Eye Drops Needed / 需要眼药水儿: Two Dreams of Lewis Klahr

When I was in New York, I complained to Chris about how I missed James Benning's Landscape Suicide because of work and how I was going to miss Saul Levin's show at Anthology and Bruce McClure's Only in Darkness Is Your Shadow Clear at Light Industry. As a consolation award for the successful survival of my nightmare job in NYC , after I came back to Cbus he gave me two new films by Lewis Klahr and Landscape Suicide by James Benning. I watched them last night.

Lewis Klahr's two films:

The Diptherians Episode Two: The Rhythm That Forgets Itself

Fake Aging

Both films were made in 2008 and haven't received much publicity yet. Diptherians was recently screened as part of a short film program Cracking The Surface at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in late Jan 2009. As a west-coast based filmmaker, Lewis Klahr's films are screened in L.A. a lot more than the east coast. Googling two films, I found that two films are only on the screening schedule of Rotterdam. Hopefully Rotterdam is just a kickoff not the end of their screening journey.

In Diptherians, Lewis Klahr uses the cut-out of photos of Wooster Group members like Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk. According to Lewis Klahr, he and those Wooster actors improvised their way "through a series of photo shoots trying to determine exactly what a 'Diptherian' is. Here's the first definition-- an elliptical narrative of what could become an ongoing serial of feature length duration".

Quote Chris from the website of CalArts:
The video-based Episode Two: The Rhythm that Forgets Itself is an elliptical narrative that presents a group of sartorially gifted demigods or super-villains (played by Wooster Group all-stars Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe, among others) as they go through their extra-temporal paces. The arcane mythology that surrounds them indicates that they exist outside of the laws of physics and man but, despite that, are trapped in their own patterns of asymmetrically cyclical behavior, somnambulistic decadence, and cosmically petty intrigues. And, similarly, the fumetti-like use of photographs gives a verisimilitude to the characters that almost grants them a sense of individual agency but the flatness of the cutouts squelches any sense of free will. That even the flattest of objects casts a shadow is one of the many paradoxes and mysteries that is hidden within The Diptherians.

Quote Tom Gunning (Chair of Film Studies Committee at Univ. of Chicago) on Lewis Klahr:
Miming the processes of memory, Klahr pulls together 'the discards of contemporary life into scenarios that seem like Hollywood films dimly remembered after a night of serious drinking.

I watched both films for three times. They are both under 15 minutes, so it's quite affordable timewise. At the second round, I finally found my best way to watch and understand his film. Instead of watching and thinking, I started living the films like my own dreams. Suddenly all the seemingly illogic fragments started to make sense. I don't know how Slavoj Zizek or any psychoanalyzist might put my case into theory, but I do believe if I could understand my memory, me dreams, and why and how my brain selected and invented them, if I could reach my unconsciousness and manipulate it consciously, I would be able to read Lewis Klahr like riding a bike.

It is really difficult to describe what Lewis Klahr's films are like. Every film is like a mystic episode of a superhero movie. He's a collagist and his films are collages. The material he uses is very nostalgic. Cut-out from old comic stripes, photos, stamps...I don't know if he really cut them out somewhere or he actually made them and made them vintage-looking. There always seems to be a narrative, but never easy to decipher. Fragmented aesthetics and narratives. One word, delirious.