Master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the United States and Europe. New York's Museum of Modern Art has purchased Klahr's films for their permanent collection, and curated three one-person shows with him since 1989. Klahr has also been included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1991 and 1995). His epic cutout animation THE PHARAOH'S BELT received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. For the past three years Klahr's shorts (ALTAIR, LULU and PONY GLASS) have been included in the New York Film Festival. LULU was commissioned by Copenhagen's Gronnegard's Theater production of Alban Berg's opera of the same name that opened to critical acclaim in August 1996. CALENDER THE SIAMESE, Klahr's first linear narrative, was included in the 1997 New Directors/New Films series as a featurette. Klahr is a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council of the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and the NY Foundation of the Arts and Creative Artists Public Services. Commercially he has created special effects and animation for television show openings, music videos, commercials, a documentary and a TV movie
"In his most masterful film to date, Lewis Klahr provides a lesson in modern hieroglyphics, assembling collages of contemporary demons and divinities in the guise of advertising images culled from a consumer culture's larger-than-life presentation of its products and the ecstasies they offer. These hyperbolic presences with their radiant colors and alternate promises and pitfalls provide the landscape for a childhood quest that teeters between nightmare and promised land, as Klahr's characters negotiate a labor of extrication from the morass of Betty Crocker chocolate icing, formica kitchens and parental phantoms toward a mastery of the imagination and the attaining of true love." - Tom Gunning
1993, 16mm, color/so, 43m, $135
ALTAIR offers a cutout animation version of color noir. The images were culled from six late '40s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky's "Firebird" (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist's story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman's battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above but instead a fascination with the color blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s
1994, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $30
"Lewis Klahr's DOWNS ARE FEMININE unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr's oneric collages graft '70s porn of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping/Architectural Digest decor (varicolored crab-orchard stone foyers, modacrylic sunbursts, jalousie windows and orientalist metal scrollwork), interior states where characters despoil themselves in Quaalude interludes of dreamy couplings. In this out-of-touch realm, touching is intelligence gathering for a carnal knowledge that will never attain its platonic ideal. The whole atmosphere is pervaded with euphoria, a hopelessness without despair, a contentment beyond longing. If Klahr's Yesterday's Glue presented an after-hours club world of pining narcissists where the mandatory sex, drugs and rock and roll was glacial if not sinister, DOWNS ARE FEMININE presents a world that edges past despondency to become an amoral libertine glade that is at its core abeyant but benevolent." - Mark McElhatten
1994, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
"... Klahr is always doing something uncanny, whether he's confusing a toy carousel with actual traffic in the silent GREEN '62 (1996) or animating cutouts to the music of Berg in LULU (1996)." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
GREEN '62 was shot in the curved window of a restaurant on Bowery and 4th Street during the summer of 1996. In the anamorphic effect of the glass I discovered a time portal to the New York City of the early 1960s
1996, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $25
"Lewis Klahr has developed a signature style of cutout animation using illustrations from old magazines and, occasionally, photographic cutouts. LULU was commissioned to be shown as an interlude for a Danish production of Alban Berg's opera, and it is a remarkably intricate piece of work. Berg's instructions call for an expository filmic sequence, but Klahr takes a more indirect approach, collaging stills of diva Constance Hauman with iconographic motifs and metaphoric condensations derived from the heroine's lurid fall from grace. A roulette wheel is a central image, at once a harbinger of chance and a catherine's wheel on which the body and soul of this femme fatale is broken. Intensities of color - predominantly gold, red, and blue - join with vertical movements into and out of frame in mirroring the rising and subsiding intensities of Berg's musical phrases. For those familiar with Lulu's dramatic trajectory, it is like watching an implosion of elements drawn to the center from opposite ends of her story, the moment at which Fate drops its mask of neutrality." - Paul Arthur, Film Comment
1996, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $25
PONY GLASS is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen's secret life. In this 15-minute cutout animation Superman's pal embarks on his most adult adventure ever as he navigates the treacherous shoals of early '60s romance trying to resolve a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. A three-act melodrama - each act has its own song - filmed in my signature collage style that "unmasks" our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do "Klahr cruises the elysian backstreets of childhood comic books to make a set of 'musicals' ripened by blue-eyed melos and soul-searching psychodrama. Cub reporter Jimmy Olsen proves to be a pony of a different stripe and a man of steel as he ascends beyond good and evil in this bittersweet bildungsroman." - Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival
"In a different vein is Lewis Klahr's PONY GLASS, a high point of Program 2, to be shown at 5 PM tomorrow. The central character of this cartoon collage whose visual focus is in the 1950s, is Jimmy Olsen the cub reporter from 'Superman', who is imagined in scenarios with musical accompaniment dealing with racial and sexual anxiety. The character is liberated from a repressed Milquetoast into a figure posed in various pornographic couplings. The synergy of intense pop music and cartoons makes for a disturbingly heady meditation on transgressive imagery and popular culture." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times
"Less fussy and far more transgressive than his previous work, Klahr's collage animation PONY GLASS makes comic-book hero Jimmy Olsen the locus of desperate anxieties about sexuality and race. The film is so charged with fear and desire that a simple iris down to black made the hair stand up on the back of my neck." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
1997, 16mm, color/so, 14.5m, $55
1998, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $30
2002, 16mm color/sound 13 minutes inquire