Lewis Klahr

Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, the film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines.

The series begins with Nimbus Smile, which depicts a love triangle in 1960s New York set to the Velvet Underground's 'Pale Blue Eyes.'

An associative montage with color flicker accents that riffs off the mythology of hedonistic musicians and seedy Hollywood hotels. The song is by my good friend Bryan Senti who performed under the moniker of Ex Mykah for this his pop Lp debut.—L.K.

"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."

“False Aging expresses a sense of lost time, of not moving in step with the rest of the world. In one sequence Jefferson Airplane's Lather asks the question, ‘Is it true I'm no longer young?’ Time makes us prisoners locked in ourselves, like the a small yellow bird who slips behind the back of a playing card, then comes back out in front of it. In rapid alternation, they make a kind of thaumatrope, that spinning parlor trick that suggests a sense of movement in the flapping wings of a caged bird. Here the birdcage has been replaced by chance, underscoring the momentary illusion that the bird is free." - Genevieve Yue

Klahr's City Film contemplates New York City rhythms, creating a tapestry of real and imagined street activities.

Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, the film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines.

The series begins with Nimbus Smile, which depicts a love triangle in 1960s New York set to the Velvet Underground's 'Pale Blue Eyes.'

An associative montage with color flicker accents that riffs off the mythology of hedonistic musicians and seedy Hollywood hotels. The song is by my good friend Bryan Senti who performed under the moniker of Ex Mykah for this his pop Lp debut.—L.K.

"I have been working with found materials since 1980. For me the process has been similar to nostalgia. In both experiences there is an overwhelming desire to perfectly recreate the original. Although this seductive temptation is deadening and also impossible, it is nevertheless a powerful motivating force. In the midst of this tug-of-war between continual embrace and perpetual rejection, I created PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS."

“False Aging expresses a sense of lost time, of not moving in step with the rest of the world. In one sequence Jefferson Airplane's Lather asks the question, ‘Is it true I'm no longer young?’ Time makes us prisoners locked in ourselves, like the a small yellow bird who slips behind the back of a playing card, then comes back out in front of it. In rapid alternation, they make a kind of thaumatrope, that spinning parlor trick that suggests a sense of movement in the flapping wings of a caged bird. Here the birdcage has been replaced by chance, underscoring the momentary illusion that the bird is free." - Genevieve Yue

Klahr's City Film contemplates New York City rhythms, creating a tapestry of real and imagined street activities.

A striking elaboration on a signature style, with “story” all but evacuated, Circumstantial Pleasure’s six episodes proceed less like an album of potent recollections and more like a stream of agitated consciousness.

A three act (a song an act) melodrama about the coming of age of the American counterculture in the 60's and 70's as a generation moves from innocence to experience; idealism to disillusion to attempted re-integration. Highlights include rephotographed super 8 home movie footage of an alternative high school and a full blown hippie wedding. The climactic film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's.

This ain’t no Pixar. This is ain’t no Disney. This ain’t no foolin’ around. ANXIOUS ANIMATION presents six contemporary film artists who take us into surreal worlds of delirium and paranoia… The reigning proponent of cut-and-paste, LEWIS KLAHR nourishes intensely private visions on the compost heap of collective fantasy through old magazines, comic books, and cocktail iconography.Complex, full of charm, and pervaded by themes of loss, JANIE GEISER simultaneously creates and deconstructs fantasies through doll-like figurines, cut-outs, and found objects in her cryptic narratives.JIM TRAINOR’s handmade animations explore the inner lives of animals that appear strangely self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.The Bay Area collective of RODNEY ASCHER, SYD GARON, and ERIC HENRY conjure diabolical visions with digital savvy, accompanied by the manic music of Buckethead and DJ Q-Bert.

The 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 and shot in high contrast B&W. There's a glimpse of Eternity in those deep, luminous blacks. The title film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's.

Lewis' first digital film from 2007, a precursor for his feature-length series Circumstantial Pleasures

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr.

Crafted from contact sheets found in the 1990s at a thrift store in the East Village.

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

"Lewis Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered. In Daylight Moon, he reaches even further back, to try to recall the moments in which a small child configures the world out of patterns of visual fascination, a mode of seeing that relies on touch and the feel of things rather than deep space. One of his most abstract films, Daylight Moon rarely reveals a human figure. Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime" Tom Gunning

Created from contact sheets found in a thrift store in the East Village, Elsa Kirk consists of Xerox enlargements as backgrounds for a series of flat collages.

"My most comprehensive working through of who this Deep Sea Diver figure is that has periodically haunted my collage animations from the first one I ever created through the last two decades. A mythic investigation of the outsider in American culture. Created as a complimentary counterweight to the series’ title film and finale, Daylight Moon." - Lewis Klahr

No synopsis available yet.

April Snow is a couplet juxtaposing two pop songs by The Shangri-Las and Bruce Springsteen

“Kiss the Rain and The Street of Everlasting Rain are part of The Rain Couplets, a new subset of my ongoing Prolix Satori project. Like my other Couplets, they grapple with romantic love, time, and the nuances of repetition.”—Lewis Klahr

Same formal approach as with the War Comics– but this time to Baseball Cards– with a completely different emotional result.

No synopsis available yet.

The trilogy’s closer, ‘Cumulonimbus,’ is a movingly mature account of grief with a puckish sting in its tail.

An amnesiac noir and city symphony, Klahr’s first black and white film in almost a decade, contemplates inner and outer voids; an opaque consciousness and the decaying civilization it finds itself within. The film’s trench-coated protagonist is a walking shadow, a lonely silhouette that traverses painted and photographed cityscapes of 20th century New York City. The impressions and atmospheres invoked recall the late Peter B. Hutton’s NEW YORK PORTRAIT, to whom the film is dedicated.

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr.

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr.

Inspired by Tom Gunning poem and William Castle's 1947 'When Strangers Marry'

Film by Lewis Klahr, music by Loose Cattle.

Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen gets his own story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets boy!

"The scent of elliptical narrative lingers in the air, as vividly colored 60's comic book figures thread their way through iconic photograph settings that are often black and white and often of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. A pop associational mindscape where texture, color and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It's my paradise lost-- a place that can't exist yet always will." --Lewis Klahr

An tactile exploration of World War 2 comic books through the abstraction afforded by a magnifying glass.

Short film by Lewis Klahr.

A portal to an older New York, conjured from a curved glass restaurant window on the Bowery.

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr. Previously referred to as Untitled, now referred to as The Life of Naomi Lang.

Nimbus Smile is followed by Nimbus Seeds, which sets a collage soundtrack of city noises, wind chimes, rain, footsteps, and bits of classical music to the exact same visuals.

"Ichor is the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. Ichor is the first episode of Sixty Six, a projected 12 film collage series that is a mythopoetic splice of classic Greek Mythology and Mid 60's Daylight Noir. The scent of elliptical narrative lingers in the air, as vividly colored 60's comic book figures thread their way through iconic photograph settings that are often black and white and often of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. A pop associational mindscape where texture, color and and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It's my paradise lost-- a place that can't exist yet always will." --Lewis Klahr

Short experimental film by Lewis Klahr.

Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character's moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.

Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character's moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.

One of Klahr's masterpieces, Altair is an 8 minute collage color -noir culled from late-40s pages of Cosmopolitan, which induces a sense of claustrophobia and dread through its use of Stravinsky's The Firebird.