Tonight at 7 PM noted collage artist Lewis Klahr will introduce the local premiere of his 12-film cycle Sixty Six at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. (Admission is free.) For Chicagoans who care about experimental cinema, this is one of the major events of the year, a chance to hear a leading voice in the avant-garde discuss one of his richest, most entrancing works. On a visual level Sixty Six is characteristically dense, as Klahr creates mosaics from layers of photographs, comic-book cutouts, and random objects; the soundtrack is no less accomplished, combining snippets of movie dialogue, new and old music, and field recordings. (Fred Camper, writing about Klahr in the Reader in 2002, aptly described him as a successor to Joseph Cornell.) The overriding theme is mid-60s American culture, with many of the found images and sounds coming from that era. While Sixty Six works as a poetic essay about consumer culture in full swing, it’s best appreciated as a subjective, dreamlike evocation of a particular time and place. A film to get lost in, it’s the most satisfying work of art I’ve encountered so far this year.
Sixty Six considers vast reaches of time as well as space. Most of the titles of the shorts reference Roman mythology—in doing this, Klahr feels he’s making 1960s America seem as distant (and as fantastic) as the worlds evoked by ancient myths. Klahr renders such considerations of the very big doubly mysterious by juxtaposing them with considerations of the very small. The sound design of Sixty Six often incorporates fleeting, everyday sounds like crickets chirping or urban street traffic. And Klahr often presents the found images in extreme close-up, making them come across as tactile objects as well as images. “Because I’m shooting super close-up on different magazines . . . the printing dots get really exaggerated. It’s like looking at these photographs through a microscope, in a way. Digital [cinema] is great at reproducing these analogue textures with great visual impact, by the way,” Klahr says.
