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....

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 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...

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

Swollen Kisses (2019), Capitulations Promise (2020), Blue Sun (2020), Alcestis (2021), The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2020), Monogram (2019)...

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...

“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...

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...

Short film by Lewis Klahr....

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr....

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 rephotograph...

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

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...

Rain themed Klahr film....

Lewis Klahr has started a new series of short animation films under the title of 'Couplets'. The project is intended to eventually result in a feature-length animation film. The theme is love, and each part focuses on a pop song. Wednesday Morning Tw...

"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 elliptica...

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 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...

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 wal...