Larry Gottheim: The Red Thread (Program Three)

Knots & Entanglements

567 5th Street

Oakland, CA 94607

Presented in association with Shapeshifters Cinema
Admission: $10 General/discounts available for Cinematheque Members and members of Shapeshifters Cinema
Event tickets here

“Early on, Gottheim […] challenged us to rethink our conventional experiences with filmgoing: basically, to start over by deepening and broadening our perception of what the elements of celluloid cinema were and how they could be used. Now, half a century later, his film Entanglement (2022) is a kind of meta-haiku that challenges us to work at comprehending, as best we can, the media-saturated world of the 21st century that we are all awash in.” (Scott MacDonald, from The Read Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films)

Among the meanings of The Red Thread are the connections that run from one film to the next, and the threads tat run from the films to issues of biography, philosophy, psychology, film theory, social issues, ritual and ceremony. (Larry Gottheim)

Working in film since the late 1960s, the cinema of Larry Gottheim is an observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement and offering uncannily commonplace imagery rife with elusive metaphor and/or accumulating into densely immersive conceptual conundra. In Gottheim’s films, time slows, hesitates and seems to move in novel and non-linear directions, the circularity of experience a recurring aspect of the master filmmaker’s rich body of work. Gottheim’s recent book, The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (published 2024 by Eyewash Books and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative) is a ruminative and musing career-spanning culmination, teasing out longitudinal threads and uncanny occurrences in the oeuvre, presenting the artists’ body of work as a multi-faceted whole, a throughline of thought and material-based philosophy.

In celebration of The Read Thread, Cinematheque is honored to present a three-program residency presenting selections from the artist’s vast body of work, from early single-shot films, still lifes and nature studies to the complex sound/image constructions of later work to the very recent films completed 2019–2024. This series is presented in partnership with the Roxie Theater, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema with Larry Gottheim in person at all screenings. (Steve Polta)

Program 1 · Program 2 · Program 3

Program Three: Knots & Entanglements
Friday, November 7 at 7pm
Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland

Cinematheque’s whirlwind survey of Larry Gottheim’s works wraps at Shapeshifters Cinema with later period films and recent digital videos, each a dense and sensorially confrontational collage of off-the-cuff cinematography and/or collaborative encounter, from “Sorry/Hear Us” (1984), an open-ended group project exploring temporal and linguistic reversal to recent digital works Entanglement (2022) and A Private Room (2024), each a confounding rebus-like audio/visual puzzlment. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING: Thought (1970) by Larry Gottheim; 16mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 8 minutes. “Sorry/Hear Us” (1986) by Larry Gottheim; 16mm screened as digital video, b&w, sound, 8 minutes. Entanglement (2022) by Larry Gottheim; digital video, color sounds, 24 minutes. A Private Room (2024) by Larry Gottheim; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes.

Thought (1970) by Larry Gottheim

The last of my continuous shot silent films. There is a very limited field of view, with small sliding and focus motions, but a lot to see. The previous films grew out of formal ideas, without much conscious concern with meaning, but now I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, and so I gave it this title. (Larry Gottheim)

“Sorry/Hear Us” (1986) by Larry Gottheim

A violated text, a hint of which leaks out through the cut-up, generates a film with its own overt surprises and suppressed associations. An old kind of poem bears, under pressure of a backwards undertow, a brash new cinema poem. Sharp and even funny, it grows out of a new mode of working, developing my desire to work collaboratively in a way that stimulates and benefits from the creative associations and acts of others. Doug Foote, David Gresalfi, Erick Pinedo—it’s fully their film, too. Kathy Benedek started it off. Karen Krawczyk, Jack Holland, Chris Sivolella made creative contributions. Also Henry Lou, Marty Sheehan, Tom Murray, Fernando Pimenta. (Larry Gottheim)

Entanglement (2022) by Larry Gottheim

An exhilarating cinematic train ride at the speed of sound through a quantum landscape. Music. The dance of death. Do you remember? Phil Spitalny and his All Girl Orchestra. Pianist Alfred Cortot. Deadly serious, but comic. (Larry Gottheim)

A Private Room (2024) by Larry Gottheim

The story of quantum Alice and quantum Bob. Words, and music. A film within the film. What is in the mind of an autistic baby? An animal baby. What is in the mind of Bob and Alice? The pathos of Bob and Alice. Looking for my ghost. (Larry Gottheim)

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