Sixty Six

The culmination of Lewis Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking, Sixty Six is a hypnotic dream of 1960s and 1970s Pop organized into twelve chapters made between 2002 and 2015. Pulling inspiration and material from comic books, Hollywood films, Greek mythology, and newspaper ads, Klahr uses his signature stop-motion collage to follow an ensemble of classic Hollywood types as they work their way through Klahr’s vision of postwar Los Angeles. The result is a relentlessly personal and poetic exploration of the intersection of mass culture and myth that the New York Times called “a cinematic archaeology of the American unconscious” and “one of the finest cinematic achievements of the year.” Post-screening discussion with Klahr and Tom Gunning, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

(Lewis Klahr, USA, 2002-2015, 90 min., DCP)

Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic films, which use found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. Klahr’s films have screened extensively in the United States, Europe, and Asia in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the LA County Museum of Art. In May of 2010 The Wexner Center for the Arts presented a five-program retrospective of Klahr’s films. He has also received commissions from European arts organizations including the Gronnegard Theater in Copenhagen and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Collecion Inelcom. Klahr was the Wexner Center for the Arts 2010 Media Arts Residency Award Winner, the 2013 Brakhage Vision Award winner, a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow, and has also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council of the Arts, and Creative Capital. A resident of Los Angeles, he teaches in the Theater School of the California Institute of the Arts.