This week it is all about the really rather wonderful Hyde Park Picture House. With Wednesday’s summit-meeting between photographers Peter Mitchell and Martin Parr fresh in the imagination, the cinema turns its attention to pioneering US film-maker Larry Gottheim who introduces a rare screening of four of his films this Saturday.
Presented in conjunction with arts organisation Pavilion, Four Films by Larry Gottheim draws on the noted avant-garde director’s fifty year plus career, from the bold experimentation of early long-take “single-shot” pieces to the abrasive, textural qualities that characterises his work from the mid-1970s onwards. Almost always captured using 16mm stock, these are haunting, powerful, hard-edged films – ruminative rather than reductive.
They are also not for everyone. Gottheim’s films perhaps have more in common with abstract art or music concrete than with Hollywood. Co-founder of a radical collective of cineastes operating out of New York State University at Binghamton, and revered for his film cycle Elective Affinities (the concluding part of which, Tree of Knowledge, is among those being screened) Gottheim pushes cinema’s counter-cultural envelope for all it is worth.
Gottheim explores racial, cultural and personal identity, often through the allusive prisms of sound and time. He channels cinema’s instinct for voyeurism, the express desire to observe and to engage with the world at one remove.
The films are concerned with nature, landscape, memory, suggesting an almost meditative purpose to the carefully abstract framing, the rhythmic cadences of the editing. Gottheim refuses the dull expediences of realism and fantasy, a paradox which is nestled in the need to tell stories reaching back to the very beginnings of cinema itself.
Godard called cinema ‘the most beautiful fraud.’ Gottheim has two or three things he knows about that.
Corn (1970) Doorway (1970), Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (1986) and Tree of Knowledge (1980) – Four Films by Larry Gottheim | 27 May 2017 at 6.30 – 8.30 pm at Hyde Park Picture House | For more information including tickets, click here. | For more information about Pavilion, click here.