Sixty Six

March 23 · Regal Riviera · 12:45 P.M.

Lewis Klahr, 2015, 90 minutes

Lewis Klahr will introduce the screening.

“Set at the intersection of mass culture and myth, right at the hazardous corner of desire and dread, Sixty Six offers a dizzying display of largely found images and sounds — culled from old comics, ads, magazine layouts, songs, and noises — that together form a kind of cinematic archaeology of the American unconscious.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

A film in twelve parts, Sixty Six premiered in December 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, where it was hailed as “a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking.” The dozen discreet chapters, which were composed over a number of years, find a new resonance in this stitched-together, feature-length form. Drawing on Classical and American mythologies, pop art, LA’s modernist urban landscape, and found soundtracks, Klahr evokes an unnerving nostalgia akin to sense memory.

Sixty Six opens with an epigraph from Paul Eluard and André Breton: “Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know.” It’s a usefully surreal guidepost for navigating Sixty Six, a film that stimulates certain narrative pleasures (viewers will naturally desire to impose a coherent story where none exists) while frustrating simple explanations or summary. Another useful guidepost? The title of Klahr’s short film program at Big Ears, “Drowsy with Ions,” which alludes to the noctural, droning, dreamlike reveries conjured by his work.

About the Artist

Lewis Klahr uses found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. He is primarily known for his uniquely idiosyncratic films, which he began creating in 1977 and has screened extensively in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Lewis Klahr teaches in the Theater School of the California Institute of the Arts and is represented by The Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.

Lewis Klahr is currently at work on a new feature length series of collage films titled Circumstantial Pleasures and Porcelain Gods, a retelling of Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt as a collage novel.