Larry Gottheim - Fog Line

Perfect works have a way of appearing unobtrusive or simple, the complexities seeming to be so correct that they flow—mesmerize one through their form—a form that bespeaks of harmony between many aesthetic concerns. Larry Gottheim's Doorway is such a film. His concern for working with edges, isolating details, the prominence of the frame as a shape and revealer of edges, love of photographic texture, are all dealt with lucidly in this film. One is drawn into these beautiful images through Gottheim's poetic feel for photographic qualities, his ability to transform a landscape through his rigorous use of the frame to isolate in order to call attention to a heretofore hidden beauty revealed through a highly selective eye.
-Barry Gerson, Film Culture

Elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution, Barn Rushes is tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time.
-Tony Conrad

Fog Line is a wonderful piece of conceptual art, a stroke along that careful line between wit and wisdom—a melody in which literally every frame is different from every preceding frame (since the fog is always lifting) and the various elements of the composition—trees, animals, vegetation, sky, and, quite importantly, the emulsion, the grain of the film itself— continue to play off one another as do notes in a musical composition. The quality of the light—the tonality of the image itself—adds immeasurably to the mystery and excitement as the work unfolds, the fog lifting, the film running through the gate, the composition static yet the frame itself fluid, dynamic, magnificently kinetic
-Raymond Foery

FILMS
Blues 1970, 16mm, color, silent, 8:30 min
Corn 1970, 16mm, color, silent, 10:30 min
Fog Line 1970, 16mm, color, silent, 11 min
Doorway 1971, 16mm, b/w, silent, 7:30 min
Harmonica 1971, 16mm, color, mono, 10:30 min
Thought 1971, 16mm, color, silent, 7 min
Barn Rushes 1971, 16mm, color, silent, 34 min

DVD5 PAL Interzone • Mono • Color & B/W • 16:9 • 89 min • + Booklet 60 pages by Scott MacDonald, Larry Gottheim