Engram Sepals

"Lewis Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered. In Daylight Moon, he reaches even further back, to try to recall the moments in which a small child configures the world out of patterns of visual fascination, a mode of seeing that relies on touch and the feel of things rather than deep space. One of his most abstract films, Daylight Moon rarely reveals a human figure. Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime" Tom Gunning

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

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 short animation film by Lewis Klahr.

An associative montage with color flicker accents that riffs off the mythology of hedonistic musicians and seedy Hollywood hotels. The song is by my good friend Bryan Senti who performed under the moniker of Ex Mykah for this his pop Lp debut.—L.K.

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.

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

"My most comprehensive working through of who this Deep Sea Diver figure is that has periodically haunted my collage animations from the first one I ever created through the last two decades. A mythic investigation of the outsider in American culture. Created as a complimentary counterweight to the series’ title film and finale, Daylight Moon." - 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 rephotographed super 8 home movie footage of an alternative high school and a full blown hippie wedding. The climactic film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's.

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 walking shadow, a lonely silhouette that traverses painted and photographed cityscapes of 20th century New York City. The impressions and atmospheres invoked recall the late Peter B. Hutton’s NEW YORK PORTRAIT, to whom the film is dedicated.

Klahr's City Film contemplates New York City rhythms, creating a tapestry of real and imagined street activities.

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

“Kiss the Rain and The Street of Everlasting Rain are part of The Rain Couplets, a new subset of my ongoing Prolix Satori project. Like my other Couplets, they grapple with romantic love, time, and the nuances of repetition.”—Lewis Klahr

A short animation film by Lewis Klahr.

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.

Lewis' first digital film from 2007, a precursor for his feature-length series Circumstantial Pleasures