Northwest Film Forum

Chosen by The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis as one of the best films of 2015, Lewis Klahr’s feature-length anthology draws upon years of short-form experimentation, leaving a trail of vignettes. A stunning work of stop-motion animation, Klahr’s sources pull from a collective storehouse of visual, aural and literary cues -- comic books, newsprint ads, pulp literature, Hollywood films, and all manner of Pop-Art ephemera. A gem of distilled narratives and free-association set to classical and popular music cues, Klahr evokes an atmosphere crafted in noirish moonlit nights, swinging mid-60s interiors and desolate city streets. 

 

Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his singularly idiosyncratic films that use found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. Klahr's films have screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia in venues such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, The Tate, and the LA County Museum of Art.

 

“People usually think my films are about remembering, but they’re really about forgetting.” – Lewis Klahr

 

"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." -- Chris Stults, Assistant Curator Film/Video Wexner Center for the Arts from "Collective Unconscious," an article in Film Comment, May/June 2010