October 20, Thursday, 7:30PM, 2005
History of American Avante-Garde:
Larry Gottheim

"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." –L.G.

Machette Gillette...Mama 16mm, 45min, 1989

"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." - Canyon Cinema

Exhibition: Havana Film Festival; Cine San Juan Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.

 

Fog Line 11min, 16mm, 1970 (silent, color)

"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

Doorway 7.5min, 16mm, 1971 (bw, silent)

"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

Blues 7.5min, 16mm, 1970 (bw, color)

"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."--L.G.