Circumstantial Pleasures(2013–2019) by Lewis Klahr
Thursday, December 12, 2024, 7:30 pm
Lewis Klahr: Circumstantial Pleasures
Lewis Klahr In Person
Presented in association with The Lab
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
Working since the late 1970s, Lewis Klahr is known for an extensive body of collage films which probe the American unconscious through the filmmaker’s intimate animation of mid-century ephemera. In Klahr’s films, fugitive fragments of forgotten material culture—including advertisements, comics, found photos and other figments—combine with poignant song selections to explore unique lonelinesses lurking within the American experience. However, in Circumstantial Pleasures Klahr abandons his signature use of mid-20th century source materials and “looks at the raw material of contemporary life and distills them into a demanding and powerful work of anxiety, alienation, agitation and abrasion… that conveys the experience of being alive in the 21st century in ways that few other films have.” (Chris Stults, Film Curator, Wexner Center for the Arts.)
Created episodically 2013–2019 and released as a completed compendium 2020, the six-part Circumstantial Pleasures, received exactly one public screening on its release—at Brooklyn’s Light Industry on February 29 of that year—before COVID-19 relegated the work to the peculiar fog of pandemic-era online exhibition spaces. During a subsequent online run in plague time virtual venues, the work was recognized as uncannily prescient in its seeming anticipation of pandemic era anxieties. Indeed, the film, with its global scope; ruminations on illness, isolation and thwarted travel; and considerations with supply chains and the flows of goods and capital—not to mention the anomalous inclusion figures from contemporary politics and entertainment—Circumstantial Pleasures is an aggressively visceral work, manifesting a dark and unsettlingly expansive rumination on the exhausting and beguilingly narcotic toxicities of late-stage global capitalism. And nearly five years later, the mysterious masterwork in fact feels painfully nostalgic and uncannily resonant on the eve of a new, darker, political era.
Circumstantial Pleasures will be preceded by Klahr’s 2007 film Antigenic Drift:
In 2007 I made a piece called Antigenic Drift, which was my first digital collage film. It was inspired by a frightening article in The New Yorker about the inevitability of pandemics. This article described “antigenic drift,” which is […] the process by which viruses replicate themselves and mutate to stay viable in partially immune populations. I was attracted to that idea, not only for what it said about pandemics but also for how it related to collage—source materials migrating from their original contexts and recontextualizing themselves into fresh contexts, while still retaining part of their original history. Antigenic Drift barely got screened; nobody was interested in how harsh and frightening it was. (Lewis Klahr, interviewed by Courtney Stephens: BOMB, May 27, 2020)
SCREENING:
Antigenic Drift (2007) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 17 minutes
Circumstantial Pleasures (2020):
Capitalist Roaders (2016) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 18 minutes.
Ramification Lesions (Microbial Stress) (2019) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes.
Rachet the Margin (2016) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes.
Virulent Capital (2018) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 9 minutes.
High Rise (2016) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 2 minutes
Circumstantial Pleasures (2019) by Lewis Klahr; digital video, color, sound, 22 minutes.