Join us for an evening with avant-garde luminary Larry Gottheim. Q&A with guest curator Allen Riley (PhD candidate in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz) to follow the program.
Co-sponsored by the Santa Cruz Film Festival
Larry Gottheim
Larry Gottheim is a key figure in the history and development of American avant-garde cinema in the 1970s. His work often shares the simple structure of the earliest films but also relates to minimal, conceptual, and process art practices. Gottheim is the founder of the extremely influential and first cinema department in the SUNY system at SUNY Binghamton.
Program:
Natural Selection (1983) 35 minutes, 16mm
Radiating from the Darwinian text-fragments outward through the material is much pictorial and spoken signifying text having to do with issues such as communication, translation, dynamics of perception, art, science, isolation and social interaction etc. In a certain sense a meaning does arise from all of this. At the same time the endless groupings and regroupings of material suggest yet another realm of meaning. Finally it is the experience of our own selection of a pattern among the myriad richness of combining materials, superimposed on my own composed pattern, that opens up the real film.
Entanglement (2022) 24 minutes, video
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.
A Private Room (2024) 10 minutes, video
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.
