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| Daylight Moon by Lewis Klahr. Film still. |
Votary of the numinous realm of dead media, Lewis Klahr conjures melancholic, chaotic collage. With the aid of suitably primitive materials like paper, glue, scissors and film, he dredges up gnomic juxtapositions and purebred chimeras from the river of no return that abducts obsolete mass imagery. The effluvia of mid-20th century print Americana - comic books, instructional manuals, encyclopaedias and advertisements - is brought together in a remorseless logic of semiotic defilement, in a dream logic where recombinant cut-outs frolic, erupt in speech bubbles, engage in kinky transactions with the object world and fall into handmade shadow.
The overconsumption of popular culture leaves a heavy thumbprint on the soul, the compulsion to repeat, but in different form. Images that were intended to be disposable from the beginning are harder to eradicate than most, gaining in tawdry glory over time and exerting action at a distance. Re-appropriation both doubles and undercuts their power, investing them with renewed life but through folding them into another narrative, reveals that this is life on the terms of a parallel universe. In this vein, Klahr's aleatory but precision-crafted reveries siphon out the latent energy of visuals that have retreated from the arc lights of adulation or use. He then injects them with the mysterious perversity of the paper-thin. Pieces like the acclaimed Pony Glass, The Pharaoh's Belt and Downs Are Feminine represent the zenith of this aesthetic for Klahr, while some of his other work wanders astray from those parameters, making a sensuous detour into neo-structuralism (Her Fragrant Emulsion) and more recently, reinventing the earlier obsessive collage with the spacious and haunting abstraction of Daylight Moon, screened in the 'Experimenta' strand of the 2003 London Film Festival. The following will consist of reflections on these two films, from 1987 and 2003 respectively.
There may be an impetus to draw analogies between solipsism and structuralism, if both can be considered introspective moments focusing on the preconditions of their own making. One is of subjective processes, the other of material filmic processes, although they can be conflated in an expressionist account of experimental film.But what seems more plausible is that there is another understanding of subjectivity to be reckoned with in film provisionally defined as structural - the impersonal subject produced in the processes of making and viewing. While suspending the atomisation of subjectivity, process and product, it reveals the malfunction that pervades each. Her Fragrant Emulsion seems to evidence this paradoxical ability of film to work best when it's breaking down. A febrile pastiche of structural films seen and a treatise in fluid ars combinatoria in its own right, it sets into play viscera of sound and celluloid with a preternaturally keen sense of the affective powers of timing. Brakhagian romanticism glints in the material inferno, working out the affinity between the ruin of representation and the havoc of emotion. Entropy takes on a romantic vertigo with the build-up of found shots and sequences of shots, rhythms and absences that might seem uninflected left to their own devices. Snatches of dialogue alternate with filmechanical noises, street audio, breaths and gasps intercut with blaring traffic, crashing sea and ice clinking in Southern Californian glasses. Dispersed imagery enacts the drama of ephemeral attachments, an unknown blonde icon with windblown hair gossips with degraded film stock in speech clips of aching ambiguity. The strips of footage are re-filmed and haphazardly overlaid matching the ornate texture of the audio track. This is film that's lost its memory revelling in new impressions. Her Fragrant Emulsion is a title that evokes glamour and film processing, calling up effortless ease as it does cranky craftsmanship. And just so the film shifts between halcyon languor and nervous attention, like virtuoso machinery giving itself away by the sound of its gears, reminding us it's only a screen memory.
There might be some narrative in Daylight Moon - there are certainly shadows on the horizon, repeated manifestations of the same thing, melancholy music and even an omniscient voice-over. But they comprise a strange set, and just as in Her Fragrant Emulsion, disclose how narrative can emerge incidentally, out of the contingencies of how motifs occur and recur, of differences from and analogies to within an enigmatic visual calculus. Rather than letting the complex profilmic activity give rise to a pat structurelessness or affectless gesturality, narrative does encroach, but as an emotional climate or half-remembered childhood terror seeping out between the somnolent and awkward shuffling of the filmed stills and archive ephemera. Panning through through promotional leaflets and animating peeling board game counters at close range, manual chiaroscuro and dense colours, blocs of soundtrack culled from Night of the Hunter: these all add up to an uncanny melange of technical ingenuity and subdued calamity, optically splendid but heartbreaking as only the inanimate can really be. There is wonder, suspense, turmoil, then finally the equivocal idyll of Nick Drake's River Man. Music is terrifically salient in Daylight Moon, at least as controlling a partner as the pops and hisses of an old record player through the first third of the film or the cryptic image patterns. The piece luminously evokes Klahr's ongoing fascination with how consciousness is structured by random shards of pop culture, skewing vision forever, like the splinters lodged in the eyes of the onlookers in Andersen's The Snow Queen. The transience of his materials, their permeability to time and shifts of cultural value render them strangely eternal in the end. It is as if time were discovered to be infinitely malleable because every object in the world had a clip-art equivalent, so nothing ever really disappears.
© Marina Vishmidt 2004
Marina Vishmidt is a writer and lapsed film/video artist. She is completing an MA thesis on Solaris and the crisis of epistemology.
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