TURBIDUS FILM #21 present LARRY GOTTHEIM (usa) June 9-10, 2017

FILMFORM June 9, 7pm / FYLKINGEN June 10, 6pm and 8:30pm

TURBIDUS FILM #21 presents LARRY GOTTHEIM (1936) in person for the first time in Sweden. Gottheim became, together with Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr, one of the America's most prominent and leading ’structural’ avant-garde filmmakers in 1960s. 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.

”I found my cinema voice in an effort to transform real events into cinema through intense camera seeing. The resulting experiences were cinematic not so much by asserting their physical nature as projected sequential frames, nor by my asserting expressive camera work or editing; their cinema life manifested itself in the special flow of consciousness they called forth. The viewer could experience intense creative concentration and discovery similar to mine in the act of filming. It was a matter of establishing a clear filming situation with dynamic harmony between my own vision, the camera procedure, and the events being ’recorded.’

This was a principle concern in BLUES (1969), CORN (1970) and FOG LINE (1970). In DOORWAY (1970) and the sound film HARMONICA (1971) the camera becomes more active, and in BARN RUSHES (1971), the organization involves blocks of shots, clear architectural patterns. This concern with the shot as distinct unit, with the problem of organizing these units, is manifest in HORIZONS (1971).” – Larry Gottheim

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PROGRAM ONE: CHANTS AND DANCES FOR HAND

FILMFORM, JUNE 9, 2017, 7:00 PM
Free entrance but to take part of this you must be on the list. Please sign up here (limited number of seats): swarthnas@mail.com

Link: http://www.facebook.com/events/1680649335297190/

Introduction and q&a with the filmmaker.


YOUR TELEVISION TRAVELER
1991 | 16mm to digital file | color | 15’00
The history of space, the place of mystery, the mystery of trace, the space of history.


CHANTS AND DANCES FOR HAND
1991–2016 | hd | color | 40’00
There are scenes of Vodou ceremonies in which I participated, scenes filmed during an uprising, personal images (Hand is my son from a Haitian marriage) but this is far from a documentary. There are no sounds other than the sync sounds that accompany the images. The sections devoted to five ceremonies are separated by “Interludes” that introduce other material, some of it threaded throughout. This is a tightly wound network of sonic and visual connections, with secret passages between elements.

Thoughts about the relationship between ceremonies and personal and political life can arise, and of spectatorship in and outside of cinema, video and dreams.

Curated by Daniel A. Swarthnas and Larry Gottheim

PROGRAM TWO: EARLY WORKS

FYLKINGEN, JUNE 10, 2017, 6:00 PM
Entrance: 60SEK (single screening) or 100SEK (for two screenings at Fylkingen)

Link: www.facebook.com/events/169122710283857/ https://www.facebook.com/events/169122710283857/

Introduction and q&a with the filmmaker.


BLUES
1969 | 16mm | color | 8’30
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. - Larry Gottheim


CORN
1970 | 16mm | color | 10’30
A fixed camera companion to FOG LINE. Bright green leaves stripped from ears of corn, and later, the vibrant yellow ears placed steaming in the waiting bowl. Each of these actions inaugurates a period in which one contemplates an image whose steady transformation is barely perceptible--the delicate slow movement of light and shadow, the evolution of subtle steam into the film grain. A meditation on the fragile moments of corn's passage from living sun-nourished plant to food to light image. The mind attempts to grasp duration itself, to distinguish its own creating from its perceiving, but distictions blur in the wholeness of times's and consciousness' flow. - Larry Gottheim


FOG LINE
1970 | 16mm | color | 11’00
"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
1971 | 16mm | b&w | 7’30
"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


HARMONICA
1971 | 16mm | color | 10’30
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?


THOUGHT
1971 | 16mm | color | 7’00
In 1971 it seemed a formal companion to DOORWAY, bringing out further possibilities of small movements within the format of a continuous shot. In 1980 something sang to my current conserns, hinted at by drawing this title into that gentle sensual pulling. Something about what is moving between me, us and that out there... what us per-forming. - Larry Gottheim


BARN RUSHES
1971 | 16mm | color | 34’00
"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

Curated by Daniel A. Swarthnas and Larry Gottheim

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PROGRAM THREE: MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA

FYLKINGEN, JUNE 10, 2017, 8:30 PM
Entrance: 60SEK (single screening) or 100SEK (for two screenings at Fylkingen)

Link: www.facebook.com/events/169122710283857/ https://www.facebook.com/events/169122710283857/

Introduction and q&a with the filmmaker.

NATURAL SELECTION
1984 | 16mm | color | 35’30
Radiating from the Darwinian text-fragments outward through the material is much pictorial and spoken signifying text having to do with issues such as communication, translation, dynamics of perception, art, science, isolation and social interaction etc. In a certain sense a meaning does arise from all of this. At the same time the endless groupings and regroupings of material suggest yet another realm of meaning. Finally it is the experience of our own selection of a pattern among the myriad richness of combining materials, superimposed on my own composed pattern, that opens up the real film.

THE RED THREAD
1987 | 16mm | color | 15’30
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.


MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA
1989 | 16mm | color | 45’00
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

Curated by Daniel A. Swarthnas and Larry Gottheim

Medlemsproduktion: Daniel Swarthnas

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LARRY GOTTHEIM
Larry Gottheim was born in 1936. He studied music and literature at University, before receiving his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Larry started the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, which was the first regular undergraduate program that dealt with cinema as a personal art. Larry maintained his professorship for a time there, teaching filmmaking and aesthetics. As an artist, Larry’s films have been shown in Museums, Festivals, Universities, Art Schools and other venues in North America and Europe. Larry is currently a dealer in classical photography through Be-hold.

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This screening is part of a touring programme of Gottheim’s works that will screen across Britain and Europe from the 19 May to 24 June 2017.

After opening at Close-Up, the programme will tour to Manchester, before returning to London for a series of analytical screenings at no.w.here and LUX. Following screenings in Britain, the tour will move to Berlin, Stockholm, Vienna, Budapest, and Barcelona.
Be-hold.

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Medlemsproduktion: Daniel Swarthnas