Peace be with you, MTWZ disciples.

My apologies for the lack of newsletters in recent weeks—that’s what working six days a week will do. I will post new material next week, I promise!

For today, I am republishing a piece I wrote in 2023 for the UW-Cinematheque blog, on two recent video works by Larry Gottheim. I tweaked some of the prose but otherwise maintained the introduction’s 2023-specific language.

I share this essay in anticipation of the Museum of Modern Art’s career-spanning retrospective dedicated to Gottheim, which begins next week. The two video works considered in this piece—Entanglement (2022) and Chants and Dances for Hand (1991-2017)—have not been written about extensively online or elsewhere.

For those in New York, I recommend seeking out these two works, in addition to the early and mid-career films screening through the second half of May (see full schedule here). I regret I will be unable to attend.

Larry—if you are reading this—congratulations on the deserved honor of this MoMA series! Your friends in Madison wish you well.

Less than one week after screening a selection of Paolo Gioli short films, the UW Cinematheque provides another opportunity to experience the work of a singular and underrated avant-garde master. We are also fortunate that the artist in question, Larry Gottheim, will be present in 4070 Vilas Hall, to introduce and answer questions about two recent (or at least recently completed) films, Chants and Dances for Hand (1991-2017) and Entanglement (2022). Some in attendance may even be able to resume conversations that began in September 2019, when Gottheim last visited campus for a separate UW-Cinematheque retrospective.1

Analyzing the films of Larry Gottheim is, to be honest, a bit intimidating, given that Gottheim himself is such a penetrating critic of his own work. (Before he made his name as a filmmaker, he earned a CompLit PhD from Yale.) You can find his writings at the nicely kept website, LarryGottheimFilms.com, as well as in a forthcoming memoir, The Red Thread, a draft of which Gottheim was kind enough to send me after our acquaintance in 2019.2 In that book’s distilled, imagistic prose, Gottheim weaves together reflections on his personal history, aesthetics, technology, physics, philosophy, James Joyce—the list goes on. The one, bright constant threaded through the text are his films, whose motivations and resonances Gottheim deconstructs with great care and humility.

Reading Gottheim on Gottheim, one detects a life lived not in cinema, but through it; the relatively slim number of references to other films and filmmakers stands in stark contrast to the network of connections Gottheim draws between each of his own works. These intra-filmography connections are less about the particulars of film form, and much more about the accrued knowledge and life experience that led him to make a film like Blues (one long, silent, meditative take) in 1969, versus the radically different Knot/Not (a barrage of superimposed, cacophonous images and sounds) fifty years later.

One implication of this analysis so far is that it is difficult to neatly package the work of Larry Gottheim. His early films, at least, are often mentioned in the same breath as other “structural films” of the 1960s and 1970s: works like Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), designed around a formal, legible structure of change. In fact, as chair of what would become Binghamton University’s Cinema Department, Gottheim hired Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, and other like-minded filmmakers who would use their academic perch to experiment with the fundamentals of cinematic perception.

Made during those heady Binghamton years, Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970) is a textbook example of structural film’s “gradual change” tendency. Over the course of one 400-foot, 11-minute roll of 16mm film, fog slowly lifts from a verdant clearing in upstate New York, revealing massive trees, power lines, and ghostly horses. Yet, as with any work of art that beckons repeat viewings, Fog Line does not simply employ a pre-fitted arc, from zero to full visibility. Near the end, the fog appears to encroach back into the clearing, or at least cease its withdrawal. Are we seeing a natural phenomenon, or is the film emulsion itself playing tricks with our eyes? Gottheim has referred to Fog Line as having “a capacity of not being exhaustible” — the ultimate state to which all of his films aspire.

On first blush, the two, newer films screening this week bear little in common with an early work like Fog Line. Entanglement and Chants and Dances for Hand both consist of rapidly cut, dense, impressionistic montages, replete with philosophical asides, musical interludes, and ethnographic observation. Though distinct in subject matter, these two films share with all of Gottheim’s work a transparent structural integrity, built on repetition and recursion.

Entanglement pushes this to a notable extreme. This digital work cycles through an assemblage of pixelated film clips; instructional web videos; still photographs; CCTV footage from the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine; and original material by (and starring) Gottheim himself. Gottheim guides us through this thicket using act breaks, graphic match cuts, overlapping dialogue, and superimposition. Soon enough, we glean a set of ideas primarily concerning quantum mechanics (black holes, string theory, elementary particles, and “superposition” are all invoked). It is overwhelming to behold, which is perhaps why, at the halfway mark, the film restarts; that is to say, the first twelve minutes play again, with no discernible changes. This repeated structure allots one the time to unpack the film’s cerebral density. Fragmented musical cues, of French pianist Alfred Cortot and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung opera, also offer immediate pleasures.

The mid-length Chants and Dances for Hand is the one I expect to ponder the longest, in part because of its slippery symmetrical structure, but most of all due to its personal nature. Filmed in Haiti over the course of several years, the film bears superficial similarity to Maya Deren’s ethnographic documentary Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954), as both feature Haitian vodou rituals at their center. Indeed, Chants demonstrates the trust Gottheim earned from this community; he is seen participating in religious customs (see header image above), and his camera betrays close access to these rituals. (Fair warning that a goat, named Kabrit, is sacrificed on-screen.)

On this same note, Gottheim documents a tumultuous political uprising in Port-au-Prince, culminating in disturbing footage that depicts two corpses, one burnt beyond recognition and the other clearly that of a young boy. The actuality of death pervading this film is admittedly hard to take.

But however sensationalized or akin to rubbernecking some of these images feel, one can also detect a deep well of familial concern. The “Hand” in the film’s title refers to Gottheim’s son, Hand, whose mother, Mitsou (glimpsed above), is the Haitian woman playing the violin at the film’s beginning and end. Gottheim intersperses extremely candid, playful footage of Hand throughout this work. The sound drops out completely for two minutes as we watch women and men, some as young as Hand, stand still and humbled before the dead. The use of total silence may recall Gottheim’s early structural film milestones, like Blues and Fog Line, but the intention behind it seems born of the fears of an older and different life entirely.