The Animated World is a regular feature spotlighting animation from around the globe. Lewis Klahr's Circumstantial Pleasures is exclusively showing on MUBI starting June 23, 2021 in many countries in the Undiscovered series.
Circumstantial Pleasures
Collage refuses known systems of meaning, instead sifting through the detritus of cultural production in order to orchestrate accidental insights into human experience. Its heyday was the early 20th century when modernists and surrealists harnessed its power to manifest the unconscious and juxtapose familiar objects into strange new landscapes. Artists like Hannah Hoch, Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield, and Marcel Duchamp created unique and perplexing works that some found disturbing, or, as famously labeled by the Nazis, degenerate. Their work often unleashed new possibilities, visual puns, erotic undercurrents and hidden political realities. Collage has lost none of its relevance over the years and continues to resonate, with filmmakers joining in as well—especially animators like Larry Jordan, Harry Smith, and Lewis Klahr. Animation is particularly suited to collage, orchestrating cutouts, objects, and images into a roiling and transformative symphony.
Watching an animated collage is like being in another country where the signs are barely intelligible: linguistic and cultural markers have an intangible quality that can amuse, frustrate or enlighten. Each collagist builds up their own system of symbols and lexicon of images which forms connections between the world and the work of art as well as between one film and another. This system, in the case of Lewis Klahr, is a conversation steeped in mid-twentieth century American culture with pulp fiction and noir, comic books, advertisements, and images and effects echoing through a wide range of magazines and printed matter. His work rummages through the bedroom and the cosmos, into cityscapes and around dark corners, searching for unexpected encounters and associations. His films can be sexually subversive and wryly funny, and his cartoon characters mope and reflect their way through the films as if they had been born into such stories. An air of melancholy lingers, as the images have been fished from a prolific print culture that is almost lost to us.
Altair
Lewis Klahr has been making collage animation since the late 1970s and his dozens of short films offer a fascinating range of materials and interests. In interviews Klahr refers to himself as a re-animator rather than an animator—resuscitating images from the dead and giving them new life and focus. He might also be called a recycler: in order to make collage magic happen, you first need to collect a lot of junk. The worlds of his films are flush with images and associations, which reflect on each other on multiple levels. In Altair (1995), for example, the story evokes a film noir where one’s fate can be read in the cards or the stars, and liqueur inflects each scenario. The color blue sets a mood that suggests melancholy and the hidden depths of skies and seas. This moodiness is underscored by music from Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, which augments the fairy tale sensibility: a magic slipper, an “invisible key,” a castle, a woman lying in bed with a rose, waiting. The galaxy spins around slowly like bubbles in champagne and a woman rides a popping cork like a rocket ship. Klahr’s source materials for this film were primarily 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan, and true to its name, the resurrected and fragmented images produce the mysterious expanses of both an inner and outer cosmos.
Pony Glass
Klahr repurposes music as well, ranging from pop songs to the classical and avant-garde. For example, in Mood Opulence (1990) he uses the 1966 song “The Look of Love” to invoke films—like A Man and a Woman (1966) and Grand Prix (1966)—that mix race cars and romance. Similarly, in False Aging (2008), “Theme from Valley of the Dolls” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Lather” establish a narrative core that contrasts safety with adventure and ponders that deceptive foundation of narrative: time. Many of Klahr’s films offer a story, and they often subvert standard genres, as in Pony Glass (1997), which reimagines the private and erotic life of comic book sidekick Jimmy Olsen. Eroticism steers many of Klahr’s films as he uncovers subversive sexualities latent in domestic settings. Downs Are Feminine (1991), for example, features cutouts engaged in a softcore fantasy that feels like a mixture of the worldly and naïve as well as the vacuous and overdetermined—as if one accidentally witnessed barbie dolls awkwardly coupling in a mid century bachelor pad. While Klahr primarily uses cutouts and print matter, occasionally real objects emerge, creating a shocking encounter, as with the labia in Elevator Music (1991), heightening the sexual immediacy and exposure of the moment. Other objects reinscribe a sensual reality, as they tend to in collage, or even an exotic one, as with the flowers in The Occidental Hotel (2014), which suggest the strange intensities of travel and the intangible memories of specific locations that are as impossible to remember as a fragrance.
Circumstantial Pleasures
Circumstantial Pleasures (2020), a compilation of six short films Klahr made between 2013-2019, is a departure from much of his earlier work. It focuses more on symbolism than narrative, lacks much of the whimsy and pop culture lightness characteristic of his other films, and ponders the present instead of reinterpreting the past. It has little of the youthful nostalgia that mixes with critique and satire in many of his collages, evoking instead despair about the bleakness of contemporary culture and global capitalism. The reference to “pleasure” is certainly an irony, however circumstantial it may be. Or rather, there is little obvious pleasure for author or viewer in the film, but one can imagine an implicit pleasure attributed to the Capitalist Roaders—the title and subject of the first film and a moniker coined by Mao Zedong to describe the decadent lovers and enablers of bourgeois capitalism. The focus on global market forces makes the scope of the film immense, and the sense of space on an inhuman scale permeates throughout—but not the infinite and imaginative space of the cosmos. Rather here are images that multiply an emptiness and lack created through an endless and pointless mechanized production where human bodies are alienated, damaged, and lost.
The six short films mull continuously over these images signifying late capitalism and globalization: money, oil cans, office buildings, shipping containers and “made in China” stamps, undecipherable patterns on official documents, suitcases that offer no escape. These quickly bring to mind the terrible monotony of soulless economic forces that produce nothing of meaning and the attendant fear. This absence of value or worth is amplified by the nature of collage, which recycles and magnifies fragments of images that are already empty and drained of life. References to current social and environmental hardships and horrors compound this baseline of desolation: rampant fires in California, racial injustice, guns, hazmat suits, traffic jams, pills, plastic containers, needles, smoke stacks, bottle tops. Even abstract shapes mirror the system of exchange: circles recall the shape of coins and rectangles recollect dollar bills. Here the human body is detritus to be cast off, a colored dot marking it for discount at a garage sale. There is little eroticism, except for an occasional phallus emerging, gesturing to power rather than sexuality or life. The overall symbolic load of the film points to power and capitalism’s rampant abuse of it, and its characters are public figures who drag their own storylines, ready-made, with them into the film.
Circumstantial Pleasures
While still giving full expression to the anguish and gloom of the present, the bookend short films (Capitalist Roaders and Circumstantial Pleasures) do allow some wit and whimsy to surface, as when a man flies over wreckage on a mattress, accompanied by jaunty music, or a hand withdraws from a cocktail glass which nudges itself forward longingly until the hand returns. The soundtrack enables these visual jokes, which is impossible in most sections. The experimental electronic music of David Rosenboom and Tom Recchion aptly accompanies the visual tension and distorts at times into static and noise, amplifying the anxiety generated by the bleak imaginary of the film. A brilliant use of Scott Walker’s “SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” arrives in the last film and releases repressed human emotion and pain, punctuating the film with rage and melancholy and the burning out of a life. The song, from Walker’s last album Bish Bosch (2012), tells the story of the court jester Zercon, who performs before a cruel audience before trying to escape and being transformed into a dwarf star. The human images in the film follow a similar trajectory: they are not so much protagonists of their worlds as drifters consuming the emptiness of the images they encounter.
Circumstantial Pleasures
The beginning of the last film deftly demonstrates this: a woman’s body covered in plastic with a recycling image stamped on her face, a man’s anguished expression, a head with no face. The use of plastic in the films has signified the unnatural and prophylactic, especially with gloves that seem to offer anonymous protection from some unspecified contaminant. The color red features heavily as well—from red dots to red screens—and brings to mind power, dictatorships, danger, blood, anger, death. When a man bares his chest with a scar down the middle, and a red gloved hand caresses it before cutting into it with an X-Acto knife, one can only ask, along with Walker’s stark voice as his song begins: “What’s the matter?” This is a question the film hauntingly and chillingly answers. Yet in the end there is, at least, some ambiguity about the future. Though the film’s soundtrack ends with the questions—“What if I freeze? And drop into the darkness?”—there is another message sent. Just as oases are hidden in barren deserts, a collage creates meanings of its own. Klahr always dedicates his films to someone, usually another filmmaker, which gives the films a personal voice and direction, a home. The last image in Circumstantial Pleasures is a red dot caught in the power lines of a transmission tower—stranded there? A drop in the darkness? Or a message on its way to a source? The last statement of the film seems to answer this question: “For Pia Borg.”