"Gottheim's Cinema is a quest of origins. The films elaborate a response to the fictions of our world, the construction of images and sounds, the repeating cycles of life and nature. The profoundness of Gottheim's act is to elaborate a body of work outside of fashion and within a search for an authentic language of cinematic discourse." - John Handhardt, on the occasion of the presentation of the full "Elective Affinities" cycle at the Whitney Museum, 1981
I have been moving away from the formal structures that were the compositional framework of much of my work, having more recently been attracted by, for example, areas of Caribbean ritual and history which contain their own patterns. My interest in exploring sound/image relationships is a continuing one - stretching the possibilities of what one can "experience" through these channels. I have become uncomfortable with being characterized in terms of superficial aspects of content (e.g., landscape) or form (e.g., "structural") Hopefully new viewers will see the films in a fuller, more appropriate context, as well as just enjoy them.
"It is a small but perfect film." - Jonas Mekas
"The metaphor in FOG LINE is so delicately positioned that I find myself receding in many directions to discover its source: The Raw and the Cooked? Analytic vs. Synthetic? Town & Country? Ridiculous and Sublime? One line is scarcely adequate to the bounty which hangs from fog & line conjoined." - Tony Conrad
"FOG LINE is a wonderful piece of conceptual art, a stroke along that careful line between wit and wisdom - a melody in which literally every frame is different from every preceding frame (since the fog is always lifting) and the various elements of the composition - trees, animals, vegetation, sky, and, quite importantly, the emulsion, the grain of the film itself - continue to play off one another as do notes in a musical composition. The quality of the light - the tonality of the image itself - adds immeasurably to the mystery and excitement as the work unfolds, the fog lifting, the film running through the gate, the composition static yet the frame itself fluid, dynamic, magnificently kinetic." - Raymond Foery
1970, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30
"BARN RUSHES is one of those seldom films which surprises one over and over. I remember the surprise I had when I used it first in a class; BARN RUSHES is so ecstatic and visionary that I thought a didactic setting might smother it. However, the film instead emerged not only unscathed, but (phoenix-like) improved! For aside from the compositional/retinal joy of the film, it is also a tour-de-force in sequential organization of thematic material, the closest possible approach to a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision, and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.
"... elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution; tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces, etc., and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time." - Tony Conrad
Collection: Carnegie Institute; Moderna Mus�et, Stockholm
1971, 16mm, color/si, 36m (18fps), $105
"Perfect works have a way of appearing unobtrusive or simple, the complexities seeming to be so correct that they flow - mesmerize one through their form - a form that bespeaks of harmony between many aesthetic concerns. ... Larry Gottheim's DOORWAY is such a film. His concern for working with edges, isolating details, the prominence of the frame as a shape and revealer of edges, love of photographic texture, are all dealt with lucidly in this film. ... One is drawn into these beautiful images through Gottheim's poetic feel for photographic qualities - i.e., light, movement, texture - his ability to transform a landscape through his rigorous use of the frame to isolate in order to call attention to a heretofore hidden beauty revealed through a highly selective eye." - Barry Gerson, Film Culture
1971, 16mm, b&w/si, 8m (18fps), $25
With Shelley Berde.
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm is all thought, and joyance everywhere -
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
is Music slumbering on her instrument.
And what if all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of Each, and Good of all?
- S.T. Coleridge, The Eolian Harp
1971, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $30
Completed in 1973 (with assistance from CAPS), HORIZONS was released as an individual film and continues to stand as such. However, I have incorporated it as Part 1 "Overture" to the series Elective Affinities, which includes three further sound films: MOUCHES VOLANTES (1976), FOUR SHADOWS (1978) and TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (1981). For information on special rates for the entire series contact Canyon Cinema.
"This was also my fifth viewing of Gottheim's HORIZONS. (It is said, in Analects, VII:31, that 'when Confucius was pleased with the singing of someone he was with, he would always ask to have the song repeated and would join in himself.') During the first viewing of HORIZONS, in London, I just looked at it, with my eyes all open and ablaze, and I found it very beautiful. Later I listened to Gottheim talk about the film. I found out about the complex web of image rhymes and correspondences in the film. During my second and third viewings I became very absorbed in seeing and figuring out the correspondences and rhymes. But I found the film equally, if not more, beautiful. The fourth viewing was again an open eye viewing, without any special emphasis. During the Cooper Union screening I suddenly discovered its incredible richness of color. I sat close to the screen and I saw these glorious colors and I was amazed that I could look at HORIZONS four times and not notice the magnificence of its color." - Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal
Collection: Centre Beaubourg, Paris
1973, 16mm, color/si, 80m, $135
Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in 16 combinations - a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Cezanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande .... The stately ceremony can generate rich sensuous cinematic pleasure as well as a free-flowing stream of associations. Containment and flowing free - these are some of the issues. The third film in the Elective Affinities cycle.
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978; Berlin Film Festival.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 64m, $135
A mirrored form in counter-movement, dense with emotion-charged memory - a rapidly sparking dynamism of image and afterimage, swirling resonant words/music, juxtaposing loss, my father's stroke, Toscanini, Siodmak's The Killers, the Red Robin Diner. ... I seem to be quickening.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $55
Mostly shot in San Francisco and Northern California, material filmed (using the camera almost as a p[r/a]inter, a means of shaping the visual world as film, but without reflection) in response to what that world was opening in me. "Material!" - analogies between weaving and spinning thread and images already a pattern within film history (e.g., in Deren) is here carried into further ramifications of unraveling and patterning in fabric- and cinema-making, as well as in personal and mythic dimensions. The open unfolding structure, which pulls away from the balanced design of much of my work, gives equal weight to the sound composition. Involves "opening" with its perils and ambiguities.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 17m, $60
Rapid, disjunctive images and sounds from aspects of life in the Dominican Republic - a film dealing with representation itself, within ritual, within cinema, within history, within narrating. The title is a Dominican song, based on a Haitian song, meaning a razor-sharp machete; it is, of course, a complex metaphor within the cultures from which it comes, but also within the film, extending my longstanding interest in edges, borders, horizons, into material of documentary interest.
Partially supported by a grant from NYSCA.
Exhibition: Havana Film Festival; Cine San Juan Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 45m, $150