Broad Underground || Sixty Six || by Lewis Klahr

Broad Underground || Sixty Six || by Lewis Klahr

When:
February 22, 2019 @ 3:00 pm – 5:30 pm
2019-02-22T15:00:00-05:00
2019-02-22T17:30:00-05:00
Where:
B122 Wells
Wells Hall
619 Red Cedar Rd, Okemos, MI 48864
USA
Cost:
Free

Sixty Six

Lewis Klahr (2015)

3:00pm || Friday, February 22, 2019 || B122 Wells Hall || Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48823

Listed as one of the 10 Best Films of 2015 by New York Timescritic Manohla Dargis, Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Sixoffers a compelling point of entry into his decades of work as an experimental animator. Each of the twelve short films that make up this feature-length anthology reference, as the title partly suggests, Klahr’s lifelong fascination with the 1960s and its cultures of intoxication. Klahr’s images are cut or torn from his personal collection of magazines, manuals, illustrations, and wallpaper samples. His films draw attention to the paper on which these images are printed. He does not shoot through glass, he lets the edges of his paper figures curl or cast shadows in three dimensions, and he lets us see their subtle patterns of pulp grain. These reanimated pieces of dead paper remind us of the importance of archives of this material, like the one here at MSU.

Unlike his predecessors in avant-garde animation, which often focused on realms of the unconscious or on occult symbolism, Klahr’s works tend to dwell in the painful, terrifying, and sweet stories of 1960s popular culture, which have been partly forgotten and now exist largely in paper traces. The films are often grand melodramas inside quiet shoeboxes. They are saturated with color and blurred by tears. In Sixty Six, myths of ancient Greece couple with the myths of recently outmoded popular culture. Hades comingles with classical Hollywood, Roy Lichtenstein with Helen of Troy. Figures cut from color comics move across black-and-white photographs that seem stark and empty, like crime scenes. Throughout the film, Klahr uses a lightbox to shoot both sides of the paper, recto and verso, at once. The pulp of the paper is no longer an opaque boundary, but a medium that transmits the fiery pools of color from its other side. If our recent history has been too easy to forget, Klahr reminds us that its fragments remain and will bleed through in unpredictable ways.

—Programmed by Kaveh Askari & Julian Chambliss


Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.

Cosponsored by the MSU Comics Forum

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