7:00 pm

The filmmaker will be present.

Co-presented with the Light Matter Film Festival, supported by NYSCC Alfred University and the Institute for Electronic Arts.

BARN RUSHES (1971)
34 minutes

I noticed a play of moving light between the slats of an old barn I passed every day on the way to my house. This led me to film it from a car window as the car drove up the road, turned and continued up the hill. I filmed it in extreme slow motion - the fastest camera speed. The barn is seen from the side, then front, then from the other side. The film is made of 8 passes across the barn, each the length of a 100-foot roll of film The light and the relationship to the foreground grasses, the sky, and the woods behind, change in each pass. Each roll of film is slightly exposed to light at the start or end, moving into a zone of images that have not passed through the lens, but are directly in or on the strip of film. Once I saw the originally unintended element of repetition, I seized on it as a fruitful meaningful element in this and other of my films. The barn manifests itself, as do other things and creatures in my films. It is both passive, as I am with the camera, and active, almost alive. As in BLUES the fully revealed milk seems to rise above the bowl, so here another miracle occurs as at the end the foreground grasses seem to pass behind the barn. These films are mysteries.

MNEMOSYNE MOTHER OF MUSES (1986)
18 minutes

There is a double retrograde motion. A flow of images goes forward, linked to a sound track that is going backward. Then the directions are reversed. This relates to the complex canon forms and retrograde motions that were beloved of some Western Renaissance composers as well as Schoenberg and Webern. I was influenced by a passage in Heidegger where he calls attention to the ancient Greeks conceiving Mnemosyne,  \the goddess of memory,  as the mother of the muses. Memory is both a subject of the film and an essential part of its structure. The material evokes many other emotional and philosophical ideas. Images include those from a wedding, the Red Robin Diner at night, my father after his stroke, the place in Sunnyside where I grew up, a ruined factory on the shore in Eastport Maine. Sound elements include the conductor Arturo Toscanini rehearsing a passage from Wagner, something from the sound track of the film noir THE KILLERS. There is a sense of loss and recovery-- the need to go back and its impossibility except in art.

THE RED THREAD (1987)
17 minutes

Material from a time spent in California at the San Francisco Art Institute. My actual image appears as an ironic avatar of my real filmmaker self. It is challenged by a woman, a weaver with whom I was in a relationship. The mythic references are more than just ironic. Creatures appear. A tribute to women: Clara Schumann, Sally at the piano, Leonora, the cow-herding women of myth. The division into "acts" is a somewhat ironic echo of the formal structures of previous films. The real me, the filmmaker me, is there, for example in the piano passages and above all with the children in the schoolyard, a ceremonial dance. Leonora is connecting the making of this very film to my personal failings. The film itself shows how I transcend those failings.

www.larrygottheimfilms.com

Larry Gottheim was born December 3, 1936 in New York City.

• Started Cinema Department at Binghamton University, State University of New York 1970 (first regular undergraduate degree program in the U.S. devoted to personal experimental film and later video.) Professor of Film-making and Film Aesthetics until 1998. Was Department Chair for much of the time
•  President of Board of Directors, New York Film-makers' Cooperative 1995 - 1997
• Awards include Fulbright Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, CAPS, NY State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Avant-garde Masters Film Preservation Grant
• Major shows include Museum of Modern Art (several times), Whitney Biennial (several times), Berlin Film Festival, Festival of Independent Avant-garde Film at National Film Theater, London, Havana Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and many other museums and festivals in Europe, Canada and the United States
•  Some shows in last decades: NY Film Festival, 2005. Retrospective, Anthology Film Archives, 2006. Portland Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles Film Forum, Red Cat Theater, L.A. Visiting Artist Cal Arts. 2006. Harvard Film Archives, 2007. Several shows London and Cardiff Wales, 2009. "2 ½ Dimensional Film Featuring Architecture," Antwerp, 2010.  Spring 2014: Union Docs; retrospective of all films in Contemporary Art Museum, Coruña, Spain
• "2 ½ Dimensional Film Featuring Architecture" Antwerp, 2010
• Fordham Library, NYC. 2016
• Tour in Europe, May/June 2017 in London, Manchester, Leeds, Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, La Coruna, Barcelona
• Tour in Europe March 2019 including Arsenal in Berlin,  Festival du Réel at the. Pompidou Museum in Paris, Bozar in Brussels. Close-up Film Centre, London 
• EXis Film Festival, Seoul, Korea