“In Greek mythology Lethe is the underworld river from which the dead drink to forget their life on earth. The first film in a possible trilogy of mythologically inspired pieces with female protagonists.” (Lewis Klahr)

Forgetting to Remember: Klahr’s Comic Book as Madeleine

Men live with their eyes closed on the edge of magical precipices. They innocently handle dark symbols; their unknowing lips repeat terrible incantations, formulae dangerous as pistols. The sight of a bourgeois family drinking its morning café au lait, oblivious to the unknowable which peeks through the red and white squares of the tablecloth is enough to make you shudder. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926)

According to a myth Plato recounts, the river Lethe marks the divide between death and rebirth, the source of the waters of oblivion that souls must drink in order to forget their past and start life anew. Yet Plato claimed that philosophy allowed one to remember what one had forgotten, recalling the true forms of things glimpsed before descent into the darkness of the world and the body. Lewis Klahr’s 2009 film Lethe takes up this ancient motif in an unexpected manner. For some decades Klahr has been creating collage films that use images and narrative situations taken from popular culture to construct both a personal mythology and a modern landscape of desire and danger. From these images, (familiar to us in their bright colors and casual seductions, yet rarely lingered over) Klahr sketches a noir/science fiction tale of transforming identity lost within an urban space littered with memory and oblivion.

Many commentators on the films of Lewis Klahr have noted their invocation of memory. Klahr collages bits and pieces pulled from the detritus of our omnipresent image culture. His films catch a thread of something familiar just on the edge of fading into forgetfulness. He rescues a “forgotten future” from the dumps of mass-production, recalling childhood expectations that have proved elusive. We have already discarded these images torn from comic strips, old school textbooks, take-out menus, magazine advertisements – so why do they haunt us?

Klahr’s films generate a blend of melancholy and desire from this interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting. We must balance these demands while watching his films or we risk losing their deepest lessons. Our shared desire to grasp and retain images from childhood can make his images appear mawkishly nostalgic or sentimental. But on the other hand, recognizing the inadequacy of these childish dreams, their flimsy kitschy nature, can make his film seems sarcastically camp, condescendingly dismissive of the popular culture in which they sometimes seem to drown. Moments of both nostalgia and satire exist in Klahr’s films, but we need to grasp how they confront and transform each other.

Klahr’s films tell stories uniquely. Many of his film resemble the fever dream of a child who has binged on sci-fi comics and TV detective shows. The icons of these pulp genres merge in a crazy-quilt style, as if shaken out of their logic of dramatic consequence by a traffic collision or a drug haze. Their surface appears like a jigsaw puzzle, transformation and metamorphosis dominating over action. We follow a road trip through a dreamscape, tracing a trajectory befogged by memory and hallucination, where nothing remains consistent. But a thread of action tugs us along, just as it pulls these cutout characters through tableaux of desire and situations of peril. None of Klahr’s films display this narrative pull more strongly thanLethe, where the transforming and dissolving bodies of its protagonists develop an almost-readable plot of genetic manipulations, hypodermic injections and erotic projections. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde meets Kiss Me Deadly meets Vertigo. As these jerky animated figures slip through their paper world, they move themselves – and us – in unexpected ways. With them, we traverse an environment that ranges from the cosmic to the microscopic, across the flat surfaces of numeric tables and charts into the hard-edged precision of modernist structures of glass and steel. Enlarged Ben-Day dots transform clichéd faces into freckled masks of unexplained anguish, enacting scenarios borrowed from comic strips and television shows that somehow hint at deeper losses underlying their mass-produced plots.

Klahr’s vehicles carry us through the rational gridded spaces of the modern environment, interrupted by lush promises of consumer-goods fulfillment and romantic denouements. But his mobile windshields reveal highways intersecting with patterns of remembrance that promises some way out, some place of exit. If only we could remember what it was we desired, what we believed we were promised, perhaps the exit ramp would loom before us and we could finally cross over the traffic interchange. Klahr’s lush, and sensual images ultimately expose their fragility and illusory nature. This is a world that could be crushed by the random clench of a child’s hand. And yet as silly as it may seem, as futile and even deceptive as its seductions may show themselves to be, these tales of desire and defeat hold some remnant of a hope of something else, a promise posed between oblivion and recall.

Tragically funny – like a nursery rhyme or our memory of a first love.

Credits

Film By Lewis Klahr
August 2009
Generous Support Provided By the Wexner Media Arts Residency Award, Ohio State University
Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London