November 2009 Archives

Mix the detritus of a Robert Rauschenberg collage with the excess and veiled social commentary of a Douglas Sirk melodrama and you might come close to a film by Los Angeles filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who makes his collage animations from images snipped out of books and magazines; these pictures are moved inch by inch beneath a camera to create movement, resulting in powerful visual artworks and deeply engrossing, if enigmatic, stories. Klahr, who teaches at CalArts, will present his work twice this week, starting with the seven-film series Engram Sepals at USC on Thursday night. The word "engram" refers to the place in the brain where fragments of memory are engraved, leaving traces that can never be completely retrieved, while "sepals" names the part of a flower stem that holds the petals in place. The phrase nicely describes the series of animated shorts in which Klahr chronicles the post-World War II decades almost as if to uncover the past and hold it in place. One of my favorites from the series is Altair, which is set in the late 1940s and follows a woman's descent into alcoholism. The melancholy deep blue backdrops, the elongated lines drawing the female form, and the rain of objects that envelopes the character point to the sense of restriction and longing that the film beautifully embodies. In Downs Are Feminine, Klahr romps through '70s sexuality with pictures torn from an illustrated porn novel, while Pony Glass imagines the tortured, secret life of Jimmy Olsen, comic book sidekick to Superman. On Saturday (November 7), Klahr will screen and talk about several of his films from the 1980s, including the masterful The Pharoah's Belt, with film scholar Tom Gunning. Klahr's work is remarkable, and he speaks about it with clarity and a reflectiveness that is entirely engaging.