The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2022)
Films by Lewis Klahr
Sunday, March 29th · 2PM

Please join us at the Brattle Theatre for a special screening and program featuring collage artist and filmmaker Lewis Klahr.

Known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations, Klahr uses found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. The evening will feature a selection of his eclectic films, including his latest feature-length series, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2022). Following the screening, Klahr will join RPM Curator Robert Harris for a conversation about his work.

Post Screening Q&A
with Lewis Klahr and Robert Haris

Robert Harris is an educator, film-poet, and traveler. Currently a professor of film production at Fitchburg State University, he was formerly Curator of Video at Anthology Film Archives (NY) and PS#1 (Queens, NY), and Artistic Director of the New York State Summer School of the Arts: Media Arts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Palomar College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ithaca College. He has assisted and collaborated with artists Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Aldo Tambellini. In 1977, he spent 9 months living with and filming the Arhuaco peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. His films have been shown in festivals, museums, and institutions throughout the world.

Brattle Tickets

Monogram (2019, 9m)
Screenplay Tom Gunning

Poetic Screenplay by Tom Gunning based on the 1944 William Castle feature "When Strangers Marry"

Swollen Kisses (2019, 6m)

Klahr, whom critic J. Hoberman called “the reigning proponent of cut and paste” for his acclaimed collage animations, is best known for his seductive and piercing examinations of midcentury materials and music. Circumstantial Pleasures is a feature-length collection of six short films that see his focus swerve toward more contemporary materials and issues. Exit the lush worlds of melancholy and romance; enter the emptied-out landscapes of asphalt, shipping containers, and vape pods. Set to remarkable music by experimentalists David Rosenboom and Tom Recchion—and featuring a wailing wallop of a late-period song by Scott Walker—Circumstantial Pleasures captures and crystalizes the unease, ugliness, and inhumanity of contemporary life. Rather than restating the things we know, Klahr’s provocative new film uniquely illuminates the gritty emotional and physical textures of what it’s like to be alive right now. - Chris Stults Wexner Center for the Arts

Capitulations Promise (2020, 6:34)

It took me 5 years to complete this film– the “hit single” from my recent feature length series The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. This degree of difficulty is just what I expected, however, when I chose to montage to such a memorable pop song as Lana Del Ray’s “Honeymoon”. What attracted me to this music is that it sounds both new and old, which allowed me to integrate contemporary imagery with the mid 20th century sources that my films are known for. “Honeymoon” also sounds like the romantic theme song to a James Bond film that has not and never will exist. - LK

”When Circumstantial Pleasures premiered at Light Industry just as the pandemic’s spread was becoming more evident, a common audience response was how prescient the work was. And it’s true that the images of folks in N95 masks and hazmat suits hit much differently now than they did when the work was being created over the past six years. For me, it’s the depopulated landscapes and nominal presence of humans in these vast open spaces that seem even more charged because of COVID-19. But I saw Circumstantial Pleasures for the first time long before the pandemic was in the air and the work essentially had the same resonance back then. This isn’t a work that illustrates anything that the pandemic has wrought. This is a work that illustrates that the pandemic is a symptom of a larger and more systemic situation that humans have caused in the natural world. “— Chris Stults Wexner Center for the Arts

Blue Sun (2020, 14m)

Los Angeles–based filmmaker Lewis Klahr explained, “My latest feature-length series of collage films, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness, is a compilation of six films created between 2015 and 2021. Focused primarily around thematics of love, it is both porous and dense, a cinema of shifting moods and engagements that offers a tactile exploration of elliptical narrative. Like a waking dream, what can be clearly described in words is less significant than what can be felt.” Klahr creates intricate worlds of fantasy and intrigue by culling two-dimensional ephemera—often cutouts from magazines and comic books, as well as objects such as playing cards—and using them as the basis for his short films, most of which are works of stop-camera animation.

Alcestis (2021, 22m)


Master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the United States and Europe. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has purchased Klahr’s films for their permanent collection, and curated three one-person shows with him since 1989. Klahr has also been included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1991 and 1995). His epic cutout animation THE PHARAOH’S BELT received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. For the past three years Klahr’s shorts (ALTAIR, LULU and PONY GLASS) have been included in the New York Film Festival. LULU was commissioned by Copenhagen’s Gronnegard’s Theater production of Alban Berg’s opera of the same name that opened to critical acclaim in August 1996. CALENDER THE SIAMESE, Klahr’s first linear narrative, was included in the 1997 New Directors/New Films series as a featurette. Klahr is a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council of the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and the NY Foundation of the Arts and Creative Artists Public Services. Commercially he has created special effects and animation for television show openings, music videos, commercials, a documentary and a TV movie.

The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness

(2020, 5:18)

Brattle Tickets

The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness (2021, 63:30) is my latest feature length series of collage films, is a compilation of 6 films created between 2015 and 2020. At once focused and diffuse, porous and dense, it is a cinema of shifting moods and engagements centered upon thematics of love that offers a tactile exploration of elliptical narrative. Like a waking dream, what can be clearly described in words is less significant than what can be felt. – Lewis Klahr