SIXTY SIX: LEWIS KLAHR

The 54 AAFF is excited to welcome filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who will be present at the Festival for the screening of his recent film Sixty Six. Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six (2002-2015) is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Lewis Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. The film will screen at the 54th AAFF - 1:15pm on Sunday, March 20th in the Michigan Theater Main Auditorium.

Sixty Six is the latest, and perhaps most magisterial entry in Lewis Klahr’s open-ended digital series Prolix Satori, in which the artist mines his vast 30-year archive of collage materials. MoMA Curator Josh Siegel notes, "With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, Sixty Six is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 70s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines." As the historian Tom Gunning observes, “Klahr’s films generate a blend of melancholy and desire from this interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting."

Lewis Klahr, called "the reigning proponent of cut and paste" by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, has been making films since 1977. A professor at CalArts, Klahr is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic collage films which have screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia. In May of 2010, The Wexner Center for the Arts presented a five-program retrospective of Klahr's films. In March of 2013 the Museum of the Moving Image presented a retrospective weekend of Klahr's digital work since 2008. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is a recent addition to the Coleccion Inelcom.