by Devin Leong
This interview was published as part of our new, free digital zine, Intervals of Light & Darkness: A Collection of New & Selected Texts on the Cinema of Larry Gottheim. Download this publication here.
Sharing the name with his 1987 film of the same name, experimental film veteran Larry Gottheim’s book The Red Thread is a full account of his career from his start at the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, to his digital work in the 21st century, beginning with Knot/Not (2019). It would be wrong to describe the book as biography, or criticism of his own work. Though traces of both of those descriptions are present, The Red Thread is an artist’s attempt to trace the line between his own life and oeuvre, that titular thread.
Continuing after Knot/Not, Gottheim began to make films that drew from his newfound fascination with quantum physics. No stranger to archival footage or scientific structures, Entanglement (2022) and A Private Room (2024) now find a filmmaker who once worked with celluloid navigating the realm of digital, scouring footage from the depths of YouTube.
I met with Forrest Sprague, experimental filmmaker and co-author of A Private Room, and Gottheim in his apartment in Yonkers. I spoke to the two filmmakers in the middle of one of their meetings, about to begin working on a new project together.
Devin Leong: Writing your book, you were re-visiting all your films, it’s almost a psychoanalysis of you and your own work. In the process of making Entanglement and A Private Room, how did revisiting all of your films impact that?
Larry Gottheim: There’s something that’s going on [that is] unusual. The important thing that goes on is something that I’m not actually aware of, although in my new project, I am more deliberately incorporating things from earlier films. Y’know, in Entanglement, there’s a thing from Tree of Knowledge, but in this film, which is called Q&A, there’s gonna be a little bit more of references to earlier films. So I feel like I’m now consciously with the book and all these new films making my whole body of work one thing.
Forrest Sprague: It’s that red thread that you always talk about, that goes throughout your entire career.
LG: Yeah, so that’s kind of the idea of the red thread, which is different from what the red thread meant when it was the title of the film called The Red Thread.
FS: When I first started working with Larry, it was right when the book was about to be published and we went and watched all of his movies together too, so it was also great to revisit those and hone in on what we wanted to take from those films and incorporate into A Private Room as well.
LG: One thing that’s always on my mind is that there is a kind of philosophical thinking in the films but they are not lectures. One [possibility] I dread is that some of the films will be seen as documentary—but they’re [more] like anti-documentary if anything, rather than pedantic lectures. So what I really work on, and what we work on is the actual, physical, nature of each cut, the timing of each shot down to the millisecond. It’s creating a work of music: the musical work can be what the structure behind it might be, but it is an experience of a flow of sound. So my films, our films, they’re a flow of cinematic experience, which is much more important, and often the philosophical underpinnings are what allow it to come into being.
FS: Also the nature of what you spoke about with the afterimage, using the amount of leader that we do, allows you to really process the shot and have that outline in your eye as you see it. Oftentimes you’ll see it again and again and again, in different sections of different parts of Larry’s movies as well.
You say that with your films you don’t want it to be like a documentary. Your last two films didn’t teach me a thing about quantum physics.
LG: Well of course.
What about those scientific concepts attracted you structurally?
LG: Well that I don’t know. Just like anybody, as you go through life, some things become interesting. Now for me because I’m not out there, I’m not in a distant place, I’m not out in the countryside. I’m here and looking at the screen and just life has put me into a position of being this hermit in front of the computer looking at stuff. So for years I was fascinated with quantum mechanics, of which there’s a lot of stuff on YouTube and it really interested me a lot but my interest in it didn’t start out as becoming a film, but then [certain aspects of] it became important. That’s what we have to talk about when we get into what we’re going to be working with today.
I’ve developed a lot of the idea when I was on this tour but it has some connection. Q: The letters are important because I found that in these quantum lectures on entanglement they would talk about two things: A & B, then they would start talking as though “A” and “B” were these people, Bob and Alice. So now in Q&A originally my idea was almost like a joke, because people were talking about the Q&A, which wasn’t an expression I would think about using. I would say: and there’ll be a discussion after the film. For a lot of people it’s normal to [say] there’ll be the screening and then the Q&A. So then I [thought], wow that’s going to be the title of my next film: Q&A. I realized that the initials, [that] the Q could be quantum and A could be A.I.
That led me to a trail of stuff; the person that I was talking to [on] this stage to something about animals. I got involved in the communication of whales and elephants and so I’ve watched over thirty [videos] on YouTube about whale communication and elephant communication; that’s going to be part of the material of the film. A big discovery I had which I can’t wait to show [Forrest] is out of all of the stuff about elephants, I found one thing that I’m crazy in love with. It’s so beautiful and it reminds me a bit of Barn Rushes.
FS: I think this is reflective of your obsessive precision with your films too, like when we first started working on A Private Room and we started out with pretty much eight hours of footage. All this stock footage, old Hollywood films, the physics lectures, and then obviously we cut down that eight hours of footage to what we basically agreed upon as the ten best minutes of what we had there but it’s the same thing with you culling through all these sort of animal footages, you leave no stone unturned when you’re trying to research and I love that.
It is rare for filmmakers like you to be so curious about the digital restorations of your own films. You even sometimes prefer them to the 16mm prints. Is there a specific reason why you are so excited about these digitizations of your work?
LG: Well, it’s obviously very important. It started with Chants and Dances for Hand, which started out [as] a 16mm film but then it ended up [being shot on video]. As soon as I got into the situation where I was able to get into these Vodou ceremonies and so on, it was very low light. A lot of those scenes were shot with a flashlight, I didn’t have a microphone. I had a little pocket—but also what became important was that the image and sound were already on there together, whereas all the previous sound films mostly [had] separate sound elements which I adjoined together, so every shot in [Chants] is , it’s in Hi-8. So, it’s an analogue digital.
FS: It’s a digital analogue hybrid… It was short lived.
LG: But then, it started to be that instead of going out and filming in nature or in some other place, I was looking at the screen a lot and then I began to feel that studying the movements of things that I would find on screen was not unlike being out in some place and searching for images [to] shoot. So it seems now almost the same thing, when I find a thing on the screen it’s as though I shot it and I have the same feeling about it as though I shot it.
[For] A Private Room, the only footage you actually shot was what, the elevator?
FS: And the child footage.
With scouring the internet for footage, do you just watch videos until something just clicks and you decide to use it in a film?
FS: I think you should give the clairvoyant example because I think that was the most divine of all discoveries.
LG: That just popped up—I mean—this is going to be an element of the new film, so I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. The algorithms, you have to accept them as part of the creative process. Unfortunately, when I get into a new area it drops out stuff from the old areas. When it randomly has some kind of 1939-1940 [film], which they’re calling film noir incorrectly, I check it out and definitely will look at it. In the credits, I can tell it’s going to be a crappy movie, or nothing, or sometimes I have to go really [deep] into the movie to find something.
The algorithms, when I start to get into something like A.I. or elephant communication, then it knows what you’re looking for and it starts to send you a lot of that information. There are certain things that are probably gonna be similar for this film as it was for the last two films. In A Private Room, I select three different types of material: one is sync sound material that I like already just as it is. So if I find eight seconds of something that’s a little fragment I put it away somewhere. Then there [is material] which I like as an image, the sound is of no interest.
FS: It goes in the image folder.
LG: And then there’s sound only. Now what I found was that in the quantum stuff, a lot of the sound material was very good, I liked it, and ended up using some of it. Whereas in this new stuff I’m looking at, there’s nothing that registers with me.
FS: Interesting.
LG: The physicists are much more poetic and philosophical than the biologists.
It does come back to Natural Selection.
LG: Well there is something which I realised only the other day. [In] the film Natural Selection: there are several bodies of material that are in each section of the film, and one of them, the main one had to do with glossolalia. With this group of students, we got interested in glossolalia and went to [the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal] because of somebody’s friend—a graduate student [who] said she had heard this amazing lecture by [André Roch Lecours]. Somehow as soon as she said that, it ignited something in me in particular, but also with the students that I was working with. So I ended up corresponding with [Lecours] and going to Montreal, which you can imagine what it would be like then, going with a group of students for a week, in Montreal.
Anyway, we met with this guy at this research centre that was studying glossolalia, mostly in the case of brain damage; people who have been in an automobile accident where part of their brain was missing or not functioning. They would be making sounds, language-like sounds, which didn’t have any meaning. They were also trying to investigate the meaning [of what] they were saying. What they would do is transcribe these things and put it into a computer and then run it through the computer and try to find whether there were any patterns within it. As it turns out, this is exactly what A.I. is doing with animal sounds: both whales and elephants make these vocal utterances and now they use this advanced power of A.I. to try to find out what [each utterance] was. So what happened in this thing in Montreal, was we couldn’t use the actual material that they were working on because of medical privacy rules.
One of the students offered to give a speech in his own made up language, and so he did. He made this whole speech which you see in the film and then it’s transcribed into a computer and then this staff member in the facility [goes] through with a tape recorder and plays [the] section over and over again. Then it just actually happened that—that’s my favourite part in the film and something that I want to put in this film; that he’s going forwards and backwards with this thing that sounds like “jag älskar dig” and then one of the other students says: “Y’know I have these Swedish people visiting me and they told me how to say I love you in Swedish, and that’s what that sounds like in other words.” So that, something of that, I’m gonna use in the film.
On editing with Forrest: after he sent you his films, what about his work gravitated you towards them, and why did you think he was a choice person to work with?
LG: Well, initially it was just that. I loved the film that he sent me.
Which one was that?
FS: The first Epiphany. I sent him the first Epiphany, and then [Larry] wrote back almost immediately, with some of the kindest words I’ve heard. Then [he] told me [that] you had an idea for a movie and you wanted me to come up here, and within two weeks I was up here and already shooting the Aliyaah footage for A Private Room. Most of that Aliyaah footage comes from the first day I was up here with Larry.
LG: I think there was initially, when we first got together—Okay first of all your question, what was it about that material that I liked? I mean that’s hard to say. It was both its rigour and its surprise, those elements are important to me in these films. It was very formally rigorous and yet so thought out and composed, that once the camera was set up to record it, all kinds of things happened that couldn’t have been predicted, but they were allowed to happen because of that. So we just got together…
FS: Instantly!
LG: You had been affected by films, I was affected by that. So we got together, and then I needed somebody. [For] all of the digital films, I need somebody to help with the computer editing. It turned into something more than that, but that’s how we started.
FS: He initially invited me up, just with two ideas. First, the song of Im Chambre Séparée, and then I remember you asked me to film Aliyaah for the day and that was definitely—there were elements that had not come to light yet.
LG: Well I think that there were some things that happened before that, although each thing was—
FS: It just sorta popped out of thin air!
LG: Right, but there had already been a process going on. I had this record of this German singer singing that song. The very beginning of it, “im chambre séparée”, which I translate as “in a private room” and then I had a friend, a musician in Germany (Eli Ningú). I had used one of her musical pieces as the soundtrack of Knot/Not, and so I told her about my fascination with the beginning of the song, and she immediately saw the ideas of Im Chambre Séparée as a metaphor, and so I had started to think about that in terms of wanting to use it somehow in a film. Now I think there was something more that I got involved with, but what happened is, my son who is the Hand of Chants and Dances for Hand, was living in this apartment that I had upstairs. He was living with his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s sister’s baby and it was a very, very tough situation. She had a condition like… whatever the condition—
FS: She had, like non-verbal autism.
LG: And plus some other psychological things. I really loved her, she was really amazing, and she would make these sounds that were really very beautiful, and that made me think: “What’s going on inside of her when she’s making those sounds? Is it like a language?”
So that relates to Im Chambre Séparée, it relates to elephants and whales communicating, so I took advantage of her being there to film. So basically we didn’t know what we were looking for exactly, but I was holding her and Forrest was right next to me with the camera filming.
FS: We filmed for like an hour.—
LG: And almost nothing of it was usable, it was just allowing us to see what we were looking at. The same was true with the elevator material, where I had some idea that had nothing to do with that film. I was just downstairs looking at the elevator, waiting for somebody and seeing some kind of composition. I said “Let’s film something with the elevator.” and it was the same thing. We set up something, but we didn’t know what we were looking for, but then it became an inevitable part.
FS: Especially with seeing glimpses of people coming out of the elevator, or you see the reflection in the metal of the elevator. That was a very important compositional part to that footage as well, the elevator doors opening, closing, the up and down buttons. It became very clear that that was gonna become a crucial element.
LG: Yeah but the people, my feeling was that we were waiting for people to come out of the elevator, and go into the elevator. We used almost nothing.
FS: Almost nothing! We shot a lot of that. Only the reflections of the people… but never any of the people.
LG: Even that is mostly the elevator door opening and there’s nobody. Most of the elevator shots have nothing to do with people.
FS: It’s true, only maybe two or three. It’s funny how much we originally shot that ended up on the cutting room floor.
Your films [and in] in your writing, there’s so much about your unconscious impulses in the edit. When editing the film with Forrest did your impulses and his clash, was there—
LG: Never.
FS: Never!
Never?
FS: Nope! We were on the same wavelength pretty much every day, and I feel like there was a very respectful collaborative process. If there was something—if I made a suggestion and he was like, “I’m not really feeling it” I would concede, and same thing if you suggested an edit and I said “Let’s make the leader a little bit shorter”, or “Let’s insert this shot after” [Larry] would also take my suggestion as if it were just as valid as [his]. Which I found to be a very rewarding experience. The times that you would say, “Y’know you were right about that, that was a better way to do it” and the times when I would tell you “You’re right that is a better way to do it”. It ended up being very harmonious.
Your last three films, you did make with someone else. That process of working with someone else on digital, is it any different from working alone on the editing table?
LG: It did bring something into the process because, usually, when I worked on a film I wouldn’t even show it to anybody. I’d do the whole thing, make the film, finish the film, and then I would show it to somebody. Then, like, very rarely, I remember showing Horizons where I had made the whole first part, and then showing it to a few people, whom I really respect a lot like Ernie [Gehr], for example, but none of the people that I showed it to had any clue about what was going on.
FS: Wow, even Ernie? Do you think that there was a change once you had the entire film finished?
LG: You mean if they were to see it now?
FS: I mean did you notice a reception change when it became the full feature.
LG: No. Well, there were certain people like Jonas [Mekas] and Joan Janhardt were basically the only people who seemed to—well there were a few other people—there wasn’t nobody, but I would have a lot of incomprehension. It’s only now I find it’s been very different.
I never wanted to be influenced by somebody. I felt very comfortable working with— and actually that was happening also with Christian [Flemm] and with Rebekkah [Palov].
FS: Yeah, absolutely
LG: This sort of going through another person while I was actually working; even just working on one shot or one idea, going: “What do you think about this?” I accepted that as part of the process of going through another person.
FS: Yeah absolutely, because you also get that feedback in real time, in a collaborative structure. If you’re working alone— you’re truly trusting your intuition but it’s great when you can springboard ideas off each other too about where something may go.
LG: And also allow things to be… To have somebody that I knew would be in the same framework. I felt okay about going through it, like some kind of micro—
FS: Yeah, just the most micro edits—
LG: There were so many examples, like the very end of the film, where I just had this idea: let’s try superimposing the two songs on each other— And then we just chose one thing and that was it.
FS: Yeah we just eyeballed it, we put just the two songs together, eyeballed it, and then it ended and we looked at eachother and we were like that’s crazy—that’s the perfect ending to A Private Room.
LG: I think that maybe some of the things, the individual edits, were more far out.
It’s hard to explain what I mean, but I feel—let’s say with Tree of Knowledge; the editing is precise and far out, but not in the same way. When I cut in something from the film of the seasons to the tree footage, that is far out, but it seems like as soon as you do it: it’s obvious, it’s right. Let’s say superimposing the two things; a lot of the things that happened in Private Room are way more far out. It allows it to extend into—which I think is what I love about the film, when I think of it as “This is the film for the future”.
It’s because the association that’s happening as each element goes by is so far out that by working with somebody else that’s like “Yeah, yeah!”
FS: We were each other’s cheerleaders, you know?
Your early film that isn’t really considered by everyone to be part of the “Gottheim canon” but I actually do like, and you write [in The Red Thread] that you came around to being proud of it, ALA, has another credited filmmaker [Rodney Young].
LG: Thank you for that. What happened was, there was this group of students that I was working with, and then it came to the end of the semester. There was some opportunity—I can’t remember, but they got some kind of support. Two of the students were able to stay on in the summer—the woman was just around and the guy would be holding up the film. There was no creative role [for] them but I wanted to credit somebody.
FS: I remember the first time watching that together with you too. You just had a big smile on your face and you’re like “I’m so glad that it’s part of my filmography now” I could sense that from you, as if you hadn’t accepted it in the past. Because with all of the other movies; we essentially went through all of your films in preparation for A Private Room, which was wonderful. It gave me great insight and also [to be] able to work with the beats and the themes that you yourself were looking for. After watching that one in particular, because it’s a documentary, more or less—
It is an early use of you using asynchronous sound.
FS: Exactly. So definitely, it has a worthy place.
LG: The film has a little bit of history within Binghamton, it was the anniversary of that film and then [I] got together [with] the guy who speaks most in the film. (There was just one of the students [who] had this crappy little tape recorder so the quality of the sound was really bad) He actually took this Proust course with me, but we’ve become friends. They just had the 50th anniversary of the African studies department at Binghamton, so they were having this whole celebration, and they invited me to go to it—which I couldn’t go to—but I was really proud of that.
You write a lot about this dichotomy with an accepted structure and chance, and accepting what happens within the confines of the structure—and I’ve been really interested lately in Andy Warhol’s films, and I think his films perfectly embody that. You have like—a reel of film, the basic structural conceit in what happens on the camera—that’s the film.
LG: I mean that was a definite influence, there was a period just before I got a camera, and after I got a camera, where I would just devour what was going on in all the avant-garde arts in New York at that time. [It] was really an exciting time in dance, in music, in sculpture and painting, and Warhol—especially those early films—were a definite influence on those early films of mine, as well as the Lumières.
I also liked some of his later films and as I said in the book I became friends with Ondine. There was that whole way that it entered into my work, and that was one of the things that I liked about Forrest’s film: the sense of the rigorous structure that allowed for things to happen that couldn’t have been—
FS: It couldn’t have been staged.
LG: Right, and yet, they were artistic—in other words; a worker doing something up in this quarter.
FS: Yeah, and then in another quadrant someone’s doing something else—and it’s funny because I am also influenced by the Lumières, but obviously in a more fastidious way. And definitely, the term “actuality” has gone out of style, but I do think the idea of actuality in experimental film is still present. The complete chance of it all, you never know what’s going to happen, but if you set a camera up on a tripod, something miraculous will happen, even if you don’t know it.
I actually watched Robert Siodmak’s The Killers last night, which is one of the pieces you reference the most. In narrative film, in Hollywood film, is there anything you gravitate towards there?
LG: Well I was doing a lot of stuff, actually, when I was in Cleveland, I stayed with a friend, Jackson, who is working in the industry as an art designer. He had been out in Hollywood but he moved back to Cleveland, and so, whenever there’s a film—which is happening a lot in Yonkers, as well as in Cleveland, then he gets called in to do it. He has hundreds of DVDs, so, I would be watching different narrative films with him, and one of the films I wanted to watch was Oppenheimer. Now I totally loathe Oppenheimer, I think it’s a piece of shit, and—
FS: P. Adams Sitney would agree!
LG: Well, then now I’ll like it. That’s at least one redeeming note.
FS: Yeah.
LG: It’s very interesting. We gotta talk about this.
FS: We gotta talk about The Clairvoyant.
LG: I did watch another film of his called The Tunnel.
FS: Oh, uh, by Maurice Elvey?
LG: Yes. It’s very—it’s very interesting. I mean it’s not as good as [The Clairvoyant], but as I told you, when I showed A Private Room in Akron, this guy came up and he said “You know what that’s my favorite film”, and I thought “Oh my god!”.
FS: Yeah. The only other person who’s seen The Clairvoyant.
LG: But there’s certain things in The Clairvoyant that have to do with this love triangle of the two women, which I never really even understood before. That’s the worst part of the film.
So in The Tunnel which is a science-fiction film, there is also this love triangle that gets a little bit confused, and it’s not good at all.
FS: I remember you called me up, late at night and said, “I just had YouTube recommend me this film with Claude Rains in it called The Clairvoyant and I think I figured out the next phase of A Private Room. And the next morning I showed up, and we watched it, and at that point A Private Room was still sort of in these various fragments that we hadn’t quite figured out yet, but I recall upon seeing The Clairvoyant, the element of him mentioning the battery, of him being the avatar for Bob and using Alice as his electric battery, when we saw that and we had the same eureka moment that this would become such a crucial element to the film as well.
LG: I have a feeling this [new] film could be longer than 10 minutes.
That time in Cleveland I was thinking Cassavetes was the positive pole of which Oppenheimer was the negative one, and I tried to figure out why that was.
I’ve been thinking about this—first of all, the other day they were doing this big feature film in front of the train station and they had like ten big trucks, hundreds of people, a whole big production, big lighting thing. I was listening to the radio this morning and they were interviewing an actor, talking about whether directors talk with their subjects and he said the really great directors hardly talk at all. He gave this example, I forgot what film he was talking about, but he said there was this scene with children. The person that was being interviewed said “‘I loved it, it was such a perfect thing’ and I asked the director ‘How did you get that performance? It’s just absolutely perfect!’ and the guy said ‘Because I didn’t tell them anything.’”
FS: Exactly: we didn’t tell Aliyaah to do anything we just let her be and we filmed her. And some of the sounds and some of the gestures and some of her body language ended up being so perfect for the film.
To round things out, at the previous Elective Affinities lectures you did, you said, “I finally found my audience.” With your recent tour for A Private Room, have you seen an uptick in the interest in this kind of film?
LG: Very much. I mean really a lot, and to all of the films—everything that I’ve shown, it was almost unbelievable, one of the greatest things was that Akron just happened because [of] doing the [tour] in the midwest.
There’s some kind of program in Akron called the Rubicon Theater, and that turned out to be really, really great—and I showed Barn Rushes, and it was—the audience was just transfixed and it was really amazing. Actually the first screening of it I had at a major theater, at the Museum of Modern Art, when the intermission comes on it’s “Oh, no!”, and then they would start slamming their seats and walking out, and here, it was like a whole audience was transfixed.
FS: There has been such a widespread acceptance of experimental film now, especially young—among, you know, Gen Z and Millennials — obviously you’ve talked about it, Dorsky and Hiler talked about it, Beavers has talked about it, Ernie’s talked about it, where like they have an audience now that won’t heckle the movie, and that’s wonderful! You know, like it also begs the question: what is the avant-garde film now? Because all of the audience is so accepting of everything now. Even thinking about the Fred Worden retro recently, it’s very interesting.
LG: I’ll tell you about this phone call from—I have this friend Ellen Carey who’s a famous photographer, and, talking about stuff she said “You gotta stand up for experimental cinema!”, you know, and I feel that there is a kind of shared responsibility that the survivors–
It’s a different cast of characters, a little bit, I mean some of the people died but, what I feel most happy about, proud about is, not being like this monster from the past, you know who survived, but rather like a fire brand and I feel that I have a need for each work to [have] connections with my past work—to be a challenge.
FS: Yeah, and he has this great motto that he always says: “Don’t fence me in.”
Devin Leong is a student and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They are currently studying History, Literature, and French. [Letterboxd] [Twitter]
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