Larry Gottheim - Elective Affinities

During the first viewing of Horizons, in London, I just looked at it, with my eyes all open and ablaze, and I found it very beautiful. Later I listened to Gottheim talk about the film. I found out about the complex web of image rhymes and correspondences in the film. During my second and third viewings I became very absorbed in seeing and figuring out the correspondences and rhymes. But I found the film equally, if not more, beautiful. The fourth viewing was again an open eye viewing, without any special emphasis. During the Cooper Union screening I suddenly discovered its incredible richness of color. I sat close to the screen and I saw these glorious colors and I was amazed that I could look at Horizons four times and not notice the magnificence of its color.
-Jonas Mekas

Mouches Volantes unfolds and recedes before us as do the waves on the beach in Sections 5 and 6. The shots themselves become familiar images, as does the quizzically magical sound track. The tonality of the film stock moves from high contrast black and white to subdued color and back again. All of this cyclical lyricism creates a fullness, an organic whole.
-Raymond Foery

Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in 16 combinations – a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Cezanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande. (on Four Shadows)

It started with filming the tree. Something was released in that manner of filming seemingly farthest removed from the procedure of the early films. But the film only came into its form-life with the idea of linking this deep-rooted and far-outreaching tree material with that film on paranoia that had fascinated me for many years. (on Tree of Knowledge)
-Larry Gottheim

FILMS
Horizons 1973, 16mm, color, silent, 77 min
Mouches Volantes 1976, 16mm, b/w, sound, 69 min
Four Shadows 1978, 16mm, color, sound, 65 min
Tree of Knowledge 1981, 16mm, color, sound, 57 min