Visiting Filmmaker: Larry Gottheim

Experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim's Elective Affinities film suite introduced complex formal patterns to his image and sound editing, departing from earlier minimalist work like Fog Line (1970) to probe the linkages between moving-image presentation and human thought. Tree of Knowledge, Gottheim's final film in this suite, interpolates his own footage with other 'found' material. Of the film, Gottheim writes, “The fusion of ecstatic filming of a tree with sounds and images from a film about paranoia, a film about the seasons, releases energy of thought concerned with knowing, learning, believing, feeling...The film doesn't just refer to freedom of thinking and feeling—it attempts to exemplify this freedom in its procedures of composition and the experience it offers.” Also screening: Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (1987), a disjunctively edited collage of sight and sound structured as flashes of Gottheim's own memory. (Larry Gottheim, 1981, 58 mins, 16mm) 

Larry Gottheim is a key figure in the history and development of American avant-garde cinema in the 1970s. His work is often associated with the structural film movement, and though his influences include minimal, conceptual, and process art practices, his work is primarily informed by a profound interest in cinematic form. Gottheim is the founder of the extremely influential cinema department at Binghamton University (formerly SUNY Binghamton), located in rural upstate New York, the landscape for many of Gottheim's most famous works. 

Tree of Knowledge (Larry Gottheim, 1981, 58 mins, 16mm) 

"It started with filming the tree. Something was released in that manner of filming seemingly farthest removed from the procedure of the early films. I first thought a simple ordering of this rich material might be enough, something related to Barn Rushes. But the essential feelings and meanings of that filming held themselves back. So I pursued sounds of comparable texture and richness, from which material the "deaf bar" (thanks to Roger Jacoby and Pittsburgh Filmmakers) and stockyard (thanks to Alan Berliner and U. of Oklahoma) sounds attached themselves to the work. But the film only came into its form-life with the idea of linking this deep-rooted and far-outreaching tree material with that film on paranoia that had fascinated me for many years." – Larry Gottheim 

Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (Larry Gottheim, 1987, 16 mins, 16mm) 

“A mirrored form in counter-movement, dense with emotion-charged memory – a rapidly sparking dynamism of image and afterimage, swirling resonant words/music, juxtaposing loss, my father's stroke, Toscanini, Siodmak's The Killers, the Red Robin Diner. ... I seem to be quickening.” – Larry Gottheim