Larry Gottheim: The Red Thread—Introduction & Early Works

Larry Gottheim in person!

Working in film since the late 1960s, the cinema of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim is an observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement and offering uncannily commonplace imagery rife with elusive metaphor and/or accumulating into densely immersive conceptual conundra. In Gottheim’s films, time slows, hesitates and seems to move in novel and non-linear directions, the circularity of experience a recurring aspect of the master filmmaker’s rich body of work. Gottheim’s recent book, The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (published 2024 by Eyewash Books and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative) is a ruminative and musing career-spanning culmination, teasing out longitudinal threads and uncanny occurrences in the oeuvre, presenting the artists’ body of work as a multi-faceted whole, a throughline of thought and material-based philosophy.

In celebration of this publication, San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to present a three-program residency (in partnership with the Roxie Theater, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland) presenting selections from the artist’s vast body of work, from early single-shot films, still lifes and nature studies to the complex sound/image constructions of later work to the very recent films completed 2019–2024. This three-part series commences at the Little Roxie with an early evening interactive presentation of three of the artist’s iconic single-shot early works and the later, semi-autobiographical film The Red Thread, filmed in mid-1980s San Francisco. All works screened in 16mm!

SCREENING:
Corn (1970); File, color, silent, 11 minutes.

Fog Line (1970); File, color, silent, 11 minutes.

Harmonica (1971); File, color, sound, 11 minutes.

The Red Thread (1987); File, color, sound, 17 minutes.

Program presented by San Francisco Cinematheque. Programs two and three at Gray Area, SF and Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland. Full details here.