The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr, 2011) (Patreon)

In one of those odd confluences of ill-timing and bad circumstance, I never got around to seeing Lewis Klahr's debut feature until now. There's no real excuse for this. I consistently find Klahr to be among the most compelling makers of experimental cinema working today, and his second feature, Sixty-Six, is one of my very favorites of the previous decade. (I hope to see his latest feature-length work, Circumstantial Pleasures, in the near future.)

One of the things that makes Klahr's work so seductive is actually the very thing that used to be a stumbling block for me, a barrier to full appreciation. With his use of retro comic book figures and images of International Style buildings, trinkets from old bars and baseball cards from days gone by, Klahr's films usually suggest a connection to the American cinema of the 1940s and 50s, the doomed romanticism of film noir and the plangent atmosphere of Sirkian melodrama. But Klahr keeps all of this beyond the viewer's conscious grasp. There is always only the hint of a story, the pieces hovering like an aerosol mist.

The Pettifogger provides more concrete touchpoints than usual, but it still remains a film of unconscious pulsions, Klahr seeming to animate the very fragments of our national image bank. We are told upfront that the film is about the year 1963, and throughout the film we see a desk calendar that marks the time, month by month. However, there are substantial gaps in this vague, surreal annum. Near the beginning of the film, we see repeated images of a square-jawed man at a poker table, and actual playing cards are a repeated physical motif throughout The Pettifogger. These images, along with allusions to travel and movement, suggest a fractured biography of a gambler on the run, or at least a man who is drifting through life, disappointing women and failing to establish roots.

It is also of note that, unlike many of Klahr's short films, The Pettifogger is almost entirely without music of any kind. Aside from one song at the end, Klahr instead constructs a soundscape of fragmented movie dialogue, police band radio, and other atmospheric, "cinematic" audio. There is no clear characterization produced by this soundtrack, but it does produce a broad genre net, enveloping the images with a sense of roughness and urgency.

Near the end of The Pettifogger, Klahr radically shifts gears, interrupting the wafting Bogart / Mitchum ambiance he has established. The film slows, and Klahr begins showing single images in brief flashes, alternating with color fields. It is as though the film has "broken down" into its constituent parts, no longer animated but instead displaying its contents in sequence, revealing its hand, so to speak. Narrative motion gives way to a gallery display of sad, isolated images. And although The Pettifogger does regain its tempo near the end, there is an overall sense that Klahr has used the long form in order to construct plausible narrative time, only to dismantle it as a pipe dream, a distant illusion.