Barn Rushes
Four Shadows
Since the late 1960s Larry Gottheim (b.1936) has been a driving force in the American avant-garde as both a filmmaker and founder of SUNY-Binghamton's legendary film program. Often associated with the structural film movement, Gottheim's work is informed by a profound interest in cinematic form and, increasingly, in the relation between sound and image. Among Gottheim's most celebrated and powerful films are a series of works that provide a sustained meditation on place and season, and take the rural landscapes of upstate New York as their ostensible subject. Gottheim has chosen two films from the 1970s to present at the HFA, Barn Rushes and Four Shadows, and is generously providing marvelous new prints.
PROGRAM
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Barn Rushes
Directed by Larry Gottheim.
US, 1971, 16mm, color, silent, 36 min.
Elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution; tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces, etc., and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time. – Tony Conrad
Barn Rushes was preserved by the New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center.
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Four Shadows
Directed by Larry Gottheim.
US, 1978, 16mm, color, 64 min.
Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in sixteen combinations – a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Cezanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande… The stately ceremony can generate rich sensuous cinematic pleasure as well as a free-flowing stream of associations. Containment and flowing free – these are some of the issues. – LG
