Three Films by Larry Gottheim

Three Films by Larry Gottheim is screening in the cinema for $15/$7 reduced (suggested donation in person) on Thursday 9/8 at 7:30PM

Avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim appears in person to present three films from his extraordinary body of work.

Fog Line
Larry Gottheim, 1970, 11 min.

The fog lifts on a scene. For an attentive viewer the mental fog could also lift. It doesn’t go from white to full clarity. It just shows a piece of time, a section of a process in the landscape and in the mind of the viewer. The entire image slowly changes, the sky, the ground, what’s at the edges. The main features are the three trees and the wires. The trees stand there, manifesting their being. They have a soft shape without outline. The lines of the wires are something else. They relate to drawing rather than painting, the controlling mind rather than the imagination. The implications of this contrast go right through my work. There is something ethereal, ghostly. The viewer is invited to explore the screen, looking here and there, each person following a different path. Those whose path includes entering into the very emulsion that makes up the image are rewarded by the sight of ghost horses, the first animals in my films.  - Larry Gottheim

The Red Thread
Larry Gottheim, 1987, 17 min.

Material from a time spent in California at the San Francisco Art Institute. My actual image appears as an ironic avatar of my real filmmaker self. It is challenged by a woman, a weaver with whom I was in a relationship. The mythic references are more than just ironic. Creatures appear. A tribute to women: Clara Schumann, Sally at the piano, Leonora, the cow-herding women of myth. The division into “acts” is a somewhat ironic echo of the formal structures of previous films. The real me, the filmmaker me, is there, for example in the piano passages and above all with the children in the schoolyard, a ceremonial dance. Leonora is connecting the making of this very film to my personal failings. The film itself shows how I transcend those failings. - Larry Gottheim

Mouches Volantes (Elective Affinities, Part 2)
Larry Gottheim, 1976, 69 min.

The beautiful, evocative musical tale Angelina Johnson narrates about her relationship with the blues singer Blind Willie Johnson is matched, frame-by-frame, with films of my family. Echoing the title – which translates to “Flying Gnats” and was taken from Helmholz –  tiny specks flying in front of the subject, leading the subject to follow them. They always escaped. They were in the eye itself. As the retina turned to catch them, they seemed to fly away. This embodied the paradox of inside and outside that was already a presence in my work and was to reemerge in other forms.

Like Horizons, this film creates a dance between the flow of images that pass by and the memory of other related images, nearby or distant. Rhymes and relationships led me to the notion of affinities, which in turn suggested the title, “Elective Affinities,” a reference to Goethe. The notion of affinities also applies to personal connections of myself with Angelina and Blind Willie Johnson, blindness, blackness, and other motifs. - Larry Gottheim

A Q&A with filmmaker Larry Gottheim will follow the screening