top of page

An Interview with Larry Gottheim

Francisco Rojas   •    19.02.2024

Screen+Shot+2019-05-17+at+12.22.27+PM.png

Tree of Knowledge

It is January 28 of the new year and Larry Gottheim is a happy man. Just yesterday, his film Your Television Traveler was shown at the Museum of Modern Art to a greatly ‘receptive audience’, alongside a wonderful lineup of films by directors such as Bill Brand and Roberta Cantow. For the last couple of years, Larry has spent a lot of his time working on some of his most renowned pieces; films from his entire Elective Affinities cycle that have recently been released by Re:Voir video. There have been screenings of various of his films in theaters around the world as well as online, such as a virtually curated programme of Larry’s works at Ultradogme, a screening at the Maysles Documentary Center and a world premiere of his latest film Entanglement (his third finished film in 5 years). All this, after a period of more than two decades without new works. During this time Larry has observed that things have been changing. The audience has gotten younger, the reception of his works is changing (for the better) and his films are more available than ever before, thanks to his enormous efforts.

Gottheim’s Horizons screened for the first time in Chile last December. The audience completely embraced the film’s silence and rhythm and by the end of it, in a very fitting response to the work of a filmmaker as generous as Larry, left the theater being thankful for what they had just experienced. Larry not only made this screening in Chile possible, he was also kind enough to share his thoughts on his new book The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and his films. In the afternoon of January the 28th, we sat down to have a conversation via Zoom about his work.

The Red Thread serves as a way of looking back to Larry’s body of work but it seems to also have opened up new possibilities. He is currently both working on another new piece and revisiting an unfinished work after 50 years. He says he is “feeling the pressure” of doing as much as he can and even though his financial problems are a constant cloud over his head, the passion for making new work has not disappeared.

Francisco Rojas: How did cinema enter your life?

 

Larry Gottheim: Well, it surprised me because I had various choices of what to do. I had studied music earlier and  went to Oberlin College partly because they had a music conservatory, but once there I got interested in everything. I kept changing my major and finally when I was graduating, I had two choices; I got into the comparative literature department at Yale University, which is a very special one, but I had also been to the Soviet Union on behalf of my college at the time in the middle of the Cold War (because I spoke a little Russian). So my other option was to go to the Columbia University Russian Institute (now Harriman Institute). I couldn't decide. 

 

Finally, I decided that going to this program at Yale was important. During my time there as a graduate student I liked it and was really deeply involved with literature but then, I got a Fulbright Fellowship to Munich in Germany (which is where my daughter was born). I still chose to be someone who was specializing in literature, like world literature, European literature, as well as English and American literature. I started teaching; first at Northwestern University for three years and then at Binghamton University where I was teaching English literature. But it wasn't the same, I felt sort of restless. They placed me into a position where my whole life would be already arranged. I would start off as this and then I would go to that and then I would go to that so I said, “wait a minute, I don't like it so much now”. 

 

I was also interested in the movies, especially the films that were coming out at the time, like Fellini and Godard and Antonioni and all of that. I was also somewhat interested in Warhol, the early films of Warhol and some other things. So I was interested in movies, film, but I was still thinking of myself as a professor of literature. I remember I didn't know the difference between 8mm and 16mm and asked somebody about it, after which eventually I got a used 16mm camera with one lens. As soon as I got that camera, my life changed instantly (I had been involved with the Film Society also, so I had that connection). But my life just changed in a second. I began to take filmmaking seriously yet was still teaching in the English department. I had made a narrative film and didn't know anybody who made films, thinking this was really very unusual of me to make a film all by myself. There was some kind of festival in northern New York at the time so I went to that festival with a group of students from our English classes and the Cinema department. What happened in New York was, first of all, Ken Jacobs was there as one of the jury members. Jonas Mekas was supposed to do it originally but he couldn’t be there. So that’s how I met Ken there. Part of the festival’s program was that if you were from another college or university, you could order the prize winning films from that festival. I didn't want to just get the prize winning films, I wanted to see all of the films that were entered into the festival. So it turned out that the festival had Hollis Frampton -whom I had known slightly when I was in college- films, Ken Jacobs’ films, Morgan Fisher’s, Ernie Gehr’s and so on. We had two projectors going in order to watch all of those films and one of Ernie's early pieces, I can't remember the name of the film, got a little damaged in one of the projectors. I contacted him to see if I could bring the film over and decide what to do and see if the  film society would pay for a new print. I went to meet him and we immediately became friends. After that I began to have friendships with people like Ken and Ernie and Hollis and so on who were way ahead of me. Here I was, already a little bit old… around their age but they were already established as filmmakers. That gave me the strong urge to catch up, also because I was interested in all of the arts that were happening in New York at that period such as painting, dance and experimental music. I just tried to absorb everything and I felt the challenge to see if I could somehow be part of this. I felt that I was not the right person because I had this background in literature, film to me was a visual art, so I thought “this is embarrassing” because I didn't have any background in visual arts. So I felt the need to catch up, I was just devouring as much as I could. 

 

I worked on a film called Frames in which I suspended picture frames from the ceiling of my wife's studio and at that time, film and developing was not so expensive. You could even buy Kodak Kodachrome film, which is the most beautiful 16mm film, at a drugstore sometimes, or a camera store, that included developing by Kodak. So I could start a session and film a whole roll of film and get it developed. Once I got the film back (from Kodak) I thought, “wow, this is great”. I showed it to some people and they thought the same thing. So I had many, many of these rolls of film and thought “ok, now I'm going to get into editing”. I struggled with it. I could never do anything with the editing so I abandoned it Frames, and I even abandoned editing altogether. That's what led me to make these films like Fog Line and so on, where there was no editing of shots, but it was a continuous take. 

 

I was not sure whether these were just experiments by me. Ernie was the one who said “no, no, these are real films, you should have a screening at Millennium (Film Workshop)” which is one of the places where you could have screenings. I think Jonas (Mekas) was there as well as Peter Kubelka, Hollis (Frampton) and so on. That is how I became part of that group of people and started thinking of them as real films. So, that is how that sort of came about. 

 

What was interesting is that I have my material at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, which is connected with the University of Wisconsin. Some of the things that were there, I had not thought about in like 50 years. So, there were the original rolls of Frames which they had digitized and sent me (digitally). I began to think of it, but when I looked at it, I had the same problem editing it as I had 50 years ago. Meanwhile, I started a new project which is what I am working on now. I have to see whether any of that material can be used. You know, I've had the benefit of knowing people who were attracted to the films and became very devoted to me through the films and we became friends. There’s this person, Christian Flemm, who just showed up as a student still at Vassar College and helped me make and edit Knot/Not. At that time I needed some help with digital editing so he offered to do it himself. He helped me a lot. A lot of other people helped me a lot. So now just recently, like maybe a month ago, somebody came by who had seen my films and was moved to be a filmmaker himself because of my films and some of Ernie's films and a few other filmmakers. He is coming [here] later. He comes every week and is helping me with the new project. One of the things that I want to do is look at some of that Frames material because he [Christian] knows about what I have and what my plans are for the new project. I have a really dear friend who is now in Berlin, but I met her in Spain, she is Spanish and we became really close friends. The soundtrack in Knot/Not is a musical work by her.  I sent some of that [material] to her and had already explained to her what my idea was for the new project, which she understood very deeply right away. She said that Frames does not belong at all, which is probably right. But I want Forrest, the person who is coming this afternoon, to look at it to see whether he thinks the same thing. I might make a different film from that material.

Screen+Shot+2019-05-17+at+12.12.08+PM.png

Fog Line

FR: You mentioned how your background in literature felt like it did not belong to the idea of filmmaking, however, over time, you find that other filmmakers like Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, R. Bruce Elder, etc,  all of them also have a background in literature. 

 

LG: At first I was embarrassed about it. I have a PhD in comparative literature, I felt people would hate me because of that. So during the very early films, I wasn't thinking about that. But soon I realized that the way that I could catch up so fast was that my background in music and literature helped me so that I wasn’t starting out. Even though I was learning how to use the camera and beginning filmmaking, I wasn't starting out, I was an artist in a certain way already. And now almost all my films have some background in literature, although that has been changing in the last few films.

 

FR: Do you think that the idea of being an artist, your background in literature, and starting to make films like Horizons, no longer just filming a roll, editing the materials, do you think all of these things converged in some way?

 

LG: Yes, it is very important because as I tell the story, it is sort of complicated for me to get into my emotional life because that is kind of a secret from yourself also. I mean, you cannot just know everything about yourself. But there was an [important] event; I had also started the Cinema department. When I went through this transition of taking film seriously, I started teaching cinema courses in the English department and at that time they let it happen. I was eventually able to start this film program. Ernie joined in the summer, he was the first one and then I was able to convince Ken. Ken had just left something in a bad way in some college in Queens, New York, so he did not have any other connections and we were friends so I was able to get him to be hired under this new cinema department. Anyway, he was doing this shadow play with his students, I am telling this because it's very important. My daughter, Sarah, I can not remember how old she was, but she was a little girl and played the Suzuki violin. Ken asked: ‘’do you think that she could come to one of these shadow play sessions with her violin to do something?’’. When she went there, I was in the studio we had classes in. As I was sitting there I could see the things happening on the stage and there she was with her violin. Somehow I had this very, very deep emotional feeling about her fragility. This idea of fragility, included very much in my current film; my son, Hans, has a girlfriend and she has this two-year-old baby who is not her daughter, it’s her sister's child, but it's like it is her child. This child is very, very amazing. She has autism so she makes these sounds like, “uh, uh, uh” which interest me a lot. And she is special in many ways so that's certainly going to be a major element in my current film. Anyway, when I was sitting there in the studio having this deep emotional thing about Sarah and her fragility, for some reason, the beginning of Dante's Divine Comedy came to me where he begins saying: “in the middle of my life, I found myself in the middle of a dark wood”. I thought that that is where I am. I took it out of context and said, the dark wood is what I am feeling right now, it is this overwhelming feeling of darkness and fragility.

 

The Divine Comedy is written in this poetic form called Terza Rima, in which there is one line, the next line and then the third line rhymes with the first one. Then in the next passage, what was the middle line in the first part is now the outer line. So it is like ABABAB. I had been searching at that time. I had already started Horizons thinking it was a small project that described where I was but somehow I kept on creating these shots with horizons in them.  When it came time for autumn I said: ‘’I can't stop. I have to keep going’’. So for a year I was going out getting these shots that were sort of separate shots and I had no plan, no idea of what to do with them. Meanwhile, also another big influence is that we had hired Nick Ray, who came to Binghamton and was staying with us. In some way he was also instrumental. I began thinking of a longer, almost like an epic thing. Now, Horizons is not really an epic poem at all but it does have that scale and that seriousness of an epic film. 

 

Now, that's only one of the ways in which literature came into the film but you can see how powerfully important it was. Then in the next film, Mouches Volantes, there is a text and almost all my films after that had some kind of text as the basis of them. So the text in Mouches Volantes is this narrative by the widow of Blind Willie Jackson. One element of the film is the act of going deeper and deeper into that text. In the last few years, I realized that Proust was one of the major influences in my life and in my work. Unfortunately, I have this vision problem where I cannot see everything in films perfectly, every little...thing. When there is any kind of text, I cannot make it out clearly and so I canot read as much as I used to.

 

FR: Was the process always as personal as when you were making Horizons? Because some people could argue that films like Fog Line or Barn Rushes, some of your more durational projects don’t feel as personal, because they are not as diaristic as Horizons. Like you mentioned in your book, there's a very intimate relationship between you and the camera, the camera as an extension of you. Did you always feel that way? You mentioned this tragic vision involving your daughter. Was it always that powerful, the personal experience, while you were making the films? 

 

LG: Yes, when I was making those films I always had something like that going on. I am trying to deal with this. With Forrest, partly how he came into connection with me was because of his interest in my films. He had sent me a film that he was working on which I think is really great. It's really wonderful. It’s almost like it was made for me as the audience of that film. That's how we went deeper. He is doing something in video and I also have now been doing things in video. But it is not my way because one of the things is that in film, even though in the beginning it wasn't so expensive, it now is very expensive. You have to deal with the laboratory and all of that. But it wasn't only that, I felt that as soon as I put the camera to my face and held it, something very, very intense was going on. I felt it was so powerful that it even affected what happened. I mean, in Blues, there is one place where the berries, sort of a few of them, could fall down. It's because I was filming down at a hillside, so that the bowl of berries were actually a little bit like *this* (makes a diagonal angle with his hands). I felt that there was an old theory of vision where you would be sending out something from your vision and I felt that filming it was so intense that it affected the world that was being filmed. 

 

There is something else like that in Doorway, even though in this instance the camera is on a tripod, the camera is moving, where I am also looking through the viewfinder and everything about that, about the Bolex became important to me. Like the way it felt on your face when you're looking through the viewfinder and especially the vision seemed so intense where in video for most people, it's not the same thing. You could generate like an hour of material and then later you would pick out this or that.  I was trying to tell Forrest: “no, you shouldn't actually press the start button until you feel such a real connection with what you're filming!”. That is something that we have been talking about because I don't like it. I mean, I could go on because we already did some videotaping and will probably some more tonight of the little three-year-old girl with autism. But when he sends it to me and we look at it…It makes me sick a little bit to see when there's too much material, I don't relate to it. I think that throwing out material for me, especially after the first films, has been a very important part of the creative process. What was certainly true in Horizons is that I had to choose most of the shots because I never shot anything that did not have some kind of powerful impact on me. So actually I was using, even though it's a lot more material, it's not so much more material than what I used. Whenever I looked through material and sort of said: ‘’I don't like this shot anymore’’, I would just take it out and kept doing that until you were left with more and more of the essential material. Even then, sometimes like in Chants and Dances for Hand -which was the first film that I was using digital editing- I would sort of cut the end of it. I tried to do that with Horizons, being very careful where the shot would begin and where it would end. Now when I look at it, I realize that I am better at doing that. Like my film, Entanglement, for example. I am so proud of it. The cutting is so great! It's the peak of my ability. When I look at Horizons I think, you know, if I were doing it now I would cut off like three frames at the end or so on. So when I started editing it, the shots that I was thinking of using had already been refined to their essence and then I could do it even further. You know, you put this next to that and then you see that… taking this out and taking that out. That is important, it's like in sculpture, a certain kind of sculpture is you have a block of marble, like Michelangelo, and then he is like cutting, throwing away parts of it, in which it finally starts to take a form and then he keeps working on it, working on it until it's perfect. So actually that kind of sculpture is really the art of taking away.

Ekran Görüntüsü (28).png

Horizons

FR: I like that. I like how that sounds because lately I have seen many contemporary films made on 16 mm, and some of them feel as if they hadn’t been edited. It's on-camera editing. But then again, I think very few were really masters at that, like Robert Fulton, for example. Film is so expensive that people don't want to compromise the material. And what’s really missing is the process you’ve just mentioned, the act taking away, refining the material.

 

LG: And the first part of that taking away is the actual filming. I mean, actually thinking of Fog Line and the early films, they do have to do with editing in a certain way. 

 

FR: Yes, of course. 

 

LG: But let's say you are going to film, I mean, there's some films that are totally automatic, but most films consist of multiple shots. Okay, now in Hollywood also, I think that they count on longer sections. Like if they are going to have a certain action or certain things taking place, they will start the, you know, this thing of camera sound, clapboard, etc. Once the clapboard claps, they are still not starting and then somehow after the beginning, that is when they are going to actually use that shot if they are going to use it. For example, Fog Line, Barn Rushes, etc. in those films I think, editing is present by its absence, and sound is also present by its absence.

 

I also felt that Fog Line was the extreme of one shot. Even Blues is divided into: “spoon comes in and the spoon comes out”. So that is a kind of editing. Barn Rushes is also because it was filmed at very high speed, I think almost 64 frames per second. When I wound the motor and the car is moving and I start to film, go “zing” (sounds of camera motor) and rewind, you have to stop and rewind it again. But I left it, all of those moments of “editing”. I think Corn has a similar quality, which is a film that hasn't been as well known as Fog Line. But the difference between Corn and Fog Line is that there are natural divisions in Corn. Like when she takes the husks off the corn and leaves, that is one section. Then when it comes down, etc. So there are a few different things that are like edits. 

 

FR: You’ve mentioned some big names you encountered when you entered the scene, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and Hollis Frampton, names that retrospectively, to some experimental film enthusiast would make it sound like a superstar scene, but those filmmakers also encountered some pretty big resistance and confrontation towards their work. Did you encounter some situations like that? Did you find some resistance from the audiences when you were making your work, when you were showing your films throughout the year?

 

LG: Some things have changed a lot. I would have trouble in the beginning showing films. I think I told this story a lot; when I first showed Barn Rushes at the Museum of Modern Art, once the third section started happening the audience was like “oh no, stop it”. Whatever, they would leave. When I saw Fog Line in a projection, my stomach was in a knot because I said “oh please, can we get all the way to the end without somebody getting up?” and… you know, ruining it. I mean there were certain people like Jonas and obviously other people who responded positively to those films. A very important person was John Hanhart, who was the curator at the Whitney Museum, he would show the films at every opportunity. I had a series of the four Elective Affinities films where he wrote a long program note, which is included in my book. But in general a lot of the people who are the tastemakers, like P. Adam Sydney or Annette Michelson, I don't know, somehow it did not engage them. They did not feel that I belonged in the same world as them.

 

I was so moved actually, a few years ago when I was in Vienna for a screening, Friedl Kubelka, the former wife of Peter, ran this whole studio and gave me this book of her photographs of filmmakers; there was Brakhage and everybody… and there was this photograph of me. I was so moved by that! I even told her: “I can't believe it. You recognize something that took a long, long time”. But things started to change over the last years, there were a couple of screenings that I remember very well and one was at the Pompidou Center, where there was a festival. So there was a big theater where I showed a film and the audience just sat there, moved. Another thing was in Portland, Oregon, where I also had a screening of Tree of Knowledge and the audience just sat there and people were crying. And it was like that again last night. I mean, something happened at a certain time where the audience changed. So last night this whole theater, full of people, everybody was like inside the experience of the film. It was really amazing. I felt that. So I do not know what happened and of course, some of the people are young people. I got an email the other day from a 20 year old person from Bogotá, saying she was very moved and influenced by my work and she was trying to see Machete Gillette… Mama, but she cannot find it. I was so moved by that. I mean, here is this 20 year old girl in Colombia having this connection; but also sometimes there is an audience that also has older people. So it is not just young people but something has changed and I think once there is a sort of momentum of the work, that that is going to happen more because of the book and the DVDs. 

 

The thing is that my vision is probably not going to decline much, but it is a problem for me to read texts and so on. So I feel like next year I want to do as much as I can to take advantage of what I can do now.

 

Something that I am thinking about, because when I was on this tour in the Midwest, I did these master classes where I would meet with advanced students who already had advanced film projects and sort of talk to them about their work in a way that I felt is a big responsibility and they did as well. That even happened with Forrest, the person who is coming [over] in a little while. 

 

I feel the obligation to talk to him as much as I could give him of my way of thinking and seeing. So I would like to be able to do something like teaching a class like that, because I am having this terrible money situation and I cannot make any money with my films. I mean, like this thing last night, I get 200 dollars sometimes and that helps but it does not really give enough to be able to relax about things.

Blues+1.png

Blues

FR: I actually wanted to ask you about this because I remember reading years ago that after the release of Brakhage’s films on blu-ray/dvd for the Criterion Collection, there was a sort of fear to release more of these kinds of works digitally because once they are available on home video there would not be as many people interested in renting the film prints as before. Institutions would not be interested in renting the prints for screenings because “now we can show the criterion dvd or the criterion blu ray”.

 

Last year there was this screening at an established art house cinema here in Santiago. They showed Dog Star Man by Brakhage to celebrate his 90th anniversary and the copy they showed was a DVD-rip. It looked worse than it looks on YouTube and on a bigger screen. It looked terrible and they charged a ticket of like 4 dollars. It was not that pricey but I remember going to the screening and leaving, fuming after it was done and I did not even stay for the Q&A. I left right away because I thought that it was insulting not only for me as “the audience” or somebody who already loves the works presented, but also to the filmmaker themselves, because like you mentioned, it is hard to make money while making these kind of artworks and a lot of artists, including yourself, have chosen to insist in doing these films despite the fact they bring almost no financial security. You are doing no service to the filmmaker or to the people who do not know the artist, who will discover them for the first time and probably have a terrible first hand experience with the film, by showing a copy that is unacceptable.

I also wanted to ask how worried you are about something like that. Because making the films available through Re:Voir in this case is like a double-edged sword. As you mentioned, it feels like it is the perfect time, the audience is changing, people are more invested in your works than before, it feels like this is the right moment to put the DVD out and the people who are interested in your work have a way to contribute with money and also have a way to discover your works, but then again, now it is possible that people probably will not rent the film prints and maybe that is better business or maybe not. I don’t  know. 

 

LG: When I got the Guggenheim fellowship, that was a lot of money but somehow I owed so much in rent and had to pay my assistant, so it is all gone. It is not so now that I am going to have to pay. I don't know how I'm gonna do it. So that's one thing, anyway…

 

Dog Star Man reminded me of one of the things I was feeling, of course he is separate. Brakhage, he is Dog Star Man. I mean, it is sort of like about him using material from his wife, you know, all of that. But it is more like he becomes a superstar as a person because he is built up with his films. I also remember Kubelka would give lectures everywhere. I felt that my work is very different from that. Like it has a lot to do with passivity and so on. But what is happening, first of all, I realize that all my films are personal and have autobiographical elements in them so I have somehow become also for some people, one of those people that have a special character that you would go out of the way or pay money to go to see one of these films projected. So it's interesting. I mean, I sort of felt that last night because the last time I was at the Museum of Modern Art, it was a different kind of programming, but there were people there, but it wasn't. I remember Heinz Emigholz, a very close friend of mine, he's become very famous in Europe as a major artist and he had some film that I remember going to and there were like two people in the audience.

 

But it's interesting to feel that sometimes, my film, The Red Thread, explores this a little bit. I mean, the relationship of the persona that you see in the film, as opposed to my persona as the person who made the film.


FR: After so many years making films, do you think it has been worth it? Are you happy with your body of work? Would you have changed anything if you could? 

 

LG: Yeah, I do, but I feel this going on still, like when the book was finished with Knot/Not being the end, I didn't think I would make something more and then I did make Entanglement. And there's a lot of pressure also. I feel that because of this whole body of work behind me in this current project, it has to have a special character of being “this is surely my last film” I mean, maybe it isn't, but probably is. And I don't wanna make this grand finale of something. I think a surprise might be something that's more minimal in some way. And that would be puzzling, and leave it for the future to figure that out. 

 

Certainly the number of films that I make, I mean people like Ken, Brakhage or Hollis have made many more films than I've made. But I feel that each film becomes really important. I'm very happy that Your Television Traveler came out and that people really responded to it. It becomes an important film, not just for me, but for them…So I hope I can get this new film finished. 

 

FR: Well, I certainly hope so as well. Going back to the body of work, Brakhage, or even younger filmmakers, Kevin Jerome Everson for example, he has more than 200 films. But I help but thinking about the first email I got from you. You’re part of the “scene” that resisted the “experimental film” or “avant-garde film” tag. And I remember you called this discipline “personal cinema”. Like it was a genre. And it made a big impression on me, because it totally aligns with what I think cinema and art in general should be about, the way you should approach them. You make the films when your soul, when your spirit, when your body needs it. Your life is asking for it, not for a “work of art” necessarily, but for a particular kind of expression. It doesn't have to be important or a big gesture. 

 

LG: I’m thinking about this right now but I think I don't have any minor films. I mean, all my films are…Sometimes it might not be obvious, because for example, when I made Machete Gillette… Mama, it was strange to people to see something with so much documentary-like material but you have to get into the film to really understand what's really going on underneath. 

 

I had this thought about this program next week. I have a program at the library, again, where they're showing a lot of the early films.  I thought I would maybe, instead of discussing all the films, I thought of talking about Harmonica, because Harmonica is easy...just understood on a superficial level, because it's kind of funny and strange and so on. So it doesn't seem to be so deep, but it is really extremely deep. And so I wanted to talk about that a little bit and apply the same kind of thing to all the other films and try to get underneath what might be the easier response.

 

FR: And again, like you mentioned, not separating work into major works or minor works. At the end, it’s always the same personal impulse, almost a sentimental impulse, that drives the films. 

 

LG: I feel like I have this pressure to do as much as I can while I can. And it's a funny thing because I'm trying to...This issue has come up about…what to do after you die with your films and so on. My son is a lawyer, we're trying to figure out different things. So it's pretty simple because like the filmmakers co-op is going to be an important element and so on. I feel like the idea that my films will have a life after me is really important. And I wonder why that is because I don’t want to be dead. 

 

FR: But are you relieved by that idea? Of course, so far it just exists as a concept,this idea the films are going to live a life of their own. 

 

LG: Even after I wrote the book, I started to give more of these lectures. So, I feel like every day I'm understanding the earlier films in a new way. They don't become dead things, they're still very much alive. I know some people that surprise me, for example, like when you have a show of your films, they would go out and smoke a cigarette and whatever, walk around. Because they say, “I don't need to see the film myself”. But to me, it's the opposite, to be in an audience and directing attention to the film is really great, I love that. 

*You can order Re:Voir’s video dvd release of Elective Affinities here

 

*You can order the book, The Red Thread, published by Eyewash Books, here

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo - Siyah Çember
bottom of page