Drowsy with Ions

March 24 · Regal Riviera · 10:30 A.M.

75 minutes. Klahr will introduce the program and discuss his work after the screening.

Drowsy with Ions: The City as Collage

Two Hours To Zero

2004, 8 minutes

Music by Rhys Chatham “Guitar Trio.” The second film in my Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy in which each successive film gets shorter and shorter and the elliptical crime story being told is more and more compressed. The early ’60s comic books I used were an adaptation of the popular TV show, 77 Sunset Strip.

Black River Falls

2017, 7 minutes

Music by Dick Connette from his album, Too Sad for the Public Vol. 1: Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade. Suzzy Roche sings the vocal. Dick’s lyrics were inspired by the reknowned photography book, Wisconsin Death Trip.

City Film

1992, 17 minutes, Super 8 Transfer to Digital Video (2013)

Between 1988 and 1992 I shot these images to make a record of the beauty I was seeing on a daily basis walking the streets of downtown Manhattan and the East Village where I then lived.

Well Then There Now

2011, 14 minutes

Script and music by John Zorn. The narration is provided by my son Slater Klahr, who was twelve at the time. I wanted a ‘record’ of his voice during this very brief period as it transitioned from a child’s to a teenager’s. The text Slater reads is excerpted from Phillipe Soupalt’s sublime 1928 surrealist novel, Last Nights of Paris, which was translated by William Carlos Williams. An “unfaithful” adaptation of John Zorn’s conceptual film script, “A Treatment for a Film in Fifteen Scenes,” in which I decided to flip the tables on conceptualism and hold it to a cardinal rule of filmmaking: “the script is not the film.” Although I did not follow Zorn’s rules, this was an excellent collaboration — neither one of us got everything we wanted but something else emerged that we couldn’t have reached on our own.

High Rise

2017, 2 minutes

This is the video component of my 2D collage, “Streets,” which was exhibited in my solo show “Circumstantial Pleasures” at Grieder Contemporary, Zurich in 2016. Gallery visitors were given a link to watch High Rise on their phones — the same device I shot it on while traveling on a high speed train between Shanghai and Beijing. This screening will be its world theatrical premier.

The Occidental Hotel

2014, 26 minutes

A “city symphony” in which Mexican comic book characters populate and travel through a fictional city composed of photos of Berlin, Copehagen, and NYC in the mid 1990s. The photos I shot all were composed with an eye towards being used in one of my films and the necessary empty spaces that the comic book characters would eventually occupy. The action is choreographed to the father of Musique Concrete Pierre Schaefer’s sublime “Suite pour 14 instruments: Vagotte-Gavotte” (1949).

Open Eye Sleep

2012, 3 minutes

Music Tom Recchion
Cast: Henry Stram, Kate Valk, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Zippi, Kevin O’Brien
World Premiere

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.