Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000)
**** (Masterpiece) Directed by Lewis Klahr.
Klahr’s superb visual sense is very much in evidence here, where his seductive environments–sensuous interiors, suggestive objects–threaten to overwhelm his people, who are even more passive than the characters in 50s melodramas. Drifting through a pop-culture fever dream of hypnotic music and entranced spaces, a kind of inventory of wonders, a comic book cutout can take on the powers of a magician even as he fails to understand what’s happening to him or why. Indeed, while many artists have engaged with mass culture, few have rendered its mix of seduction, imaginative stimulation, and destructive smoothness as elegantly and precisely as Klahr does here.
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“Engram Sepals” (which Klahr will present Friday only at Chicago Filmmakers) consists of seven short films, three of which have been exhibited previously in Chicago. Though the parts can be shown on their own, Klahr writes that the whole “traces a trajectory of American intoxication–both sexually and substance wise–from the second world war into the 1970’s.” References in the films to drugs and alcohol and to the intoxicating effects of romance and sex underscore the characters’ search for authenticity.
Born in New York City in 1956, Klahr was raised in Great Neck, an upper-middle-class suburb on Long Island, and “grew up on pop culture,” he says. His first major creative effort, at about age ten, was a comic book. That interest may have had a significant effect. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics points out that, unlike cinema, comics of necessity contain significant gaps between panels, forcing the artist to choose what to omit. Likewise Klahr’s cutout animation doesn’t even approach the illusion of continuous movement or the realistic spaces of a live-action movie: we never get a whole view of the elevator that includes those mysterious buttons. Instead Klahr offers a collagelike ensemble of objects that the viewer connects, almost as if responding to a surrealist painting.
The series is also haunted by references to time: clocks and clock hands occur throughout, and a calendar appears in Elsa Kirk. These combine with the retro objects and decors of various decades, the frozen look of the cutout figures, the stop-start movements, and the halting, ambiguous narratives to suggest the ambivalence inherent in nostalgia: our wish to enter the past is coupled with an awareness of the impossibility of doing so.
