Circumstantial Pleasures (Lewis Klahr, 2020) (Patreon)

For years now, Lewis Klahr has mastered a particular kind of cinema. Using cut-out and object animation in stop-motion, he has used the copy-stand as a sort of field of dreams, moving fragments of forgotten romances, movie stars, confrontations, and half-formed ideologies across the screen in a way that tends to bypass our capacity for logic. Instead, his image shards and plangent sounds hit us in the back pocket or our brains, where we store dissolving recollections of events that we cannot remember if they actually happened, or if we heard about them from someone else long ago, or if they merely refer to old, unfulfilled desires. Because much of Klahr's work has engaged with the past, it has been mistaken for nostalgia. But how can we long to return to the past when we are already there?

Circumstantial Pleasures is Klahr's newest feature film. Like his previous features, The Pettifogger and Sixty-Six, it is partly a compilation of short independent works, and also a broad new conceptual context for those works -- a curated screening of sorts that hints at a narrative or thematic throughline but doesn't offer the clarity of a Hollywood star map. And again, there are works appearing in Circumstantial Pleasures that have never screened apart from their presence in the feature, making them essentially chapters rather than "films" per se. Klahr complicates the idea of what a "feature film" really is.

But Circumstantial Pleasures is bracingly different from much of what Klahr has done before. As he himself has pointed out, there have been earlier hints of this direction, such as 2007's Antigenic Drift. But there is no hint of the past in this film. Well, except for the fact that history is how we got to where we are now, and our current predicament thrusts us into a permanent present of nonstop destruction and zero-sum blood-borne decimation. Although one immediately notices that pictures of money abound in Circumstantial Pleasures -- stacks of cash that crush the sky and tower over vehicles with unseen bodies inside -- the other dominant visual motif in the film can be found in the background. Zigzagging Op Art patterns taken from the inside of security business envelopes almost always form the ground against which Klahr's late capitalist Grand Guignol unfolds. The message is clear. We are inside capital. We are its secrets. We are the invoices, the contracts, the past due notices. We are nothing but money.

Klahr completed his film before the outbreak of COVID-19, but as sometime happens with great works of art, history caught up to Circumstantial Pleasures. The film is rife with bodies being penetrated by tubes, superimposed footage of Flomax capsules rolling in a factory tumbler, and body parts studded with red spots that may be pockmarks, pressure points, or directions for future cutting. One jarring image, late in the film, features a man ripping his shirt open, Superman-style, to reveal a massive vertical scar from open heart surgery. 

There is an all-over atmospheric shift in Circumstantial Pleasures that distinguishes it from Klahr's previous work, so much so that I can imagine longtime fans may find it offputting. (Several major festivals passed on the film in 2019, most likely because they didn't know what to make of this darker, more direct turn in the work.) The collage sequences are frequently punctuated by high-key colorfield frames that pierce the eye in their extreme disparity from the surrounding visual material, producing an almost somatic, Paul Sharits-like effect. One section, "ramification lesions (microbial stress)," is highly atypical in its use of recognizable Xeroxed images of world leaders (Trump, Putin, Hillary Clinton and others), creating a tone not unlike an embittered, contemporary Stan VanDerBeek film. And most shocking of all, one section ("High Rise") is photographic live-action.

But Klahr's tour de force is the film's final segment, "Circumstantial Pleasures," a 23-minute sequences set to Scott Walker's track "SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)," from his final album Bish Bosch. (Most of the rest of the film features music by electronic composer David Rosenboom.) As bodies exhibit various states of medical disrepair, they are subsumed by subway turnstiles, unforgiving modernist cityscapes, and the marks of total abstraction -- geometrical figures, pie charts, wads of cash, empty boardrooms. As Walker's voice quavers and pleads, Klahr is showing us a picture of the present that we understand, both intellectually and viscerally, that we inhabit. 

In Klahr's earlier films, we saw ourselves reflected as comic book heroes, men of action, the Don Drapers and Joan Holloways of days gone by. But these were fantasies. Inside of manila folders, and on hard drives stationed offshore, we exist, barely, as code, as data, but never in human form. We are pieces of paper in a file to which we will never have access. After all, "when you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is  wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing we would have very few cases." Global capitalism crunches the numbers, banks on externalities, and we're buried without so much as a proper name.