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....

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...

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr....

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...

“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 sm...

“Bar mitzvahs. Military training. Rock n' roll. First person, third person. Family photos kept, family photos discarded. A collage of male coming of age stories that sketches ways America changed from the early 60s to the 1990s.”...

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 ...

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...

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

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...

Rain themed Klahr film....

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...

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...

A melodrama with an elliptical, poetic narrative that suggests infidelity in a love relationship....

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....

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....

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

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

“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...

created to Royal Auditiorium's S.B.S. I made this a few years back but never felt satisfied by my first version which included edits to 3 different plays of the song. this new one is reduced to 2....