Synopsis

Free admission! A discussion between Larry Gottheim and Madison Brookshire will follow the screening.

Larry Gottheim is an avant-garde filmmaker and a founding figure of the influential Cinema Department at Binghamton University. His early films are often beautiful meditations on the experience of vision. Barn Rushes (1971), once described by Tony Conrad as “elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution,” is just such a work of poetic minimalism. Like Monet’s haystacks, Barn Rushes is a loving portrait of an inanimate object: a careful study of qualities of light as they change over time. This program pairs this early key work of 70’s experimental film with Natural Selection (1983), a brilliant example from the next phase of Gottheim’s filmic career: the use of form to interrogate the relationship between sound, image, language, and perception in cinema. Natural Selection intercuts several bodies of material originally created by students during a year-long seminar and uses excerpts from Darwin’s text to both illuminate and punctuate the combined footage. Even so, the source and nature of the sounds and imagery, as well as the way in which they relate to one another, remain mysterious, their connections slowly unfolding over time. Between these two films, we see a wealth of approaches to sound, structure, and meaning in cinema.

Program
Barn Rushes, 1971, color, silent, 34 minutes
Natural Selection, 1983, color, sound, 35 minutes

Films will be screened digitally.

About Larry Gottheim

Larry Gottheim is a seminal figure in American avant-garde cinema. His films combine the simplicity and directness of early cinema with the rigor of minimalism and the conceptual precision of process art. As the founder of the first and highly influential cinema department in the SUNY system at Binghamton University, Gottheim played a pivotal role in shaping experimental film education in the United States. In recognition of his groundbreaking work, he was awarded the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film.

“Gottheim’s cinema is a quest of origins. The films elaborate a response to the fictions of our world, the construction of images and sounds, the repeating cycles of life and nature. The profoundness of Gottheim’s act is to elaborate a body of work outside of fashion and within a search for an authentic language of cinematic discourse.” (John Hanhardt, on the occasion of the presentation of the full “Elective Affinities” cycle at the Whitney Museum, 1981).

About Madison Brookshire

Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. He frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, such as Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada. He teaches in the Departments of Art and the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside.

Image: Still from Natural Selection, 1983. Courtesy of Larry Gottheim