereo.
That roughness is intentional. Klahr’s deceptively simple technique is as much about the raw materials of our culture, the aging paper of comic books and magazines, the useless trinkets (like a cocktail stir stick adorned with a Pan Am logo) that we nevertheless might save. He used to shoot on 16-mm film, but now uses a digital still camera, which captures the textures of the material that much more clearly.
Klahr is after lost memories, including his own. “My relationship to these things is not about nostalgia. It’s really about time,” he says by phone from L.A., where he teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. “I think the most uncanny experience I’ve ever had is this inability to reconcile the past with the present on some level, the discrepancy between that,” he explains. “How things decay and age or pass into a kind of scarcity through age. [That’s]surprising to me on a very gut level, and that’s what the work is exploring.”
Klahr’s films deal with serious adult issues, such as loneliness and longing, rendered as if in a dream. In his short Pony Glass, for instance, he uses cutouts of Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen to explore a young man’s identity (including his sexual identity). In his masterpiece Altair, he does the same from a woman’s point of view, using pictures from 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine. With The Pettifogger, although it alludes to a Rat Pack-type story of petty crime, gambling and womanizing, Klahr notes that the emotions are more about the depression his own father felt when his business collapsed.
“This is imagery that I grew up with,” Klahr explains. “It’s fun stuff, but I’m giving this adult weight to things. And that’s what I’m doing in The Pettifogger. I’m describing something that was quite harrowing to me as a kid.”
He’s achieved large-scale success – his films have screened at three Whitney Biennials and four of them are owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art – but Klahr says it’s the intimacy of film that drew him to it in the first place.
“As opposed to the Hollywood model, it didn’t seem like you had to marshal resources in a big way. It wasn’t going to be expensive. It was something you could do [on your own] ... I aspired to be a writer. I wrote poetry, and it’s a very poetic form. It’s a very first-person form. So it had a lot of things going for it that interested me,” he says.
Far from Hollywood blockbusters, most of his films lack linear plot. Instead, it is merely implied, and sometimes peppered with subtly hilarious details, like when a series of cutouts of 1960s dancing girls is followed by a split-second shot of an X-ray of a man’s foot. ( The Pettifogger’s protagonist clearly has a hard time keeping up with young women.)
“It invokes what dreams are like,” Klahr concludes. “In dreams, all kinds of strange things happen, but it feels like it makes sense in the dream. I think that’s what true about my films.”

 

 

PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS & THE PHARAOH’S BELT:

EARLY FILMS BY ANIMATOR LEWIS KLAHR

False Aging 

How To Drive His Private Dick Wild

By Patrick Brennan

What many non-narrative films lose with lack of conventional story, character, and performance, they make up for with simplicity. What may take a traditional narrative film anywhere from an hour and a half to 3 hours to express, a non-narrative film can relate in a matter of minutes. If you watched Puce Moment, highlighted in last week’s entry, and Sunset Blvd. back to back, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. The two films tell essentially the same story, but Billy Wilder’s film is nearly two hours long, compared to Kenneth Anger’s 6 minute glimpse. Not to say Anger’s film is better, of course. It just has the advantage in one department.

In some cases, simplicity is more of an advantage than others. Without being bound to story and characterization, a filmmaker can be free to express an idea that may be too difficult to construct narrative film around. Lewis Klahr has made his career a constant reminder of this fact. I’m sure he’ll come up again here (his Pony Glass is one of my favorite animated movies, and one I’m excited to write about), but today I’d like to focus on his third film, 1995’s Altair.
Underneath the noir trappings and Stravinsky music of Altair’s collage of late-1940’s Cosmopolitan advertisements and images, astronomical maps, playing cards, and drink menus, Klahr critiques the idea of that women should conform to a beauty standard, and that for women, physical attributes are much more important than any personality traits for success in society. The tools he uses—the aforementioned media, music and mood—manipulate what we feel to reveal just how little the world had changed between 1945 and 1995—and 1995 and today, for that matter. He’s not merely making a film; he’s writing with images.
Klahr himself describes his process as a form of language. “It’s got a lot to do with hieroglyphics: this kind of visual shorthand, storing cultural memory,” Klahr told the Village Voice in 2000. “I’m the kind of person who used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Egyptian exhibit, because I was fascinated by the idea of this string of images forming a kind of sentence; I never took the step to find out what they meant, because I didn’t want to know. It’s the same with Hollywood: This image of a woman, this image of a car, this of a gun, you’ve got a noir in three images.”
In Altair, the woman, the car, and the gun are all there, and the noir is too. The women of Altair are both angelic and dangerous, both the typical good girl and the iconic femme fatale that would appear in many classic noirs. These women are cut from advertisements, and as such, both the victims and perpetrators of the beauty myth. The women in these advertisements are reduced to character types: the perfect housewife, the sex kitten, the concerned mother, etc. These were the only options Cosmopolitan and their advertisers presented to women in the 1940s.
The music Klahr chose is a part of his collage, an extension of the hieroglyphics he uses to speak to us. Beyond matching the noir feel of the film, the “Lullaby” movement in Stravinsky’s 1910 ballet, The Firebird, is a moment when the several of ballet’s characters fall into a deep sleep, bewitched by the titular Firebird. The women of Altair are hypnotized by advertisements, magazines, doctors, their husbands, and society as a whole to conform to the roles to which they were ascribed.
Images of liquor are repeated throughout Altair. Bottles of whiskey, half-empty rocks glasses, and drink menus share the screen with their female co-stars. In one of the first shots of the film, where characters—I use the term very loosely—dance in front of a list of different liquors and what part of the body they affect positively. This list appears several more times over the 8-minute course of the film, always as a partially obscured background to some sort of action. I can’t help but think this menu, joining liquor and the body, is as important to the feel of the movie as any other, suggesting the drunken, abusive husband, the leering barflies, and dulled pain.
There are very few images of men in Altair. In most cases, men are suggested rather than directly represented. However, there are three repeated male characters, who appear in succession several times in the film: a judge, a doctor, and what appears to be a pharmacist. I’m hesitant to assign any image in such a dense film a set meaning, but I looked at the judge as a representative of the government, the doctor as a representative of science, and the pharmacist as a representative of commerce, three bodies that constantly attempt to limit and control women’s bodies. Of course, they could just be characters in the story Klahr has in his mind, or mean something else, or be dadaist unrelated images.
I’m completely willing to admit that there are a lot of parts of Altair I just don’t understand, and may never understand. For example, several times during the film a telegram, the words unintelligible, appears on screen as a background to an action. The judge, the doctor, and the pharmacist frequently appear in front of the telegram. I’m less convinced the telegram has a meaning than that it’s meant to convey a feeling. The image of a telegram is never one that connotes good news to me. In my mind, I associate it with dead soldiers and other tragedies. The image is meaningless, but it still leaves an impression.
Playing cards have certain symbolic significances; they are somewhat closely related the tarot and can symbolize the inescapability of fate. They also represent the seedy underside of a culture based on possession, and the American dream that with one good hand your fate can change. Playing cards appear at random times throughout Altair, and they don’t feel, in this context, at all lucky. There’s no chance of a big break here. There’s no chance you’ll hit 21. There’s just the fact that the women in this story will continue down their terrible paths, without any hope of escape.
The Klahr films I’ve seen deal with conformity. Altair is about the horror of conforming to a beauty standard, while Pony Glass speaks to the anxiety of a gay man in a world still very unwilling to accept him as he is. There’s no more appropriate medium for a nonconformist message than the non-narrative films. Not only is Klahr unwilling to submit to what the society considers normal, he won’t use traditional plotting, character or media in breaking free of this idea. But his movies are incredibly watchable. Non-narrative film can be dauntingly inscrutable, but Klahr’s work never really feels difficult. Klahr focuses on mood, evoking a feeling using familiar images, and while you or I may not understand the meaning, we understand the intent.

Studio Visit with Filmmaker Lewis Klahr on Vimeo.

Pony Glass:

The Allusions - Gypsy Woman:   

The Diptherians Episode Two:

PRETTY TALK by Rachel Kann w/ animation by Lewis Klahr. Beats by Leggo, cuts by DJ LYNK.:

   

Collective Unconscious
[Originally published in Film Comment, May/June 2010]

Even the most dedicated cinephile knows what it’s like to fall asleep at the movies. The confusion upon awakening is akin to the sensation sought by the Surrealists who would walk into movies already in progress and leave once the plot started to make sense. In struggling to find his or her bearings, the viewer becomes an active participant—and since the subconscious is still partially engaged, for a time the movie theater becomes a place for lucid dreaming.
The collage animations of Lewis Klahr can induce a similarly rewarding disorientation. Narrative is present to a greater or lesser degree in his films and videos, but it’s often submerged. The viewer has to search out and construct meaning. Klahr’s films unspool like Delphic visions or vignettes glimpsed in a crystal ball in which dream, memory, and history—and past, present, future, and phantom tenses—are indistinguishable. The necessity of interpretive engagement is crucial to the power of the work.
The materials Klahr utilizes—objects and images culled from mainly mid-20th-century advertising, comic books, and other ephemera of American commerce and popular culture—are often inherently seductive. But his lo-fi animation style ensures that his voice and relationship with the material is always foregrounded. Far removed from the smooth, illusionist techniques of hand-drawn or digital animation, Klahr's collages move in fits and starts. Shooting in his garage without an animation stand to create his arrhythmic visual cadences and elliptical narratives, the filmmaker doesn't so much bring his subjects to life as turn them into hieroglyphs of myth or allegory. In Time Regained, Proust's narrator remarks apropos the difficulties facing novelists attempting to translate the inner life into art: "The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us." Likewise, by basing his art around archeological diggings from the recent past, Klahr fashions reveries that reveal the unconscious of what Walter Benjamin called the "dreaming collective," providing a portrait of American materialism through its own images of itself. Benjamin and Proust are not evoked lightly: Klahr's body of work serves as an Arcades Project for the advertising age and an In Search of Lost Time with a killer backbeat and dolorous melody.
Born in 1956, Klahr grew up in New York and studied at SUNY Purchase and SUNY Buffalo in the mid to late Seventies. Although he encountered the collage animations of Lawrence Jordan, Stan Vanderbeek, and Harry Smith, he was more profoundly influenced by the films of Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, and Ken Jacobs. His eight-part debut collection of Super-8 films, Picture Books for Adults (83-85), features only two cutout animations, Deep Fishtank Birding (83) and Deep Fishtank, Too (85), while the rest are collages of found footage and re-photography. Conner looms large. The montage collision of disaster, masculinity, and war in What's Going on Here, Joe? (85) feels like a pulpier version of A Movie from a child's point of view; and 1966 (84), a wistful, tender portrait of the year from the perspective of a 10-year-old, recalls Conner's gentle memory piece Valse Triste. Klahr's work in Super 8—the format of home movies and living room screenings—establishes a hallmark of his oeuvre: the refashioning of mass-produced industrial images into objects with a domestic, personal resonance. Picture Books for Adults shows how these materials could be used to mold identities and foster wonder and mystery for grown-ups who have not lost their childhood curiosity and play.
With its vivid use of Rodgers and Hemmerstein's "Some Enchanted Evening" and The Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee," Picture Books for Adults also provides an early glimpse of how integral music would become to Klahr's work. It's through his deep and sensitive engagement with the hopes, illusions, and emotions within particular pieces of music that Klahr most clearly emerges as an heir to Conner and Anger. His tendency to group films into series can be related to his coming of age during the heyday of the LP. Like a well-sequenced album, the individual films function effectively on their own but deepen when seen in context. Klahr's next Super-8 series, Tales of the Forgotten Future (88-91), is like an epic double LP, testing the boundaries and possibilities of its format: imagine the ambition and variety of the Beatles' The White Album expressed with the raw, impenetrable punk brio of Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade. Consisting of 12 films, equally divided into four sections, Tales is a sprawling two-and-a-quarter-hour fantasia on the American Century.
Klahr sometimes refers to himself as a "re-animator," bringing "dead" imagery, fashions, and thought processes back to life, while also demonstrating that the outmoded and obsolete are still with us. ("The pastness of the present," he calls it.) Tales of the Forgotten Future conjures these ephemera from out of the past, uses them to travel through time, and arranges them with complete narrative freedom, to swooning, delirious effect. Klahr's material exists on (at least) two levels: as documentary artifacts of of whatever encyclopedia or advertisement they were taken from, and as pure images, which Klahr then places in fresh settings. In Tales, the new contexts often involve outsiders searching for identities in an alien America. Besides several pop songs, the soundtrack is primarily a collage of wind, crickets, mechanical whirs, and other ambient sound. Where music so often grounds Klahr's films, the protean stories of Tales have fewer signposts.
Klahr also overturns the usual flatness of collage by introducing subjective points of view for his protagonists and multiple planes of depth. Point of view acts less to establish greater identification with the characters than to incorporate the grammar of classical Hollywood storytelling. Klahr draws on film noir and melodrama throughout Tales and much of his later work, but genre in Klahr's films carries the force of the remembered, a factor that keeps them from inhabiting only the present tense. Stories are told in ways that mimic the processes fo memory; scene skip from one haunted and iconic scenario to another. Genre is pared to its intrinsic elements and presented as a fever dream. The films circumvent language and defy any attempt to make rational sense of their scenarios. These are truly tales that can't be retold.
The seven-part Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000), Klahr's most widely seen project to date, finds him at his peak in terms of capitalizing on the seductiveness and deceptiveness of his chosen materials. Shot in 16mm, the films are lusher, their color more vibrant, and their sting that much more sharp—aptly so given the theme and trajectory. Engram Sepals starts off with Altair (94), a film of almost unseemly beauty. A delirious swirl of enticing images from late Forties issues of Cosmopolitan traces the downward spiral of a befuddled woman drowning in vodka martinis as society mercilessly puts her through its paces. The resulting sense of lightheartedness perfectly sets up the rest of the series, which circles characters grappling with the American horn of plenty from the late Forties through the Seventies. Faced with the out-of-control materialism of postwar consumer culture, the figure in Engram Sepals seek oblivion through various forms of addiction that get increasingly debauched as the series progresses.
I've heard people describe Klahr's work as "kitsch" after seeing a single film in isolation, but he eschews the easy tactics of irony and camp that can be a temptation of collage animation. His work maintains a tricky and singular tone, and it often takes exposure to several films to get past the surface and grasp the deeply felt critical engagement of his larger project. No matter how far he deviates from the original focus of the materials, Klahr never condescends to their subjects. Engram Sepals reaches its lowest point of debasement and ugliness in Downs Are Feminine. But even in this shag-on-shag tone poem of aberrant figures (cut out from porn magazines) that sleepily violate each other in a Seventies-era domestic setting, the images are infused with a tenderness and empathy that offsets the bottomed-out goings-on with a paradoxical sweetness. At one point, the body of a drugged-out man is awkwardly disended across an eyesore of a living room, and a gloved hand enters the frame, not for carnal probings but to gently stroke his head. It's as if Klahr is inserting himself into the film from several decades' remove, trying to ease the pain of its self-medicating denizens.
In 2007, Klahr began working in digital video, and the change in media seems to have reinvigorated him: in less that two years he has created eight works that inaugurate a new cycle, Prolix Satori. This series differs from those previous in its open-endedness and ability to accomodate a variety of themes. Klahr has said that he could foresee making works for the Prolix Satori project for the rest of his artistic career. As the title implies, some of the series' most salient elements to date are duration (ranging from one to 22 minutes), repetition, and the motif of awakening. Klahr's methods and oeuvre have been described as obsessive, and with Prolix Satori he seems to have found a satisfying form that allows him to play and explore permutations endlessly. (Five of the eight videos are also classified as part of a sub-grouping, "The Couplets." So far these are primarily built around pairings of pop songs, but all deal with that favored subject of ballads: the vagaries of romantic love.)
One of the main developments in the initial batch of Prolix Satori videos is their investigation of repetition. Rhythmically repeating images have always been a central component in Klahr's films, but in recent years he has been increasingly incorporating other varieties of iteration. In Altair, a four-minute excerpt from Stravinsky's The Firebird is played twice, inducing a claustrophobic atmosphere that presents the protagonist's plight as preordained and inexorable. The neo-psychedelic musical backdrop for Downs Are Feminine is Mercury Rev's "Downs Are Feminine Balloon," which Klahr cues up a second time to mirror the character's insatiable hedonism, deflating the cathartic closure of the traditional pop song.
Likewise, Wednesday Morning Two A.M. (09)—one of the Prolix Satori couplets—runs the same song twice, back to back. This time it's the Shangri-Las' "I'll Never Learn," whose off-kilter, mournful syncopation dictates the tempo of Klahr's animation. First, the song accompanies a cutout tale about a woman lamenting a lost love affair. The second time, the visuals consist of a stream of abstract imagery, colors, and patterns. Now, rather than stasis, repetition suggests progress—even a form of mastery. Klahr optimistically rejects the defeat in the lyrics of the Shangri-Las: the film's protagonist is learning. Wednesday Morning Two A.M. has been enthusiastically received, perhaps not only because it's among his most visually ravishing works but also because it's one of the most hopeful.
Klahr's three "Nimbus" videos constitute an even more arresting and sensitive experiment in repetition and memory. Set in Sixties New York, Nimbus Smile (09) depicts the love triangle between a married woman, her husband, and her lover, its wistful action synched up with the lyrics of the Velvet Underground's iconic "Pale Blue Eyes." The second video, Nimbus Seeds (09), which is intended to be shown immediately after Nimbus Smile, uses exactly the same visuals but is set to an ambient soundtrack of rain, footsteps, doors, and snatches of classical music. It's astonishing how different the images feel when combined with a different soundtrack. In Smile, the music provides a narrative through-line that makes the video seem to take place in the present tense, but the Seeds soundtrack foregrounds the abstraction of the material. Its narrative moments now seem to unfold as memories—perhaps beccause the Velvet Underground song makes its absence felt, lingering on in the mind of the viewer. The third entry in the series, Cumulonimbus (10), sets the collage soundtrack from Seeds to entirely new visuals, and it recedes into the background as the visuals come to the fore. Cumulonimbus, like many of the best Klahr films, centers on loss, love, and memory. It recounts a new romantic relationship (taken primarily from Silver Age issues of the superhero comic book The Flash), leading up to what might be considered a surprise plot twist that brings the "Nimbus" cycle to a close on an appropriately ambiguous tone and temporal tense.
In small doses, Klahr's films may seem in a "minor" vein—to refer to Tom Gunning's pivotal 1989 essay "Towards a Minor Cinema," which contained the first serious analysis of Klahr's work. But when considered in its full depth and breadth, Klahr's oeuvre becomes a major excavation of American cultural and personal history. It also functions as a thorough investigation of the uncanny, the alienation of consumer society, and the power and poetics of narrative and music. Above all, Klahr's great subject is time, which certainly explains the exquisitely melancholy tone that pervades his work. He traffics in modes that are pitched just beyond the realm of reason. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, we can find that wavelength and achieve understanding—only to have it slip away as we enter one state or the other. Klahr's films and videos provide a rare opportunity for us to engage with a liminal state of consciousness with our alert mind and to reach those "infrathin" moments that Proust describes as existing outside of time.
ESSENTIAL KLAHR [sidebar]
Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987)
Klahr slices footage of actress Mimsy Farmer from the 1970 B-movie Road to Salina into strips of various shapes and sizes that initiate a chase after an ever-elusive object of desire.
Tales of the Forgotten Future (1988-91)
Greater than the sum of its diverse parts, this 12-film series captures the anxieties, dreams, promises, and disappointments of the American Century, culminating in the poignant 21-minute silent Untitled (The Life of Naomi Lang), which imagines the life of a woman and her milieu by animating images from eight family photo albums that Klahr found in a used bookstore.
The Pharaoh's Belt (1993)
Klahr's first 16mm film depicts the domestic odyssey of a boy seemingly in a hyperglycemic fugue state, his living room becoming an interstellar microcosm containing all the dangers and wonders of the mid-century popular imagination.
Downs Are Feminine (1994)
A cautionary tale without the moralizing, blurring the boundary between bacchanalia and torpor, and impishly investigating zonked-out lives with fascination and concern.
Pony Glass (1997)
Perhaps Klahr's best-known film employs a three-song, three-act structure for a melodrama in which Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen experiences all the anxieties that the Fifties and Sixties had to offer and, after a series of romantic traumas, ends up defending an entirely different type of freedom.
Govinda (1999)
The fulcrum of the Engram Sepals series is a melodramatic freak-out in three acts and one of the most remarkable portraits of the counterculture's rise and fall in the Sixties and Seventies. Built around found footage, home movies, and exploitation films rephotographed off TV screens, it examines whether you can go home again after you tune in, turn on, and drop out. You can, but you'll never see things the same way.
The Aperture of Ghostings (1999-2001)
A trilogy centered on photographic contact sheets of three different women from the mid-Sixties. Klahr builds imaginary settings for each: Elsa Kirk (99) has the trappings of film noir while Creased Robe Smile (01) is the closest the filmmaker has come to making a Hollywood musical.
Daylight Moon (2002)
Hints of a crime drama hand over the generally abstract proceedings in one of the most exhilarating explorations of light, shadow, color, rhythm, and melancholy in recent cinema. It's a virtuosic work of subtlety, seemingly composed of the types of memories Proust termed "impressions," which also carry the weight of existence. The music in the three sections comes from the soundtrack albums of Peter Pan and The Night of the Hunter, and Nick Drake's "River Man."
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003-04)
Three films of dramatically decreasingly length retell the same crime story with identical imagery from issues of 77 Sunset Strip comic books that Klahr waves in front of his static camera. The first time around is a relatively leisurely 23-minute affair set to Sixties SoCal psychedelic folk-rock; the second time is an ecstatic nine-minute Ben-Day ballet accompanied by Rhys Chatham's monumental "Guitar Trio." The narrative compression reaches its end point in the third iteration, one minute long and set to music by Glenn Branca. Pure pop for noir people.
False Aging (2008)
Klahr's most recent three-act piece (the first of the Prolix Satori videos) is a powerful character study tracking the stages in a man's life, from innocenceand wonder to loneliness and bitterness. Perfectly calibrated musical selections reinforce the tragedy of time passing and the wasted potential of even a productive life.
Lethe (2009)
A straightforward narrative film by Klahr's standards, Lethe is a pulpy melodrama that incorporates sci-fi B-movie elements into a story straight out of a Vincente Minnelli women's picture. It also functions as one of Klahr's most sophisticated enactments of the intertwining of Thanatos and Eros, as if the inanimate materials that he is bringing back to life wish to return to their natural state of dead calm.
The Nimbus Trilogy (2009-10)
Three romantic entanglements play out in the three "Nimbus" videos, which extend Klahr's interest in constructing almost legible narratives—but doinog 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. - cstults.net/



Tales of the Forgotten Future
Lewis Klahr, 1988-1991, 131 mins
Part 1: The Morning Films
Lost Camel Intentions, 1988, 10 mins
For the Rest of Your Natural Life, 1988, 9 mins
In the Month of Crickets, 1988, 14 mins
Part 2: Five O'Clock Worlds
The Organ Minder's Gronkey, 1990, 14 mins
Hi-Fi Cadets, 1989, 11 mins
Verdant Sonar, 1989, 2 mins
Part 3: Mood Opulence
Cartoon Far, 1990, 6 mins
Yesterdays Glue, 1989, 14 mins
Elevator Music, 1991, 14 mins
Part 4: Right Hand Shade
Station Dramam, 1990, 14 mins
Untitled, 1991, 21 mins
Untitled, 1991, 4 mins
Light Industry is excited to present a rare screening of Lewis Klahr’s Tales of the Forgotten Future, to be introduced by the artist. An epic cycle created on the tiny, domestic medium of Super-8, the film combines the intimacy of its chosen gauge with the evocative sweep of Freudian dreamwork. It’s a moving collage clipped together out of photos and illustrations from the Atomic Age, reconfigured into a private visual language that speaks of both Klahr’s own childhood and a greater strangeness: how images from another era stand as uncanny evidence for a very different stage of development in the American psyche.
Though located in an avant-garde practice of cut-out appropriation that stretches from Harry Smith, Stan VanDerBeek and Lawrence Jordan to later artists like Martha Colburn and Jonathan Schwartz, Klahr’s work creates a system of representation all its own, quivering between the present and the past, reshuffling that potent deck of icons bequeathed to us by our former selves.
"In the age of industrial sound and light, Lewis Klahr makes special-effects movies that are almost insanely artisanal--one man, labor-intensive cut-and-paste animations that are at once crude and poetic, blunt and enigmatic, as funny as they are inventive.
Klahr is even more involved in the reworking of received images than Hollywood is. For the past fifteen years, the 36-year-old New York-based filmmaker has been collaging material foraged mainly from old magazines into brief, evocative, eccentric movies. What sets him apart from underground predecessors such as Stan Vanderbeek and Harry Smith...is his extreme pragmatism. Not only does Klahr work in Super-8 without an animation stand but when it suits his purposes, he employs the three-dimensional world--using, for example, a dollop of grape jelly for blood.
For Klahr, the Super-8 format has strong associations with home movies and childhood. Still, to create Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987), a homage to the '60s movie star Mimsy Farmer, Klahr used a technique called 'strip collage,' in which bits of cut-up film are glued or taped to clear leader. Some of his other films employ a new form of the photo-comics the Italians call fumetti (which Federico Fellini affectionately parodied in The White Sheik). In addition to pillaging back issues of Life, Klahr photographs actors and integrates their images into his pulpish quasi-narratives amid splashes of color and hieroglyphic thought balloons. (His is a world where sounds are often seen rather than heard.)
There's an obsessional quality to all animation, but Klahr compounds it with a collector's fetishism. Diving into a sea of musty magazines, he dredges up all manner of forgotten icons--fashion drawings, watercolor washes of idealized housing tracts--and imbues them with a secret life. (His child's-eye view seems to preclude simple nostalgia.) Klahr's 1988 break-through, In The Month of Crickets, is a masterpiece of populuxe surrealism that, set in a mysterious hotel-cum-department store, manages to coax a remarkable degree of eroticism out of a few suggestive maneuvers and the escalating soundtrack buzz that gives the movie its title.
Klahr tends to cluster his films in cycles. His first series was called Picture Books For Adults; he's recently completed the twelve-film Tales of the Forgotten Future. Its title an apparent reference to that American utopia prophesized by the ads of Klahr's childhood, the 'Tales' cycle is redolent of fallout shelters, jet-ports, and the '64 New York World's Fair. The Organ Minder's Gronkey (1990), which flashes the date '1957' on the screen, is an economical evocation of nuclear paranoia that suggests both the original D.O.A. and Godard's Alphaville. Hi-Fi Cadets (1990), a small classic during which a TV is emblazoned '1960,' boldly appropriates John F. Kennedy, providing his image with a strange form of afterlife. A cutout JFK wanders into a neighborhood tavern and drinks Mr. Boston with the black patrons until he passes out, alone at the bar. Klahr uses both photographs and editorial cartoons of Kennedy and, at one point presents him as the janitor of what seems to be an all-girl high school where the English class is studying Henry IV. The film's ending is sweetly mysterious-accompanied by celestial music, a young woman (student, teacher, Kennedy's date?) blasts off in an outsized coffee cup into a cluttered, Disneyesque vision of the cosmos.
Other 'Tales' are teenage celebrations of fast cars and hot romance. Cartoon Far (1991) is a moodily psychedelic, flashback-and-moire-ridden noir set to the Shangri-Las' 'Past, Present and Future,' a tormented reworking of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata.'
Klahr's 'Tales' suggests a brief history of the machine age produced at its end. One of the last installments concerns a female aviator; another, untitled, is a generic family history that collages scores of snapshots from the '30s through the '60s: Babies are dandled in kitchens; children celebrate birthdays; bald men and squat heavy-breasted women visit Mount Rushmore or pose self-consciously on the beach. Universal memories proliferate in postcard sites. Yesterday's Glue (1991) arranges fashion models in some sort of space craft and subjects them to various kinds of mechanical sex. (In one daringly organic bit, a viscous drop of fluid appears on one of the photos.)

Elevator Music (1991) is Klahr's X-rated Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a suburban fantasia that makes iconic use of thermostats, high heels, and an outsize box of Jell-O, mixing a photograph with various cutouts and drawings to effect a range of simulated sex acts. Some of the images come from soft-core comix, but what's astonishing is the psychic energy with which Klahr is able to invest them--I mean, after all, they're only pictures." - J. Hoberman (1992) - www.lightindustry.org/

Culture Consumer Lewis Klahr

The Re-Animator

By Michael Atkinson Tuesday, May 16 2000

One of the most evocative, accessible, and culturally aware experimental filmmakers alive and working, Lewis Klahr uses what we—and our parents—have discarded to tap into the 20th-century American spine. Locating a lost, damaged dreaminess in the magazine illos, product ads, furniture catalogs, comic books, and porn of the postwar era that define, whether we know it or not, our shared past, Klahr's films construct archetypal narratives and mood trances out of the middle-class utopia we promised ourselves and never got. In its cumulative effect, his new series, Engram Sepals, echoes his earlier Tales of the Forgotten Future: a visit to the secret closet of ephemeral life, of a pop culture bulldozed as landfill and then "reanimated" as collective remembrance.
"I don't think of myself as an animator," Klahr says. "I really am a collage artist, with all that implies: a need to explore the found materials, to explore history through those materials. It's got a lot to do with hieroglyphics: this kind of visual shorthand, storing cultural memory. I'm the kind of person who used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Egyptian exhibit, because I was fascinated by the idea of this string of images forming a kind of sentence; I never took the step to find out what they meant, because I didn't want to know. It's the same with Hollywood: This image of a woman, this image of a car, this of a gun, you've got a noir in three images."

A longtime New Yorker recently transplanted to L.A., Klahr points to Joseph Cornell, Douglas Sirk, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacques Tourneur, and Kenneth Anger as influences, much more so than collagists Stan Vanderbeek and Harry Smith, defining his own approach as not abstract nor manifestly ironic. "I occasionally try to be funny, but there's a sneering quality to irony which I don't feel. There's no sense that I feel superior to my material." For example, in the desperate sex-wreck Downs Are Feminine (part of the new cycle), Klahr uses depressing black-and-white porn images against photos of '70s decor. "It's profoundly ugly, my worst nightmare, and the people in the pictures never come close to mastering that confident, seductive gaze that you see in most porn. But in making the film, I developed a compassion and empathy for them. I found them beautiful in their self-destruction."
Most of Klahr's films could be characterized as portraits of deranged, unfulfilled consumerist lust, but he insists on a larger thematic picture. "My previous film, The Pharaoh's Belt, came from my reading about an Egyptian pharaoh's bull-tail belt, which was passed on for 3000 years. But for us, nothing persists. When the '60s came, I saw a very big shift away from the way I thought the world was going to be. The world looked different, I didn't like the way it looked. With consumer culture, they always have to change product, and the past is always evaporating away around you. Cars, for instance: About 1965 I stopped caring about new cars, I liked the old ones and the new ones all began to look alike. Growing up, you feel like something escapes you. Everyone has this sense of loss. It's a part of what it's like to be alive. And what it means in the end to face death."

David Bordwell: Lewis Klahr X 3, X 4

DB here:

Last Saturday Lewis Klahr came to Madison, brought by the Starlight Cinema group of the University’s Student Union. He showed two sets of films: The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003-2004) and Daylight Moon (A Quartet) (2002-2004). He’s one of the most gifted collage animators in the American avant-garde, surely the most accomplished since Larry Jordan. Both filmmakers work in the Surrealist tradition, but Jordan seems more drawn to images from nineteenth-century illustration, while Klahr loves US pop culture. As a baby boomer who came of age in the 1970s, he recycles magazine ads, comic books, and book illustrations in lyrical and sometimes aggressive ways.

Tipped off by Tom Gunning, I first encountered Klahr’s work in The Pharoah’s Belt (1993), his most famous film. I also enjoyed seeing his film-within-a-film in Miguel Almereyda’s imaginative Hamlet (2000). At a recent Hong Kong International Film Festival I saw The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy and decided to study it a bit. I contacted Klahr and he kindly sent me the film, along with Daylight Moon, and some lovely work by Janie Geiser, an accomplished filmmaker in her own right. You can get examples of their work on this DVD from Craig Baldwin (himself an extraordinary filmmaker).

Seeing the Trilogy again, I was even more impressed by it. Each of its three parts consists of images snipped out of old 77 Sunset Strip comic books, with each part implying a bank holdup and a chase, but each time the events are compressed more and more. The last episode runs only one minute. “A feature length narrative compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized,” as Klahr puts it.

Don’t try to find a plot. Each episode uses just enough cops-and-crooks iconography to tease us into trying to create a coherent narrative, but it frustrates that in several ways. The images refuse to settle down, slipping and snicking past your eye in an imitation of saccadic glances. The microscopically short snippets recall multitrack sampling. In the Madison Q and A, Klahr called it a “pan and scan aesthetic.”

Sometimes the cartoon panels jerking past the camera create a weird effect of motion. A man dodging into a car with a valise seems to be whizzing off, a woman seems–for only one frame–to wave a sheaf of bills.

The cutting is rapid-fire as well. I’d thought that Klahr had edited in the camera, but he spliced everything. A certain maniacal precision becomes evident when you can actually look at the images on the strip and see the bold shot-changes, like the one crowning this post. The trilogy evokes the rush of a heist film without ever giving us more than glimpses of what the narrative might be. The sense of action hurtling toward chaos is cranked up by soundtracks using roaring guitar music from Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca.

Daylight Moon (A Quartet) was far more relaxed. I saw it as a meditation on childhood and its sensitivities, fears, and moments of awe and mystery. (A touch of Joseph Cornell, maybe.) Valise is dominated by the vastness of our planet and the cosmos; Hard Green gives us comic-book imagery of military combat. Soft Ticket was a lyrical remembrance of baseball cards, and the finale, Daylight Moon blended imagery of kid culture and suburban utopias with the soundtrack of Night of the Hunter.

Klahr talked about the quartet as “the best film I’m ever likely to make,” largely because it achieved his aim of a “democracy of subjectivity.” He meant by this the poetic power of the juxtapositions he creates, which invite viewers to connect the material in unpredictable ways. Hollywood films, he remarked, try to get us all to experience the material in a single way, and that’s suitable for a mass audience. But collage films like his have a “signal to noise ratio” that allows viewers to tune in to something, drop out for a few moments, and then tune in again.

For each viewer, the high-information moments will be different, and if a viewer returns to the film, he or she will probably find new images to focus on. This time through the Quartet, I noticed that each of the first three films had a recurring male figure–a sea diver/ astronaut, a soldier, baseball players–until Daylight Moon ends with a man stretched out on a used car. This would seem to be a reverie about a boy’s childhood.

Klahr is a warm, unpretentious speaker and he engaged the audience in a lively dialogue. His work deserves to be more widely known. I can’t imagine watching the Trilogy on DVD; could digital sampling capture the REM effects of the blurring pans? Still, a release on that format would surely expand his circle of admirers.

- www.davidbordwell.net/

The Lewis Klahr Experience: Sex, Drugs and Animation - See more at: http://maisonneuve.org/post/2011/06/24/lewis-klahr-experience-sex-drugs-and-animation/#sthash.rOFbHDVw.dpuf

The Lewis Klahr Experience: Sex, Drugs and Animation 

Renee Giblin

By Renee Giblin June 24, 2011

A scene from Lewis Klahr's film Altair.
When I walked down the stairs to the Segal Centre's CinemaSpace in Montreal on May 18, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That night, rough sexual images shocked and sometimes angered me; they stabbed at my biases and rigidity. But I'm sure I'm not alone: that's just how it feels the first time you watch the work of American animator and filmmaker Lewis Klahr.
"People tell me when they watch my films, they experience long after-effects," said Klahr, who has been using collage techniques to create experimental, sometimes disturbing films since the late 1970s. In an event titled "Lewis Klahr: Hieroglyphs of Lost Time," the Segal Centre screened Engram Sepals, a series of seven short films depicting a decades-long downward journey of sex, drugs and alcohol. It pulls viewers into an eighty-one-minute orgy of substance abuse, confusion and sexual experimentation, and exposes American vices and anxieties. Shooting on 16mm film, Klahr used images cut from from magazines, comic books and '70s porn rags, as well as old Super 8 footage, to create distinctly adult animations.
Klahr, who was in attendance at the event, explained that the short stories he told in his films were really about discovery. He carefully sourced and selected each image he used in his collages and, he said, everything has a meaning; just as the real world has structure, so do the worlds he created.  He emphasized that music and images need to reinforce each other for a film to work. "I wanted the emotions like in a Dionne Warwick song, combined with experimental movies," Klahr said.

The epic voyage of Engram Sepals began with the 1994 short Altair, a shifting collage of images from 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan. Behind the romantic images of well-manicured women, there was an underlying sense of doom. Klahr used blue-tinted backdrops and repeated images of cigarette cases, martini olives, cards and beds to evoke the feeling of addiction.
Altair—which is now included in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection—was the tamest of the seven movies. The following film, Engram Sepals was even more sinister: Jimmy Olsen, the freckly young photojournalist from the Superman comics, was shown lying dead on the ground. Then, in Pony Glass, Klahr manipulated Olsen's clean-cut persona by placing cut-outs of him in scenes of same-sex affairs, interspersing these with images of looming clocks and mid-century offices. Klahr, speaking after the show, admitted that experimental filmmakers often use repetition to encourage viewers' personal interpretations of images, and the looping music and recurring images in Pony Glass underlined Jimmy's identity crisis and sexual self-discovery.

As I was watching the series, my own brain started playing tricks on me, too. During Govinda, Klahr's 1999 take on a coming-of-age story, I inwardly named a woman in the film "Sarah." Listening to the Indian-influenced accompanying song and watching Sarah's loss of innocence, I felt as if the vocalist was singing, "Run, Sarah, run." As I watched her naively walk into a forest, like Eve taking a bite into the apple, I wanted to stop her. When her journey into the forest led her to drugs and group sex, I felt truly outraged. I did not like the chaos of the scenes. I wanted to put the world back in order. Who knew collage could be so emotional?   
At the beginning of the second half, Klahr warned the spectators at the Segal Centre that the following material was not for everyone. And it's not. Viewers would go on to witness orgies, cut-outs of drugged-out porn stars having rough sex and, with the final piece, A Failed Cardigan Maneuver, I experienced a longing to return to the relative innocence at the beginning of the film. "I needed the courage and self-permission to go where those images could take me," Klahr said. A rake poked at the characters' anuses and scratched the surfaces of their skin; a needle was inserted into a penis; I couldn't help but cringe. "Even though you're not involved, they [images] still hurt," Klahr said. "You're feeling those things."
For days after seeing Engram Sepals, I had an urge to analyze every cut-out and make sense of my experiences. I wanted Klahr to explain his imagery so I could file it, label it, make sense of it. But Klahr's films stubbornly refuse to be classified.

- See more at: http://maisonneuve.org/post/2011/06/24/lewis-klahr-experience-sex-drugs-and-animation/#sthash.rOFbHDVw.dpuf

When I walked down the stairs to the Segal Centre's CinemaSpace in Montreal on May 18, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That night, rough sexual images shocked and sometimes angered me; they stabbed at my biases and rigidity. But I'm sure I'm not alone: that's just how it feels the first time you watch the work of American animator and filmmaker Lewis Klahr. 

"People tell me when they watch my films, they experience long after-effects," said Klahr, who has been using collage techniques to create experimental, sometimes disturbing films since the late 1970s. In an event titled "Lewis Klahr: Hieroglyphs of Lost Time," the Segal Centre screened Engram Sepals, a series of seven short films depicting a decades-long downward journey of sex, drugs and alcohol. It pulls viewers into an eighty-one-minute orgy of substance abuse, confusion and sexual experimentation, and exposes American vices and anxieties. Shooting on 16mm film, Klahr used images cut from from magazines, comic books and '70s porn rags, as well as old Super 8 footage, to create distinctly adult animations. 

Klahr, who was in attendance at the event, explained that the short stories he told in his films were really about discovery. He carefully sourced and selected each image he used in his collages and, he said, everything has a meaning; just as the real world has structure, so do the worlds he created.  He emphasized that music and images need to reinforce each other for a film to work. "I wanted the emotions like in a Dionne Warwick song, combined with experimental movies," Klahr said. 

The epic voyage of Engram Sepals began with the 1994 short Altair, a shifting collage of images from 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan. Behind the romantic images of well-manicured women, there was an underlying sense of doom. Klahr used blue-tinted backdrops and repeated images of cigarette cases, martini olives, cards and beds to evoke the feeling of addiction. 

Altair—which is now included in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection—was the tamest of the seven movies. The following film, Engram Sepals was even more sinister: Jimmy Olsen, the freckly young photojournalist from the Superman comics, was shown lying dead on the ground. Then, in Pony Glass, Klahr manipulated Olsen's clean-cut persona by placing cut-outs of him in scenes of same-sex affairs, interspersing these with images of looming clocks and mid-century offices. Klahr, speaking after the show, admitted that experimental filmmakers often use repetition to encourage viewers' personal interpretations of images, and the looping music and recurring images in Pony Glass underlined Jimmy's identity crisis and sexual self-discovery. 

As I was watching the series, my own brain started playing tricks on me, too. During Govinda, Klahr's 1999 take on a coming-of-age story, I inwardly named a woman in the film "Sarah." Listening to the Indian-influenced accompanying song and watching Sarah's loss of innocence, I felt as if the vocalist was singing, "Run, Sarah, run." As I watched her naively walk into a forest, like Eve taking a bite into the apple, I wanted to stop her. When her journey into the forest led her to drugs and group sex, I felt truly outraged. I did not like the chaos of the scenes. I wanted to put the world back in order. Who knew collage could be so emotional?   

At the beginning of the second half, Klahr warned the spectators at the Segal Centre that the following material was not for everyone. And it's not. Viewers would go on to witness orgies, cut-outs of drugged-out porn stars having rough sex and, with the final piece, A Failed Cardigan Maneuver, I experienced a longing to return to the relative innocence at the beginning of the film. "I needed the courage and self-permission to go where those images could take me," Klahr said. A rake poked at the characters' anuses and scratched the surfaces of their skin; a needle was inserted into a penis; I couldn't help but cringe. "Even though you're not involved, they [images] still hurt," Klahr said. "You're feeling those things."

For days after seeing Engram Sepals, I had an urge to analyze every cut-out and make sense of my experiences. I wanted Klahr to explain his imagery so I could file it, label it, make sense of it. But Klahr's films stubbornly refuse to be classified.

Cut and Paste: Q&A With Collage Filmmaker Lewis Klahr



by Craig Hubert

Published: March 8, 2013

Digging up relics from the dustbin of history, Los Angeles-based experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr makes films that breathe life into the dead images of our past. Comic books, advertisements, mail-order catalogs, and discarded pop songs are repurposed into stirring collage films that explore the faded memories of childhood and the complicated process of aging. ARTINFO’s Craig Hubert recently sat down with Klahr, a professor at Cal Arts, who is currently in New York to host a series of screenings this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image. He spoke about collecting images, novelistic aspirations, and looking at the world “with the openness and wonder of a child.”
Do you collect images and then build a story around them, or do you think of a story and find corresponding images?

It works every which way. Being a collage artist I’m always collecting things, so there are certain things – like with “The Pettifogger,” the first image, which is the soap dish, I found that in this old plastics manual I found in this used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from my house. I saw that and knew it was going to be useful to me – I wasn’t quite sure how, you know?
What’s the connection between “The Pettifogger” and Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel,” which the Museum of the Moving Image is screening in conjunction with the film?
The original film I wanted to show with it is a Wim Wenders film from the 1970s that was very important to me, “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.” Have you ever seen that?
Yeah, the Peter Handke book is great as well.
It’s not an easy film to see. I saw it on film back in the day. But I had to make another choice because there's no print of "The Goalie's Anxiety" that's available. I chose "Fallen Angel" not because it inspired "The Pettifogger" – it could have, but it didn’t – because it felt like it would compliment the film well, because it finishes the story. What happens to “The Pettifogger” after my movie ends? Well, this could be it-- Dana Andrews is completely broke and a con man who manipulates women just like my protagonist. I also like that my film is set in 1963 but Fallen Angel is from 1945-- I'm asking the audience to go back in time to complete my film's story.
“Fallen Angel” also has a similar dreamy, foggy quality.
Yeah, it’s very sensual. The landscape is very beautiful. It’s a gorgeous film. Did you watch “The Pettifogger” on a computer monitor?
Yeah.
It’s really meant to be seen on a very big screen, in a theater. That’s not true of my work usually, it’s usually more domestic, and it’s intimate. I love domestic art, actually. But this is a different scale than I usually work. I’m not sure how much of this would have come through to you watching it on a computer, but when you watch it big, with the way the soundtrack is and the images are, you drift off in a way. You really go in a reverie, a drone – like drone music, Morton Feldman or Velvet Underground instrumentals.
How important to you is showing your work in a theater as opposed to having people watch it on a small screen?
It matters to me more now that I'm working in digital. I mean, I make these things to exist in different ways. “The False Aging Trilogy,” you don’t have to watch that in a theater. But “The Pettifogger” benefits from that. One of the great things about digital – I’m working with basically a DSLR, a 35mm camera; I used to work in Super 8mm, than 16mm, I had a Bolex – is that it’s a real 35mm image. I was shocked at how great it looked the first time I saw my digital films projected on a large screen on a high def projector.  I was seeing all the details I see when I'm shooting, even in 16mm these details weren't showing up on a big screen, even with good projection. With digital all the detail is there. There’s an enhanced sense of texture, which is good for my work because it’s so much about the materials, and there’s an enhanced sense of scale – it’s quite exciting and effective. It’s kind of ironic, here we are at a place where this kind of projection is increasingly in question for people, especially working outside Hollywood – now I finally make something that really exists on that scale! I’m always too late for everything.
The choice of music in your films is always really interesting. In “The False Aging Trilogy,” you use everything from John Cale, which has a dream-like quality, to pop songs from the Shangri-Las and Bruce Springsteen.
The pop songs I approach in a different way – and “April Snow” is a good example, actually the best example. I'm putting two songs together that tell the same story but one from a female and the other from a male point of view. Springsteen was in my time, but the Shangri-Las were a hit when I was probably 7, and I didn’t hear it on the radio. It’s something I discovered later. when you unpack a time after it's over, you can have a much deeper knowledge of it, especially if you were a kid. I come at things through my childhood, but that’s just a historical and perspectival focus – there’s a sense of innocence to experience in some of my films. What I’m after, and what “The Pettifogger” has in this perceptual way, is this place where vividness returns like you have it as a kid. That’s what I’m most after, the way the world is so alive. I thought of this juxtaposition of songs back in 1988. However, back then, it still felt like the taboo against using pop songs was too big.
After Kenneth Anger and Bruce Connor?
Right. You couldn’t do it as well as they could, and it’s a cheat, all this stuff. But I found, well, that’s what I want to be doing, and I have ideas about it, and I’m pretty good at sequencing. I’m recovering things, making you hear it a different way and the sequence creates another kind of meaning.
What determines the length of the films? “The Pettifogger” is 65 minutes, while the many of the other films are much shorter, sometimes only a few minutes.
“The Pettifogger” was a decision about wanting to make a wider piece. I made a lot of work that dealt with crime, in a way – there’s a natural aspect of collage, it’s like you’re stealing. We use the fancy art-world justification for it, appropriation, but on some level you’re stealing. So there’s that dimension of it. I liked the challenge of it – I hadn’t made a film longer than 43 minutes. I wanted to challenge myself via duration, and I had a semester off from teaching, and I thought, this is what it needs, to go at it every day. When I make the shorts, I can start and stop – I can do a lot of them in the summer, it fits the teaching schedule. With this, I felt like I needed an uninterrupted block of time. It was really hard. It was not fun.
How long did it take?
Nine months. I was full time those nine months. I did not enjoy much or any of the process. I constantly had to figure out things about duration that I didn’t have a history of understanding for myself. Everything was new, and it was a hard film to pin down. As I made it – because I improvised so much – I was figuring out what I was saying, what it was about. I must have made at least 12 different versions of the film.
Because of the improvisational process, do you recognize things, or themes, that you weren’t conscious of when making the film?
That’s exactly what happens. I make the films less to illustrate an idea I already have than I am exploring an idea, which changes, and then I discover things that I didn’t know. It’s a journey.
It reminds me of the way some novelists will just start writing with no idea where they’re going, discovering the structure as they write.
It’s an interesting comparison to the novel; that was one of my aspirations for the length of “The Pettifogger.” I started as a writer and I went to film because in college, the linearity of writing, I couldn’t quite get there. It would be like, I don’t know what word to put next – you know these problems as a writer yourself. But in film, I'd make a cut, and it would be like I'm moving whole paragraphs around with just one shot. It was very liberating.
You spoke earlier about unpacking your childhood – will there ever be a time when you feel like you’ve said everything you need to about that time of your life?
Yeah. But then it starts to fill up again. And my relationship to the material has changed. When I first started doing this, in my late-20s, I was really trying to bring my childhood back. I wanted the world to look like that again. As I aged, and as I grew as an artist, that became not the concern anymore in the same way. Then it was more about memory. Now it’s just a language; it’s a place I like hanging out. It’s this idea of looking at the world with the openness and wonder of a child, so you’re seeing things fresh.

Filmography:

The Pettifogger (2011)
April Snow (2010)
Nimbus Smile (2010)
Cumulonimbus (2010)
Sugar Slim Says (2010)
A Thousand Julys (2010)
False Aging (2009)
Wednesday Morning Two A.M. (2009)
Lethe (2009)
Nimbus Seeds (2009)
Hard Green (2004)
Soft Ticket (2004)
Two Days to Zero (2004)
Two Hours to Zero (2004)
Valise (2004)
Two Minutes to Zero (2003)
Daylight Moon (2002)
The Aperture of Ghostings (2002)
Engram Sepals (2000)
Govinda (1999)
Elsa Kirk (1999)
A Failed Cardigan Maneuver (1999)
Marietta’s Lied (1998)
Pony Glass (1997)
Calendar the Siamese (1997)
Green ’62 (1996)
Lulu (1996)
Whirligigs in the Late Afternoon (1996)
Altair (1994)
Downs Are Feminine (1994)
Pharaoh’s Belt (1993)
Elevator Music (1991)
Untitled (The Life of Naomi Lang (1991)
Untitled (Actuality) (1991)
Cartoon Far (1990)
The Organ Minder’s Gronkey (1990)
Station Drama (1990)
Hi-Fi Cadets (1989)
Verdant Sonar (1989)
Yesterday’s Glue (1989)
For the Rest of Your Natural Life (1988)
Lost Camel Intentions (1988)
In the Month of Crickets (1988)
Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987)