Lewis Klahr is a very unique filmmaker. He makes short animated films via elaborate collages. He creates each of his collages from cut outs of magazines, papers, books, comics, etc. He came to St. Mary's earlier in the semester as part of the animated film series. I found his films very interesting. Of the films he showed, all used cut outs and themes of an earlier era. They seemed to be set in the 1950s time period. The films he showed were "April Snow", "A Thousand Julys", and "The Nimbus Trilogy." Each had it's own unique theme and style. I thought his particular type of film really applied to what we were learning in digital art at the time. When I saw this lecture, we were working on our vector portraits and viewing some of the vector animated films. I really enjoyed the style of these films so I was interested in seeing some other types of unique animation.
"April Snow" was all about the love he has for his wife. Klahr said a few words about the film after our viewing. He said he wanted to portray the ideas of married life and how relationships change over time, yet stay just as significant. He chose appropriate images to display this feeling of love. He said most of the images chosen were from old comics that he read as a kid. I thought it was interesting that he chose to display current feelings for his wife through old cut outs. "The Nimbus Trilogy" was the next film he showed. I found this one a bit harder to gain meaning from. However, the animation was very interesting. I noticed certain cut outs making appearances several times in different ways. For instance, a penny kept sliding across the screen at different periods in time. A student asked Klahr the significance of the penny and he didn't really give a clear answer. I know the broad idea of the first part of the trilogy was a about a man and woman struggling with their relationship. Klahr added some word bubbles similar to the ones found in comic books. I thought this really helped portray his message since their was no actual dialogue to be heard. I think he was trying to portray the miscommunications and misunderstandings that are bound to be found in relationships.
I really liked the uniqueness of Klahrs films. I have never seen animated films where cut out figures are used with or without background music and without dialogue. The ways in which he positioned the cut out figures with cut out backgrounds and slid them across the screen was very creative and I am sure very time consuming. I enjoyed watching is films for the visual aspects, however I sometimes found them rather hard to understand. This may be partly due to the fact that I had never seen animations of this sort and kept getting distracted by the different visual aspects rather than focusing on realizing some meaning. Most of the clips that we viewed seemed to present messages about relationships. Some relationships were good, some were bad, others were repetitive and boring, and still others involved lack of communication. I like the messages he presents because they are ideas that everyone can relate to and they are very realistic as well.
I think artistically and visually, Klahr is a master of his art form. I think the only change I would make if I were making a film like his would be to somehow make the message more clear. He did a good job using different songs in the background to symbolize different emotions, however more word bubbles with the human cut outs would have been helpful as well. Overall though, Klahr's work is extremely visually pleasing and flows together very naturally. I enjoyed viewing his unique film style. I couldn't find any of the films we viewed at St. Mary's on youtube, but here is a link to one of his other videos.
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