Air of menace suffuses “Circumstantial Pleasures”
An air of menace suffuses “Circumstantial Pleasures,” the latest from cinematic collagist Lewis Klahr. An archivist par excellence and excavator of the collective unconscious, Klahr creates striking, deeply personal assemblages using found images and objects, with jolts of sound and music. His materials vary but are inevitably frayed around the edges, bringing to mind the odds and ends gleaned from flea markets and junk drawers: old ticket stubs, bottle caps, blister packs, medical illustrations and comic books. With alchemical invention, he takes this cultural detritus to make work that hovers — tentatively, teasingly — on the very precipice of narrative. One of the most consistently inventive figures in noncommercial American cinema, Klahr has been making films for decades. They are often shown in museums, galleries and off-mainstream spaces, and “Circumstantial Pleasures” had its premiere in New York at Light Industry in February. With theaters now closed, Klahr and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, have joined forces to present the movie online for free at wexarts.org. It will be available to stream through June 18; on June 5, the Wexner will host a live conversation with Klahr — you should tune in. Klahr’s movies are meant to be seen on largerthan-life screens, and that’s how I’ve watched them. But “Circumstantial Pleasures” scales down just fine on a television. For much of his career, Klahr, who was born in 1956, has focused on midcentury America, creating work that, in his words, explores “the pastness of the present.” He tunnels directly into your memory banks by culling pop-cultural images that he recontextualizes in combination with other found visuals and 3D objects. The results are by turns familiar and alienating, as you seize on the recognizable and iconographic — an old car, a comic-book heroine — in new, unexpected configurations. Some of his work suggests deconstructed film noirs or soapy melodramas via a do-it-yourself punk ethos delivered with near-obsessive compulsion. Klahr’s films tend to run fairly short, though sometimes he arranges them into feature-length epics. That’s the case with “Circumstantial Pleasures,” which consists of six shorts that total 65 visually and aurally dense minutes. Each movie has its own texture, vibe, narrative thrust and soundtrack (with music by Scott Walker, among others). There are thematic and visual echoes throughout all six and some share bits and pieces, with zigzagging dots, whirling patterns and moving comic-book figures making repeat appearances. Yet no matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece. In “Circumstantial Pleasures” — which opens with a quote from fourthcentury Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien — Klahr shifts focus to the present and its ills without leaving the past behind. “In the eight directions,” the quote reads, “the same dusk.” This leads to the first short, “Capitalist Roaders,” which opens with a comic-book fist crushing a black slab while flanked by the American flag and the Capitol building. The fist rises out of the frame, and there’s a cut to an apocalyptic red sky over a clogged freeway, which is followed by close-ups of the face of China’s president, Xi Jinping, and the back of President Donald Trump’s head, a juxtaposition that suggests these world leaders are two sides of the same coin. This association reverberates through “Circumstantial Pleasures,” which oscillates between bluntness and near-abstraction.