TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE, PARTS TWO AND THREE
Almost all the imagery in this and Klahr’s other films is created by cutout animation. No large cast was engaged; no highways were closed down–the cars aren’t moving because Klahr filmed his cutout man over still photographs of highways. Eschewing the smooth, slick, transparent look that results from the use of an animation stand, Klahr might film on a table or wall in his cramped New York apartment, combining images from magazines, comics, and other pop-culture sources with cutouts of the actors taken from his own photographs. At times he lifts one cutout above the surface of another, creating an illusion of depth; in one film he also uses original drawings.
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Tales of the Forgotten Future is a projected four-part work, of which the first three parts have been completed, with three separate films per part–12 films in all. Klahr filmed in Super-8, and intends these works to be shown either on a small Super-8 screen or on video monitors; he says it’s crucial to preserve the intimacy of a small screen. The two parts being shown at the Film Center on Friday will be shown on video, which is how I previewed them, and I can testify that Klahr’s vibrant imagery survives transfer to the tube in a way that many films do not.
Cartoon Far, for example, sets a goggle-wearing race-car driver against a rapidly shifting background of black-and-white geometrical patterns, suggesting a space traveler more than a hot-rodder. Then in a flashback he recalls an encounter with a woman; when they try to speak to each other, objects emerge, rebuslike, from their mouths in comic-book speech balloons: the man replies to the woman’s frying pan with car parts and a ring. The trip continues, now in front of eclipsed suns, now against a drawing of the solar system. Klahr replaces the flatness of the pop-culture images with the expansive vision of a Joseph Cornell, whose boxes and collages also combined disparate, often celestial images to suggest flights of the imagination. The transformative power of memory, or love, Klahr argues, can truly transport one to other worlds.
But at the same time the very nature of the cutout technique, and in particular Klahr’s nonslick use of it, reminds us that we’re only viewing scraps of paper. The striking depth effects Klahr achieves also cut both ways, heightening the illusion but reminding us with extra intensity that one scrap of paper placed in front of another does not a world make–except, of course, in the mind. And that is precisely the point: Klahr’s dualities point less to a modernist exposing of illusionism than to a vision of the transformative power–and utter fragility–of the imagination.
