Sorry/Hears Us. 1984. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. 16mm. 8 min.
The Red Thread. 1987. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. 16mm. 17 min.
Natural Selection. 1983. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. 16mm. 35 min.
Two of these films grew out of production seminars at Binghamton University. Sorry/Hear Us involves the transformation of visual and linguistic elements. It was generated using a student’s poem—a reading of the poem is played backward over and over until the background sounds start to resemble a new word. Natural Selection, which arose during a yearlong seminar, developed out of several bodies of material and was inspired by an interest in glossolalia and a trip to a research institute in Montreal. Everything was filmed and recorded by the students, and they gave Gottheim permission to use the material. He added to each section titles in the form of quotations from Darwin’s masterpiece, along with sections of an interview with Arnold Schoenberg and other material. The Red Thread grew out of material made when Gottheim was a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute. It centers on a relationship with a Bauhaus-trained fabric artist whose work gives the film its title. This major work is a potent bricolage, a warp and weft of moments of everyday melodrama, like children playing in a Chinatown schoolyard, and inferences and elements of mythic dimensions. Presented in vintage 16mm prints.