Larry Gottheim

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Larry Gottheim
Born1936 (age 88–89)
New York City, New York
OccupationFilmmaker
Years active1970–Present
Notable work Fog Line , Elective Affinities

Larry Gottheim (born 1936) is an American avant-garde filmmaker.

Contents

Early life

Gottheim attended a high school for music and the arts. [1]

He went to Oberlin College for undergraduate studies, where he became interested in poetry and fiction. He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University. [1] [2]

Career

Gottheim became a faculty member at Binghamton University, where he began teaching literature. He purchased a Bolex camera and began learning how to make films. [1] In 1969 Gottheim brought filmmaker Ken Jacobs to Binghamton, and they established a film department, the first in the SUNY system. [3]

In the early 1970s, Gottheim made short films dealing with duration and landscape. [4] Fog Line is a static shot of a foggy landscape, where figures not discernible at the beginning become perceptible as the fog slowly lifts. [5] Doorway is a slow pan across a snow-covered field. [6] In Barn Rushes, Gottheim recorded several shots of a wooden barn with a camera that moved around its exterior. He likened the technique to a musical composition with multiple variations of a passage or theme. [7] Harmonica is a sound film made in the back of a moving vehicle, where a man improvises a harmonica performance by playing it with his mouth and holding it the window. [8]

Gottheim's Elective Affinities series, named after the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is a collection of four films: Horizons, Mouches Volantes, Four Shadows, and Tree of Knowledge. Horizons (1973), his first feature-length film, comprises a series of landscapes, each containing a horizon. Inspired by Virgil's Georgics , Dante, and Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons , Gottheim organized the film around the four seasons and developed editing patterns that act as distinct rhyme schemes for each season. [9] In Four Shadows (1978), he worked with structures of repetition to enact different relationships between image and sound. [10]

Gottheim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. [11]

Filmography

References

  1. 1 2 3 MacDonald, Scott (1988). A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers . University of California Press. pp.  78–82. ISBN   978-0-520-05801-9.
  2. ↑ MacDonald, Scott (2015). Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967–1977. SUNY Press. p. 214.
  3. ↑ Fiore, Anthony (April 27, 2012). "Ken Jacobs, godfather of BU cinema, returns to campus". Pipe Dream . Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  4. ↑ Burnham, Dave (2020). "Turning to Nature: Cavell and Experimental Cinema". Discourse. 42 (1–2): 184–185. doi:10.13110/discourse.42.1-2.0173.
  5. ↑ Remes, Justin (2012). "Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis". British Journal of Aesthetics . 52 (3): 257. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays021.
  6. ↑ Gerson, Barry (1979). "'Doorway' by Larry Gottheim". Film Culture . No. 67–69. pp. 180–181.
  7. ↑ Mekas, Jonas (February 24, 1972). "Movie Journal". The Village Voice . Vol. 17, no. 8. p. 67.
  8. ↑ Cowan, Bob (1972). "New York Letter". Take One . Vol. 3, no. 4. p. 45.
  9. ↑ MacDonald, Scott (1996). "Voyages of Life". Wide Angle. 18 (2): 108–122. doi:10.1353/wan.1996.0009.
  10. ↑ Bartone, Richard (1979). "The Forms of Repetition: Larry Gottheim's Four Shadows". Millennium Film Journal (4–5): 167–171.
  11. ↑ "Larry Gottheim". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation . Retrieved September 4, 2024.
  12. ↑ "Larry Gottheim". The Film-Makers' Cooperative . Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  13. ↑ "Larry Gottheim". Canyon Cinema . Retrieved November 5, 2025.
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