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Lewis Klahr: Daylight Moon

"Much of my work is like an archaeological excavation," explains the Los Angeles-based collage animation artist Lewis Klahr. "I get incredibly strong feelings looking at things that are outmoded. I start to imagine worlds and stories; it's like remaking these forgotten images from movies and pop culture that have seared my consciousness." Eschewing computer-generated animation and flashy special effects, Klahr works as an artisan, creating poetic, mysterious cut-and-paste animated collages using photographs and aging ephemera from every conceivable source, such as encyclopedias, postcards, 1950s fashion magazines, medical texts, and real estate brochures.

Klahr's initiation into the world of avant-garde film came during the mid-1970s when, during a year off from college, he encountered a history of experimental film, ranging from surrealism to structuralism. "I had originally wanted to do Hollywood stuff," he says, "but found it too intimidating. When I discovered avant-garde cinema, filmmaking opened up for me. It gave me an affordable, poetic model with which I could explore ideas about time and money." Rather than abandon his affinity for classic Hollywood films (ironically, in the last few years he's begun to earn a living writing Hollywood screenplays), Klahr takes cultural icons and radically reinvents them as transgressive cinema.

Working solo with a Bolex 16mm camera and no animation stand--he shoots the collages on his garage floor--Klahr juxtaposes cut-outs of forgotten, often eccentric, symbols along porous narrative lines where several levels of meaning feverishly coexist. Turning shadows, staccato movements, in-camera superimpositions, and irises to black (created by his gloved hand) into an expressive language of his own, he coaxes a remarkable degree of psychic energy out of the detritus of everyday images. "When things are going well," he professes, "I'm really just performing for the camera, and things just happen that are way beyond my conscious control, like a jazz musician improvising."

Assembling his films in cycles, Klahr has produced three series over the last fifteen years: "Picture Books for Adults," consisting of eight films employing largely found footage, is a keen examination of childhood. The twelve-film "Tales of the Forgotten Future" is an epic, "delirious genre hop through the twentieth century trying on different masks of identity," he says. "Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)" is a seven-film feature tracing a history of American intoxication from World War II to the 1970s. Reflecting on the visceral impact of Klahr's work, New York Film Festival co-curator Mark McElhatten describes the filmmaker as "a creator of atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood and setting but ontological terrains where event and emotion register with archetypical power and dream-like intensity."

Daylight Moon (2002), Klahr's latest vision, was jumpstarted by a viewing of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) on DVD. "Marnie's color opened up something deep about my childhood that I'd been trying to get at for years. I went into the studio and quickly shot a 100-foot roll of film centered around an open safe and various shades of green. This became the first section of the movie," he says. Daylight Moon is a crime story about a safe, a couple that steals money, and what happens after the theft, with each sequence's length determined by specific sounds or music. The film's richly textured dark palette, furtive movements, and melancholy mood presents an encounter with something otherworldly. "In a way," observes Klahr, "the film is from a child's viewpoint; it is a very tactile experience of color and texture."

For Klahr, Daylight Moon, is the apogee of his work with found materials. "I have finally broken through," he says. "Daylight Moon feels new to me because it has left all my explanations and rational justifications for creating something behind. The film exists in some completely imaginary realm that is unfamiliar and surprising even to me. All I know is I want to spend a lot more time there."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Fantasy & Myth | California | 2000