Movies: Lewis Klahr

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....

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....

An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn’s early 80’s film script, “A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes”. I consider “Well Then There Now” a “list” film since Zorn’s text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image, but a p...

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....

A feature-length narrative crime film compressed two different times into two separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from ...

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for tra...

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr....

Begun in 2015 and completed in 2022, Five Days Till Tomorrow evokes a timeless oneiric twilight, depicting a menagerie of fantasy comic book characters as they sleep, loll, and patiently inhabit a landscape of 1970s futuristic architecture waiting fo...

“Her Fragrant Emulsion is an obsessional homage to the ’60s B-film actress Mimsy Farmer. The film’s visceral collage images act as a metaphor for sensuality and move in and out of sync with the soundtrack to evoke the distancing and intimacy cycles t...

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 alluringl...

“The Occidental Hotel is a “city” film—I was inspired to emulate the Surrealists’ sense of wandering, of flaneury, of the way a hotel and its rooms is a temporary resting place inhabited by many many people, a shared public/private space. I am intere...

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

Film by Lewis Klahr, music by Loose Cattle....

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 explor...

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr....

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr....

A crime story told two different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to (and immediately following) a bank robbery. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from four issues...

Music by Dick Connette from his album, Too Sad for the Public Vol. 1: Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade. Suzzy Roche sings the vocal. Dick’s lyrics were inspired by the reknowned photography book, Wisconsin Death Trip....

This is a film that explores the two sided-ness of the comic book page. Although I’d been wanting to make this film for many years, I couldn’t resolve the technical challenges with 16mm. However, Digital Video’s sensitivity to low light allowed me to...

Muscular, patriarchal images of comic book superheroes from yesteryear are illuminated on a light box and juxtaposed with tactile skill....