Four Shadows. 1978. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. 2K digital restoration by Christian Flemm. 64 min.
Four Shadows, the third film in Gottheim’s Elective Affinities series, is an intricate weave of image-sound associations on the themes of art and nature, and of a personal and open-ended character. Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections combine into 16 synchronized sections. Segments include a dense, beautiful passage from William Wordsworth’s Prelude recited by readers whose native language is not English; a pair of uninvited surveyors measuring the landscape across from Gottheim’s house; a family of vocalizing apes in a zoological garden manifesting before an audience of unseen children; an open book revealing a diagram of Cézanne’s painting; figures from the Commedia dell’Arte—one steps out, shadowed by the threatening other; and Illicit lovers declaring their passion in the shadows as they are discovered by the jealous husband in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Presented in a digital file scanned from a 16mm print.