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 transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

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 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 four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American television show 77 SUNSET STRIP. Music by Glenn Branca (an excerpt from "The Ascension"); film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival's "Just a Minute" program. - Lewis Klahr

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

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.

"Arguably the definitive portrait of the postwar America of secretly toxic dreams and treacherous surfaces," is how critic Michael Atkinson describes Tales of the Forgotten Future. Klahr’s breakthrough series traces an alternate history of 20th-century America in a collection of 12 diverse shorts. From the nuclear paranoia of The Organ Minder's Gronkey to Hi-Fi Cadets, where JFK is employed as a janitor in a neighborhood high school, Klahr's lo-fi animation style astutely captures the anxieties, dreams, disappointments, and promises of our recent cultural history. (wexarts.org)

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 for the extended night—described in the title—to come to its end.

"Saturn's Diary is just that-- a diary of the God's mundane, earthly existence, including his busy romantic life, during the first 4 months of 1966. Here the comic book noir characters and L.A. landscape of Ichor re-emerge. In the film's final section, as representation is replaced by the abstraction of silence and pure color flicker, Saturn disappears, and the film transforms into a color diary." --Lewis Klahr

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.

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.

Music by Lorenzo Wolff

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.

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

“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

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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.

Short experimental film by Lewis Klahr.

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

"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."

“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 interested in a creative geography of the city I've constructed. For instance, the front of the hotel is from Berlin, its interior was photographed in Copenhagen. The film offers the elliptical “scent” of espionage films (largely because of its Berlin locations) and offers that genre’s lubricating sense of voyeurism, danger, and sexuality. My source materials are Mexican comic-book figures, and these urban photos I snapped on my honeymoon with my wife Janie Geiser in the summer of 1996.” —Lewis Klahr