Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)

‘Well, the word “melodrama” has rather lost its meaning nowadays: people tend to lose the “melos” in it, the music.’(Douglas Sirk, in Sirk on Sirk)‘Engram Sepals, a feature-length series of seven collage films, traces a trajectory of American intoxication – both sexually and substance wise – from the second world war into the 1970’s. Using the original definition of “melodrama” (music + drama) as my starting point, these films continue my longstanding romance with the ecstatic mysteries of elliptical narrative and across-film
montage.’(Lewis Klahr)‘Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific film artists of his generation. Intensively archeological in his approach to autobiography and cultural ephemera he created two major series in the eighties and nineties: Picture Books For Adults and The Tales of the Forgotte Future. Jim Hoberman has called Klahr “the reiging proponent of cut and paste”, one reason the casual viewer might detect a superficial resemblance to the work of experimental animators like Harry Smith, Stan Vanderbeek and Larry Jordan. But Klahr more appropriately belongs to the lineage of film-makers like Anger, Harrington, Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures through radical form. And, like Jacques Tourneur, Klahr is a creator of atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood and setting but ontological terrains where event and emotion register with archetypical power and dreamlike intensity.’(Mark McElhatten for a Film Society of Lincoln Center Image Innovators Program, May 2000)Including four premieres and three recent favorites, Engram Sepals is Lewis Klahr’s first new series in nearly a decade.