Lewis Klahr’s Latest Film Premieres at MoMA

Screenshot from Lewis Klahr’s ‘Sixty Six.’

On Monday (Dec. 7), the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Modern Mondays series presents the world premiere of Sixty Six, collagist and CalArts School of Theater faculty Lewis Klahr’s latest film.

Klahr, called “the reigning proponent of cut and paste” by The Village Voice, is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic collage films and cutout animations. For Sixty Six, part of his digital series Prolix Satori, Klahr mines his 30-year archive of collage materials.

From MoMA’s website:

Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, the film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines.

The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis writes in a review that, “taken together, [Sixty Six] forms a strange and beautiful, quietly powerful and affecting exploration of the pop cultural world that we make and share and that, every so often, can also become our very own fortresses of solitude. There’s a great deal of heart in this work and not a trace of condescension; Mr. Klahr knows that in the end we are in this dream together.”

A Q&A with the filmmaker follows the screening.

MoMA’s Modern Mondays is a series that invites artists working in the expanded field of film, video, performance and sound to present their work in an intimate setting.