Larry Gottheim

Larry Gottheim
Larry Gottheim in 2025
Born1936 (age 89–90)
New York City, New York
OccupationFilmmaker
Years active1970–Present
Notable workFog Line, Elective Affinities

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

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] Blues is a single shot of a bowl of blueberries and milk, from which spoonfuls of blueberries are occasionally removed until only milk remains. Corn shows ears of corn being shucked and transferred into a dish, next to the husks. After being boiled off screen, they are returned to the dish, and the lighting subtly changes as they cool.[5] Fog Line is a static shot of a foggy landscape, where figures not discernible at the beginning become perceptible as the fog slowly lifts.[6] Doorway is a slow pan across a snow-covered field.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

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.[10] Mouches Volantes (1976) uses a palindromic structure, with seven segments shown once before being repeated in reverse order. Its soundtrack is composed of excerpts from an interview with Angeline Johnson in which she discusses her life with Blind Willie.[11] In Four Shadows (1978), he worked with structures of repetition to enact different relationships between image and sound.[12] Tree of Knowledge (1981) moves between three types of footage: a tree recorded with prominent camera movements, found footage from an educational film, and interviews with psychiatric patients.[11]

Gottheim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.[13]

Filmography

  • Blues (1970)
  • Fog Line (1970)
  • Corn (1970)
  • Doorway (1971)
  • Thought (1971)
  • Harmonica (1971)
  • Barn Rushes (1971)
  • Horizons (1973)
  • Mouches Volantes (1976)
  • Four Shadows (1978)
  • Tree of Knowledge (1981)
  • Natural Selection (1984)
  • Sorry / Hear Us (1986)
  • Mnemosyne Mother of Muses (1987)
  • The Red Thread (1987)
  • Machette Gillette... Mama (1989)
  • Your Television Traveler (1991)
  • Chants and Dances for Hand (2016)
  • Knot/Not (2019)[14][15]
  • Entanglement (2022)
  • A Private Room (2024)

References

  1. ^ a b c 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. ^ MacDonald, Scott (1978). "The Expanding Vision of Larry Gottheim's Films". Quarterly Review of Film Studies. 3 (2): 208–212. doi:10.1080/10509207809391395.
  6. ^ Remes, Justin (2012). "Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis". British Journal of Aesthetics. 52 (3): 257. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays021.
  7. ^ Gerson, Barry (1979). "'Doorway' by Larry Gottheim". Film Culture. No. 67–69. pp. 180–181.
  8. ^ Mekas, Jonas (February 24, 1972). "Movie Journal". The Village Voice. Vol. 17, no. 8. p. 67.
  9. ^ Cowan, Bob (1972). "New York Letter". Take One. Vol. 3, no. 4. p. 45.
  10. ^ MacDonald, Scott (1996). "Voyages of Life". Wide Angle. 18 (2): 108–122. doi:10.1353/wan.1996.0009.
  11. ^ a b Turim, Maureen (March 1985). "'Elective Affinities': Larry Gottheim's Cinematic Quaternion". Afterimage. 12 (8). Visual Studies Workshop: 12–14. doi:10.1525/aft.1985.12.8.12.
  12. ^ Bartone, Richard (1979). "The Forms of Repetition: Larry Gottheim's Four Shadows". Millennium Film Journal (4–5): 167–171.
  13. ^ "Larry Gottheim". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved September 4, 2024.
  14. ^ "Larry Gottheim". The Film-Makers' Cooperative. Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  15. ^ "Larry Gottheim". Canyon Cinema. Retrieved November 5, 2025.
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