Thursday, April 27, 2006 @ 7:15 PM
A Quest of Origins: Films by Larry Gottheim
Presented by PDX Fest and Cinema Project
Artist-in-attendance
Since the late 1960’s Larry Gottheim has a been deeply involved with cinema, teaching himself 16 mm filmmaking then developing the Department of Cinema in Binghamton, N.Y. This extremely influential department attracted the most talented artists, academics, and filmmakers of the day including Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, and Ernie Gehr among many others. In the 1990’s Gottheim has also served for a brief time as director of the Filmmaker’s Co-op in New York.
Gottheim’s early film prints have been restored in connection with an "Avant Garde Masters" grant through the Media Center of the Donnell Library, the Art Library of the NY Public Library. Elective Affinities is a series of four feature-length films Gottheim started in the early 1970’s. The Films are formal investigations edited into a structure involving formal patterning, with repetition and permutation of elements. Elective Affinities explores not only the film’s image and the relation of sound to image, a recurring theme in his work, and time but issues such as family, psychology, education, freedom, the theme of "nature" in art. Tree of Knowledge, the final installment of the series, serves as summation of Gottheim’s aesthetic as it contains within its epistemological questioning of the authority of images a self-referential return to the ground of experience and being as the camera returns to nature, the earth, and the tree of knowledge. Gottheim describes his newer work, Our Television Traveler, as “The history of space, the place of mystery, the mystery of trace, the space of history.”
Tree of Knowledge (Elective Affinities IV)
Larry Gottheim
1981, 16 mm, 58 min
Our Television Traveler
Larry Gottheim
1991, 16 mm, 17min