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Detailed Program and Artist’s Notes

Blues (1969, 8 ½ min., silent, 16mm, 16fps.)
A bowl of blueberries in milk, changing light radiant on the berries and on the glazed bowl, the ever more radiant orb of milk transforming into glowing light itself, with a brief shadow coda answering the complex play of shadows. The regular pulses of light framing the looser rhythmus of the spoon, itself a frame. A charging of each of the frame's edges with its own particular energy. Within and without, whites and blues, lines and curves. The pulses of vision, the simple natural processes, lift the spirit.

Mouches Volantes – Elective Affinities, Part II (1976, 69 min., color and b&w, sound, 16mm) Elective Affinities is a series of four feature-length films Gottheim started in the early 1970s and completed in 1981 with Tree of Knowledge; the series explores not only images and their relationship to sound and time (a recurring theme in his work), they also examine issues such as family, psychology, education, freedom, and the theme of nature in art.
In Mouches Volantes… three elements… were brought together: the suggestive title….; a narration by Angelina Johnson of the story of the life of her husband, Blind Willie Johnson; and groups of visual material, light fragments from my own personal world of occupations…. As in all my films, the basic processes of cinema, the exposing of film stock to light, here the stringing together of linear patterns of sound and image, become metaphors, embodiments of acts of coming to feel, coming to know.

Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (1986, 18 min., 16mm) 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. –

Your Television Traveler (1991, 17 min., 16mm) The history of space, the place of mystery, the mystery of trace, the space of history.

The Opening (2005, 8 min., video) (excerpt from Chants & Dances for Hand, work-in-progress) This is the first section to be released from a large work constructed from material made in Haiti, mostly on Hi-8 video. Hand is my son. He’s now 12. The initial production was partially supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation. My venture in Haiti was to some extent inspired by Maya Deren. I was searching for traditional forms that related to the structures of my previous films. And something else.

About the filmmaker

Born 1936, Larry Gottheim taught himself 16mm filmmaking in the 1960s and became one of America’s leading avant-garde filmmakers.

From his late-1960s series of sublime “single-shot” films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-1970s and after, his cinema is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement. While addressing genres of landscape, diary and assemblage filmmaking, Gottheim’s work properly stands alone in its intensive investigations of the paradoxes between direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structures of repetition, anticipation and memory.

Gottheim developed the Department of Cinema in Binghamton, N.Y. and taught there for more than three decades. This extremely influential department attracted the most talented artists, academics, and filmmakers of the day including Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, and Ernie Gehr among many others. In the 1990’s Gottheim has also served for a brief time as director of the Filmmaker’s Co-op in New York.

Gottheim’s films are in the collections of museums and archives throughout the world, and a program of his restored early films premiered at the 2005 New York Film Festival.

Filmography

First Period:
Blues (1969)
Corn (1970)
Fog Line (1970)
Doorway (1970)
Thought (1970, re-titled 1980)
Harmonica (1971)
Barn Rushes (1971)

Second Period:
“Elective Affinities”
Horizons (1971-73)
Mouches Volantes (1976)
Four Shadows (1978)
Tree of Knowledge (1980)

Third Period:
Natural Selection (1983)
“Sorry/Hear Us” (1984)

Fourth Period:
Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (1986)
The Red Thread (1987)
Machete/Gillette ... Mama (1989)
Your Television Traveler (1991)

Fifth Period:
gathering material in Haiti for a long video project, Chants and Dances for Hand (1991-now)

Additional screening at Los Angeles Filmforum Sunday April 29, 7 pm Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre 6712 Hollywood Blvd at Las Palmas. see: www.lafilmforum.org for ticket and venue information

Tree of Knowledge – Elective Affinities IV (1981, 16 mm, 58 min.) It started with filming the tree. Something was released in that manner of filming seemingly farthest removed from the procedure of the early films. I first thought a simple ordering of this rich material might be enough... But the essential feelings and meanings of that filming held themselves back. So I pursued sounds of comparable texture and richness, from which material the 'deaf bar"… and stockyard sounds… attached themselves to the work. But the film only came into its form-life with the idea of linking this deep-rooted and far-outreaching tree material with that film on paranoia that had fascinated me for many years. – L.G.

Machete/Gillette ... Mama (1989, 16mm, 45 min.) 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… 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 [nature]. – L.G