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An epic cycle created on the tiny, domestic medium of Super-8, the film combines the intimacy of its chosen gauge with the evocative sweep of Freudian dreamwork. It’s a moving collage clipped together out of photos and illustrations from the Atomic Age, reconfigured into a private visual language that speaks of both Klahr’s own childhood and a greater strangeness: how images from another era stand as uncanny evidence for a very different stage of development in the American psyche.
Though located in an avant-garde practice of cut-out appropriation that stretches from Harry Smith, Stan VanDerBeek and Lawrence Jordan to later artists like Martha Colburn and Jonathan Schwartz, Klahr’s work creates a system of representation all its own, quivering between the present and the past, reshuffling that potent deck of icons bequeathed to us by our former selves.
“In the age of industrial sound and light, Lewis Klahr makes special-effects movies that are almost insanely artisanal–one man, labor-intensive cut-and-paste animations that are at once crude and poetic, blunt and enigmatic, as funny as they are inventive.
Klahr is even more involved in the reworking of received images than Hollywood is. For the past fifteen years, the 36-year-old New York-based filmmaker has been collaging material foraged mainly from old magazines into brief, evocative, eccentric movies. What sets him apart from underground predecessors such as Stan Vanderbeek and Harry Smith…is his extreme pragmatism. Not only does Klahr work in Super-8 without an animation stand but when it suits his purposes, he employs the three-dimensional world–using, for example, a dollop of grape jelly for blood.
For Klahr, the Super-8 format has strong associations with home movies and childhood. Still, to create Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987), a homage to the ’60s movie star Mimsy Farmer, Klahr used a technique called ‘strip collage,’ in which bits of cut-up film are glued or taped to clear leader. Some of his other films employ a new form of the photo-comics the Italians call fumetti (which Federico Fellini affectionately parodied in The White Sheik). In addition to pillaging back issues of Life, Klahr photographs actors and integrates their images into his pulpish quasi-narratives amid splashes of color and hieroglyphic thought balloons. (His is a world where sounds are often seen rather than heard.)
There’s an obsessional quality to all animation, but Klahr compounds it with a collector’s fetishism. Diving into a sea of musty magazines, he dredges up all manner of forgotten icons–fashion drawings, watercolor washes of idealized housing tracts–and imbues them with a secret life. (His child’s-eye view seems to preclude simple nostalgia.) Klahr’s 1988 break-through, In The Month of Crickets, is a masterpiece of populuxe surrealism that, set in a mysterious hotel-cum-department store, manages to coax a remarkable degree of eroticism out of a few suggestive maneuvers and the escalating soundtrack buzz that gives the movie its title.
Lewis.Klahr.Tales.Of.The.Forgotten.Future.One.1988-POENiR.avi
General
Container: AVI
Runtime: 34mn 26s
Size: 543 MiB
Video
Codec: XviD
Resolution: 640x480
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 2 000 Kbps
BPP: 0.272
Audio
#1: 2.0ch MP3 @ 192 Kbps
https://nitro.download/view/3842F56F8DC7CB4/Lewis.Klahr.Tales.Of.The.Forgotten.Future.One.1988-POENiR.avi
https://nitro.download/view/6BCC1E11BACE0F7/Lewis.Klahr.Tales.Of.The.Forgotten.Future.Two.1989.1990-POENiR.avi
https://nitro.download/view/32489CF680FC2C9/Tales_of_the_Forgotten_Future_Part_3_(Klahr,_1989).avi
https://nitro.download/view/951FD938FA080DE/Tales_of_the_Forgotten_Future_Part_4_(Klahr,_1990).avi
Language(s):No dialogues
Subtitles:not needed
The post Lewis Klahr – Tales of the Forgotten Future, Part 1-4 (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.