Lewis Klahr's Pony Glass: Queer Collage Animation, Retroactive Contingency, and the Everyday

Animation Journal, Volume 23, 2015

51LEWIS KLAHR’S PONY GLASS:QUEER COLLAGE ANIMATION, RETROACTIVE

CONTINGENCY, AND THE EVERYDAYby Ryan Watson

And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away my childish things.”

-James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room1

In the epigraph above, James Baldwin evokes a body, possessed with a stirring yet foreign malady. It longs for something both precise and ineffable. This something, an acute homosexual desire, is trapped within and profoundly shapes the contours of the subject, as evidenced by the allusion to the mirror. This intense anxiety, connected to childhood, is also projected upon an intractable passage through time, hurtling toward revelation. The “things” of childhood—which we could imagine as both the fungible everyday objects of toys, comics, and coloring books and the more ephemeral things like laughter, friendships, and playing—are suppressed in the conscious pursuit of an adult identity, “put away” in order to become a man.

Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room, revolves around two young men as they deal with their homosexual attractions in different ways. David, blonde and handsome, makes a conscious choice not to build a life around his desire for a relationship with Giovanni. Instead, he marries a woman, but ultimately ends up alone and miserable. Giovanni, on the other hand, decides that he can make a life as a gay man, but eventually goes mad as a result of his unrequited love; he commits murder and is put to death. The novel begets a multitude of “what ifs”—questions that gesture toward not only a recuperation of the past, but also a wish for the ability to reset the promise of chance and possibility.

Baldwin’s novel had a profound influence upon Los Angeles based filmmaker Lewis Klahr. Klahr is a straight filmmaker, but he engages in a recuperation of his homoerotic desires from adolescence in his collage animation film Pony Glass (1997), a favorite on the queer avant-garde festival circuit in the late 1990s. In this essay, I consider Giovanni’s Room as a passageway into thinking about Pony Glass and the form of collage animation it employs. The film raises the issue of what it means to “queer” time in a variety of forms, while engaging in the representation of desire as imbricated within the everyday “things of childhood”—scraps and cutouts of mass- produced comic books, pornography, and magazines. Beyond queering time, the film also effectively “queers” the three-act melodramatic structure popular in films by directors such as Douglas Sirk in the 1950s and 60s. Klahr deploys the overwrought


52emotions evoked by pairing images with soaring music, but not in the service of heteronormative courtship; rather, he explores the fear and anxiety of inhabiting an identity that does not conform to societal norms. The film and its representation of queer sexual desire is particularly novel in that it is the recuperation by a straight man of feelings that are often left buried. This investigation, then, relies on Klahr’s re-creation of youth and his recovery of desire and subject formation through collage animation and the discarded things of childhood. As Tom Gunning aptly notes, “Klahr’s collages reawaken patterns of desire and of terror buried within these discards.”2 These reawakened patterns and buried origins allow theorization of what I call retroactive contingency, a form of affective recuperation and memory making within transformed or “queered” temporalities.

Klahr and Collage Animation The central character of Pony Glass is Jimmy Olsen, the

newspaper reporter and sidekick from the “Superman” comic book series.3 The setting he is placed in is created with cutout imagery from 1950s and 1960s American culture and evokes a seemingly perfect mise-en-scène for love. The film’s three-act structure is marked by soaring melodramatic music and Jimmy is represented in scenarios dealing with intense sexual anxiety, as he is liberated from his role as a repressed hetero-normative man and becomes a figure posed in various homoerotic pornographic couplings. Klahr contends that:

One of the most important influences on Pony Glass is literary—James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room which also details a particularly difficult gay coming of age story. Both Baldwin’s protagonist and Jimmy Olsen can’t see the change coming and are surprised and overwhelmed by it. Ultimately their rational resistance to their transformations proves futile.4

This sense of determinism, coupled with lack of vision, points to an identity that develops within a hidden register, only to emerge with frightful spontaneity.

Klahr, who was born in 1956, grew up in New York State and has been making films since 1977. He studied filmmaking in college and was drawn to the technique of collage as it allowed him the freedom to explore notions of time and memory in a way he found satisfying. In terms of recurring thematic elements, affect, and approach, Klahr’s work is aligned with fellow experimental filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Joseph Cornell, and Ken Jacobs, who pioneered work exploring the relationship between music and the image, buried desires and readings within popular culture, and the use of found materials.5

Klahr does not consider himself an “animator” per se. Instead, he prefers to define his work in terms of the legacy of collage,


53which I will historicize briefly below. Klahr works primarily with bits of found source material mined from a previous age of popular culture—dead or outmoded commodities, which he “re-animates” in his work through a cut and paste technique that provides the filmmaker with room for improvisation and the formation of previously un-thought connections. Klahr’s process eschews an animation stand or even glass to hold down cutout images, leaving shadows and thus disrupting the inherent flatness of the form. His current recording set-up consists of a 35mm or digital camera with a zoom lens, on a tripod, pointing down at his garage floor.6 Klahr has made nearly 50 films since his professional career began in 1987, including Altair (1994, 16mm, 8 min), a cut-out, color version of a film noir; The Pharaoh’s Belt (1997, 16mm, 42 min), a lengthy meditation on suburban childhood employing 1960s and 1970s era superheroes and advertisements; and Lethe (2009, HD video, 22 min), a fairly straightforward melodrama inspired by Greek tragedy. All of Klahr’s films contain an element of wish fulfillment and use the detritus of popular culture for material. Aside from Pony Glass, Klahr’s work falls squarely in the realm of the heteronormative or non-sexual.

Interestingly, while Klahr’s affinity for comics began around the age of nine while at a sleep away camp, Jimmy Olsen and Superman were not among those he read. In the mid-1990s, he accompanied curator Mark McElthatten on a trip to a large comic book warehouse in Brooklyn, New York to purchase back issues of the “Thunder Agents” comic he adored as child. While there, he was offered a large discounted box filled with hundreds of damaged comics, and upon returning home with it, he found a double issue of Superman featuring Jimmy Olsen in drag on the cover. Something about that image and the stories he imagined about it resonated with Klahr’s sense of self and confusion in adolescence and inspired him to make Pony Glass. As Klahr notes, the film was “a way to explore my own repressed homo-erotic feelings—I’m straight, but my gay friends often tease me that I’m a closet case. I felt that if I had made the switch in sexual orientation during my teenage or young adult years, it would have been as fraught and difficult as Jimmy’s transformation is in Pony Glass.”7 The film is an exploration of the “would have been,” a foregrounding of the closeted recess of non-normative desire through the form of collage animation.

In the film, the fright referenced above comes not only from anxiety about identity, but also from a sense of being ensnared within a set of fixed, hetero-normative structures founded on the rationality and temporal form of postmodern consumer culture. Fredric Jameson, who argues that postmodernism leaves us with only a “pure and random play of signifiers,” articulates the quality of entrapment within the postmodern… “[that] ceaselessly reshuffle the fragments of preexistent texts…”8 The “ceaseless reshuffling” of


54the postmodern forecloses possibilities for novelty or new modes of production, thought, or potentialities. Although I am aligning Klahr’s work within a postmodern framework, I am also attempting to open the potential offered within a postmodern aesthetic to explore new patterns and new expressive possibilities. Arranged carefully and personally, even widely circulated, mass produced images can signify in novel and unexpected ways.

Klahr’s redeployment of the melodramatic form as well as his use of popular songs clearly follows the lead of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) and other films in the queer avant-garde canon.9 However, the portrayal of queer anxiety follows a different path than it does in Anger’s work or that of filmmakers such as Gregory Markopoulos, or Mark Rapaport. Anger’s Fireworks (1947), for example, works as a literal representation of the mediation of desire and shame by violence and stars a teenage Anger exploring his own coming out. The film’s protagonist (played by Anger) is viciously beaten by a gang of homophobic sailors. As Klahr notes, “Pony Glass doesn’t depict or reference this kind of threat, but presupposes it as part of Jimmy’s general sense of internalized shame and anxiety, something the film’s intended audience would take as a given.”10 Because Klahr is not gay and did not experience a coming out, any sense of shame and anxiety has been internalized, closeted in the discarded, everyday objects of childhood that are recuperated and re-contextualized within the collage. He eschews the conventions of assembling found footage of old films and iconic stars, and does not represent real bodies, star or otherwise, in natural bodily motion.

Hence, his experience of homosexuality is not represented through the lived everyday. Rather, Klahr employs the collage animation form that is characterized by cutout images, flatness, and minimal movement. His content largely consists of comic book pictures, which work to represent a discarded everyday: old feelings, disposable consumer culture, and images of masculinity re-imagined from the space of youth through the eyes of an adult. “Through this allegorical prism of childhood viewed through adult eyes,” Klahr argues, “I am able to experience ecstasy and history.”11 Ecstasy in this sense should be understood as the innocence, safety, and possibility of childhood coupled with the knowledge and experience of adulthood, a form of mature looking through a transformative prism. History, on the other hand, evokes a dual meaning encompassing the concretized experiences of the past as well as the representation of buried thoughts and feelings that have remained out of view.


55Collage as Concept The technique of collage first comes into the purview of art history around 1910 with the work of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. As A.L. Rees explains, “collage introduced a new set of operations and ideas, from the emphasis on the flat surface to machine art and to cut-out phrases and images from the popular press.”12 It was also a direct response to the alienation and acceleration of everyday life endemic to modernity. Collage offered an antidote to the anxiety of modernity and its demands on attention by creating a relationship between disparate images, representations, and events. In this way, Rees argues, collage reacted against the standardization of “. . . the machine age by turning from the central, positioning human eye” to an aesthetic suggesting multi-valence.13 Rosalind Krauss furthers the notion by asserting that the contribution of collage lay not merely in the re-positioning and multiplicity of vision, but rather that it provided “. . . a systematic exploration of the conditions of representability entailed by the sign . . . where presence is replaced by a discourse founded on a buried origin, a discourse fueled by an absence.”14 This discourse, both founded on and fueled by absence evokes a degree of flux, but also, within this gap, a greater potentiality for expression. A collage is a purposefully crafted, purposefully flawed object that, with its redeployment of everyday objects, incompleteness, and precarity, offers a space for exploring new relationships between signs, images, and affect. We may also layer a larger implication on this gap, thinking of it as both a new ontological terrain as well as a “closet” that is purposefully pried open. Within this open closet, objects, ephemera, and the detritus of commodity capitalism are newly re-contextualized. The form of collage marks a collapsing of temporalities around the conflation of object and experience.

Act I: Consumer Culture, Labor, and the Hieroglyph In Pony Glass, the opening shot of Act I reveals a picture

of a golf course with an expansive factory/office complex in the background. This image is coupled with a picture of a sandwich, cut in half, each side held together with a toothpick topped with an olive. The juxtaposition of the two pictures establishes a space of relative affluence with its gesture towards a country club atmosphere, and fluidity between the domains of work and play. It also highlights the idea of class, in both the proximity of the upper and working classes and Jimmy’s status as firmly middle class.15 After a close-up on the sandwich plate, the camera pans left, revealing a loading dock, a parking lot, and an awning containing the generic phrase “Textiles, Inc.” followed by a slight zoom toward the windows of the building. This shot dissolves into a shot of various cutouts of metallic machines. Cutout images of five men in orange jumpsuits, suggesting both a factory and a prison uniform, are all bent over,


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arms stretched, faces contorted as they work the machines. In the middle of the men is a cutout of an attractive blonde woman, who kneels slightly while the men and the machines move rhythmically around her. Klahr’s coupling of the women in the space of labor effectively objectifies her sexuality and literally places her at the center of desire. The mechanistic space of male work emphasizes the compulsory demands of hetero-normative sexuality as an automatic, rigid, mechanized act of (re)production.

Immediately following this sequence, we are confronted by a black and white drawing of a typical office setting. The occupants of the two desks contained in the shot are literally cut out of the mise-en-scène. They are represented as white spaces with the potential to be filled in by any-body, a nod to Marx’s notion of the worker “slot,” rather than the worker as a subject. Overlaid on this setting is a succession of cutouts of Jimmy Olsen, looking pensive. The sequence concludes with an image of Jimmy looking at a calendar and a clock as well as an image of Jimmy in close up with his head opened, revealing a series of metal gadgets. This literal internalization of the mechanistic logic mentioned previously implicates Jimmy within both the repressive apparatus of productive labor and compulsory hetero-normativity. The images of the clock and calendar reinforce the trope of standardization within everyday life and connect the conflation of sexuality and labor. As Henri Lefebvre argues, everyday life is made of recurrences, what he calls “gestures” of labor or leisure.16 In the next sequence, we are confronted with a close-up of a Jimmy’s hand and his wristwatch. As the camera lingers on the timepiece, a white lightning effect

All images from Pony Glass. © Lewis Klahr


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emerges from the edges of the dial as if to highlight dependence on the rational time regimenting Jimmy’s life. Standardization functions as mechanistic repetition in an objective sense, as well as ritualized normalcy in Klahr’s subjective representation.

This ritualized normalcy continues in the domestic space. We are presented with scenes of what appears to be a very normal courtship—Jimmy and the aforementioned blonde woman driving together in a car and holding each other against a photo background of a bucolic park. In the next scene, we view Jimmy and the woman dancing in front of a catalog picture of clocks. Each clock is a different design and has a small white square containing a number beside it. The scene later shifts to a designer catalog picture of a living room, which Jimmy and the woman walk through on their way to the bedroom. The living area also contains a series of numbered squares next to each item in the room. “And what of everyday life?” Lefebvre asks, “Everything here is calculated because everything is numbered: money, minutes, meters, kilograms, calories…; and not only objects but also thinking, living creatures…”17 Lefebvre’s conception extends not only to the deterministic track of hetero-normative courtship with its prescribed rituals, but also to the mise-en-scène, which is arranged to near perfection through a series of carefully placed commodities, set in order to persuade one to both make a purchase and to aspire to sterilized domestic living. It is not then a huge stretch of the imagination to implicate the desiring subject of postmodern consumer culture to the same status as objects—merely the numbered living creatures to which Lefebvre refers—laboring to craft an identity that is ordered and standardized.


58This labor occurs within the normative frameworks of society,

using the products of capitalism to form or repress an identity. Clothing, furniture, and other possessions can be acquired, arranged, and displayed to present a coherent and legible self to the world. Legibility also has resonances in the coming out with (making legible) and the repression of homosexual desire (forcing its absence). Both experiences involve a form of labor on the part of the subject. For a queer subject, this sense of coherence and legibility engendered by donning the trappings of consumer culture does not resonate with internal feelings that one may be “different” or out of step due to the ideological dominance of heteronormativity. Thus, when one consciously pursues a new identity outside of this framework, they must recontextualize the products of capitalism to make them signify differently. This notion can also be extended to straight and/or closeted men with queer feelings that do not act on them and actively work to stymie their potential. Klahr’s depictions of Jimmy Olsen within spaces of labor certainly explicates this tension, as does the collage form itself.

The discursive nature of the collage provides both legibility and an evasive, ineffable affect. Klahr describes this critical juncture using the notion of a hieroglyph. He asserts, “I was attracted to collage as a form for the way it allowed me to explore experiences of time— its hieroglyphic nature in particular lends itself to the time compression that is one of my deepest and most abiding interests—a striving for a sense of over view.”18 The idea of the hieroglyph refers to an image or symbol (in the case of collage, multiple images and symbols) with both a commonplace signification as well as a multiplicity of meanings that remain buried and must be deciphered. It evokes an intense visuality of presence, which is clearly seen, coupled with a repression of that which cannot be seen, fully understood or expressed. Its dual nature engenders a pervasive anxiety, which is relayed by Klahr as he notes, “I had many feelings of shame and fear related to homosexual desires—hence the pervading sense of anxiety in my film.”19 Coming out of the closet is fraught with peril for most queer subjects, and it seems that exposing a hidden closet, one culled from the reimagined and affective space of the straight filmmaker, can be just as anxiety provoking. Despite the anxiety, however, the collage also seeks a release of buried libidinal energies, a release that brings with it feelings of ecstasy. Identity, old feelings, and old ways of thinking can be explored in a safe space that collapses distinctions between the internal and external experiences of self.

Jean Lyotard and other theorists of postmodernity look to art for the release or “decolonization” of the libidinal energies that language, text, and the intellect censor and repress.20 Postmodern art switches from modernism’s emphasis on signifiers to an emphasis on


59the signified and thus reveals a preference of image over narrative. With this collapse, the affective impact of art increases because signifiers no longer disinvest the desire of the viewer. Art becomes a participatory experience, one in which the audience receives the flows of libidinal energies that the artist sets free. Collage animation, in its postmodern form, which borrows freely from a variety of modes of cultural production, has at its center this ecstatic flow, something Klahr is self-consciously seeking to free as a new experience, a representation of what could have been and a mode of affective history making.

The use of the “out-moded” or démodé commodity in Klahr’s work evokes a melancholic potential for nostalgia—a relay and exchange of accessibility on the one hand and recuperative memory production on the other. As Gunning argues, “the démodé commodity, while disavowed, yet retains the residue of previous libidinal investments. The process explains the extraordinary ability of the démodé to evoke one’s own personal memories…”21 This memory is moored within the “things” in the world. The static comic images employed by Klahr are already undone and deconstructed, cut out, and freed from their standard frames. As Paul Arthur contends, Klahr’s particular use of collage “contribute[s] to a postmodern aesthetic blueprint convened at the limits of standard representational channels.”22 Comics, which can be categorized derisively as “semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare,”23 offer a novel representational channel for Klahr, a way of re-framing history, memory, and the repressed within a unique poetics. As Hillary Chute argues “comics, by means of manifesting material frames and the absences between them—therefore literalizing the work of framing and also what it excludes on the page—offers a distinct and particular poetics.”24 The form of the comic mirrors the form and content of the hieroglyph with its similar dialectic of legibility and absence. In Pony Glass, legibility begins to deteriorate as Jimmy begins his transformation and buried feelings emerge.

Act II: Pornography, Cross Dressing, and Productive Transformation

Various ruptures alter the mise-en-scène as the film transitions from Act I to Act II. First, communication breaks down. Klahr employs the text bubble, a common device in comic books, to signal dialogue between the characters on the screen. Yet, unlike in traditional comic books, the text balloons we confront contain words that are only partially legible. It is as if the balloon was simply cut from a page of text, rather than the text supplied within the space of the balloon. Other times, the text balloons are more legible in terms of syntax, yet the words are all crossed out or under erasure (sous rature), as Derrida would claim; traces that signify


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not former presence, but absence.25 Discourse here is figured upon incomplete exchange and suppressed meaning—a partiality of both intent and presence. This illegibility of dialogue and hence lack of communication further reinforces the notion of the hieroglyph in the sense that it is a text that must be deciphered not merely read.

We also begin to see images that seem out of place. For instance, we view a sequence that portrays Jimmy asleep and lying in bed; presumably he is dreaming. All of a sudden, a silhouette of a man with upraised hands emerges from near Jimmy’s head as a large Greek male statue occupies the background, a first glimpse at the homosexual desire that will later occupy his waking life. Phallic connotations also begin to adhere themselves to the banal, everyday images and things presented in the background. The background begins changing from clocks to images of bowling pins, candleholders, and mirrors—at once suggesting male genitalia and subject transformation—a queering of commodities and subjectivity. Jimmy’s internal struggle begins to transform his view of the world he inhabits, which becomes increasingly saturated with images that present their libidinal energies on the surface.

The most overt rupture occurs with the addition of pornographic images. Marking the start of Act II, we see a close-up of a black and white photograph of a woman on her knees, her breasts and vagina clearly exposed. Next, also in close-up, we see Jimmy shirtless, covered with three Superman tattoos, one on each arm and one on his chest. Suddenly, as he is about to engage in sex with the woman, a photograph of a substantial erect penis emerges from his crotch. This imagery is followed by a black and white photo of a naked man’s back and buttocks leaning over the aforementioned woman


61as she sticks her finger into his anus. Yet, it does not involve a “shock,” especially in light of the alignment of the work within a postmodern artistic tradition.

As Jameson argues, everything from “sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize.”26 This is not a move to shock, contradict or represent the subconscious, as one could attribute to the Surrealist project of the early 20th century.27 It is rather, as Paul Arthur writes, “ . . . the appropriation and re-working of actual images from pornography . . . a signpost for an erotics of ‘different desiring’ as well as a jab at cultural resistance in a reactionary sexual climate.”28 The new form of poetics is one that conflates erotics and desire within a new mode of representation, beyond traditional frames, interpretations, or categorization. Adhering black and white pornographic images to the colorful, standardized background allows Klahr to engender a juxtaposition that produces a new space for thought and affect. He argues that, “for me [it] creates a vital space for the viewer that puts them inside and outside of my works into a space of deep questioning—not just fictive and aesthetic questioning—but questioning of beliefs and ideas that relate to life.”29 This space of questioning is constructed through the collage form. The inside and outside Klahr refers to is linked directly to the notion of presence and absence and is dependent upon the cultivation of new ontological terrain. Within this new terrain, Klahr is able to re-vitalize modes of thought and feeling through the re-instillation of chance and possibility.

Finally, as Jimmy’s inner self transforms, so to does his outer appearance. Of particular interest in Act II is that Jimmy dresses in drag. First, we see him in a red wig and green patterned dress, and then he is depicted within the space of domesticity ironing a dress, parading around in female undergarments, and sporting a pink bathrobe. Drag, as Judith Butler famously argues, “implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation.”30 The approximation Butler refers to suggests fluidity and incompleteness, fragments of subjectivity in transformation.

The relative fluidity soon meets a more codified and clear choice, as we witness Jimmy confronted with two doors, “A” and “B.” Jimmy knocks on “B” and is quickly shown in a shirtless close-up, again baring Superman tattoos. Yet, suddenly, a white bra appears on his chest and then dissolves. A bit later, Jimmy is placed within an urban backdrop, in front of a store named “Tea Broad-Men’s Furnishings.” As he looks down at his wristwatch, a series of images of himself in drag swirl around him, as the background rotates clockwise. Thinking back for a moment to the transformational nature of this act, it is helpful to read this sequence through the lens


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of production and the everyday. As Lefebvre writes, “…production is not merely the making of products: the term signifies on the one hand ‘spiritual’ production, that is to say creations (including social time and space), and on the other material production or the making of things; it also signifies the self production of a ‘human being’ . . .”31 The production of self, in regard to the above scene relates to a form of material production. The tri-partite structure of spiritual, material, and self-production coexist as Jimmy begins to transform himself from an anxious heterosexual into a swinging gay man.

Act III: Music, Melodrama, and Queer Temporalities In Act III, as his transformation is nearly completed, Jimmy

accompanies a man to a “modern hotel,” where they engage in anal sex. Act III is set to Rosa Ponselle’s version of “Song of India,” a utopian ode for a land of wonder. This song allows the viewer to identify with the liberatory possibilities of Jimmy’s new life as a promiscuous gay bachelor. In its lyrics, the song also reveals a limitless temporal register. Ponselle’s rich soprano envelops the lyrics: “thy hidden gems are rich beyond all dreaming …” Even though Jimmy inhabits the same world, the time and space have become transformed as the ecstasy latent in the closet is revealed. The “hidden gems,” which can stand in for Jimmy’s homoerotic impulses, have moved from the space of dreams into everyday life. Klahr’s choice of music throughout the film is quite deliberate and works to comment ironically on the content of the film. The songs lyrics provide a kind of window into Jimmy’s inner life. Act I, set to Frank Sinatra’s “Goodbye,” is about the failure and end of a heterosexual relationship, but takes on an added degree of meaning as Jimmy says goodbye not only to a traditional relationship, but also to normative sexuality. Act II is set to Louis Grindberg’s operatic rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” Interestingly, the piece was written, in dialect, for Paul Robeson, an African American. Yet here Lawrence Tibbitt, a Caucasian opera singer, performs the song. It centers on the refrain, “lord I done wrong, I knows it,” which serves to heighten the intense anxiety portrayed as Jimmy begins his transformation. Klahr contends that this was a deliberate and intensely personal choice.32

This self-reflexive gesture also raises the larger question of substitution in terms of queer identity within a coming of age story. Can a queer spectator identify with someone who had homoerotic feelings but is ultimately straight? Do his feelings and anxieties come across as authentic? Klahr is aware of these concerns and argues that “this substitution [of Tibbit for Robeson] raises big questions about authorship and who gets to tell whose story—I mean it to ultimately refer back on me as a heterosexual telling a gay coming of age story…can I tell this story effectively even though I’m not


63gay?33 Beyond the question of authorship and authenticity, the film engages notions of temporality as a site of contradiction.

Klahr’s work signals a going back, at once a freezing of standard time and the enunciation of a queer time, and the concept of time is intimately linked to the three-act structure Klahr employs. As Klahr contends, “the three act structure of Pony Glass fits right in with Hollywood melodramas highly stylized form and the genre’s emphasis on depicting large periods of time in its characters lives.”34As Thomas Elsaesser posits, the portrayal of large periods of time signaled the “characteristic attempt of the bourgeois household to make time standstill, immobilize life, and fix forever domestic property relations as the model of social life.”35 The immobilization Elsaesser references certainly fits into the framework of the foreclosure of chance, possibility, and choice. It invokes a rigid time of accumulative processes that ensnare social relations and consumer culture into immobile facets of life that concretize particular forms of logic and common sense, leading to both a taming of chance and a denial of choice. On the other hand, Klahr’s representation, which juxtaposes history, memory, and desire within the gaps and potentiality offered in collage animation, creates a retroactively contingent space for the choice of homosexuality to play out.

To engender some sort of change within everyday life would require a different concept of time, a rhythm that would allow for an un-mooring of accumulated rationality. As Lefebvre contends, “everyday life, when it changes, evolves according to a rhythm that does not coincide with the time of accumulation and in a space that cannot be identified what that of cumulative processes.”36 When one speaks of rhythms, one is immediately drawn to music as a metaphor. But in melodrama, whose linguistic components comprise a juxtaposition of melody and drama, music is integral to not only heightened affectivity, but also to reinforcing the tropes Elsaesser invokes. “Music is movement, flow, time, and yet it is based on a recurrence,” argues Lefebvre, “…emotions and feelings from the past are re-evoked and moments recalled by and through music…”37 On the one hand, the choice of the words “movement” and “flow” evoke constant change, yet when paired with affect, music merely reinforces past history and forgotten memories, embalming time and contingency.

As Elizabeth Freeman notes, the idea of a queer temporality encompasses a “queer vision of how time wrinkles and folds as some minor feature of our own sexually impoverished present suddenly meets up with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past find their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time.”38 Within this project of examining how retroactive contingency aligns with queer anxiety and desire,


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Freeman’s contention seems to be a particularly fruitful way of thinking through how Klahr effectively “queers” time.

Near the end of Act III, Klahr shows a close-up of a blonde man (who Jimmy had just had a sexual encounter with) as cutouts of Jimmy swirl in a counter-clockwise direction around the man’s head. The temporal reversal gestured to by the notion of retroactive contingency and the form of the hieroglyph has become fully realized. Time has at once compressed and reversed, allowing for the interplay of character cutouts unmoored from frames and mingling in newly imagined spaces outside of rational time. This temporal rupture seems to become permanent. After Klahr shows a close-up of a sign reading “One Way,” we may be tempted to anticipate a reversal, Jimmy’s brief interlude into a new world, a new time and new space that will be quickly set “right.” Yet, this does not occur. Proper clock time returns, now marked by the clockwise motion of a nude male statue with wings and the black and white photograph of a posing male body builder. In the last shot of the film, Jimmy lies naked with a masked man; the hero of our story has been relieved of his anxiety and time has begun anew.

ConclusionIn Klahr’s redeployment of comics from the forgotten past,

we are confronted by an image of a future that was unimaginable in its original time. His portrayal of the regimented time of labor, consumer culture, and hetero-normative values abuts the use of frozen clocks and figurative representations of people from static frames. Thinking back for a moment to Elsaesser’s contention that bourgeois subjects wish to make time “stand still,” we can view


65Klahr’s attempt on two registers. One would be the fulfillment of this desire—the past frozen in place in the present. But, as we have seen, there is something more radical going on. With the rupture of pornography and re-contextualized comics within the frozen mise-en-scène comes a realization that time can be folded, stretched, and transformed. Within the subjective space of desire, a number of temporal trajectories convene around the remembrance of everyday objects. New rhythms are established, in concert with an ironic deployment of melodramatic form and music, and the everyday is transformed, allowing for a space of questioning of the ideas that relate to life itself.

Time does not simply collapse into history; rather it queered, especially through the technique of collage and the retroactive reclaiming of contingency. These strategies work to release embedded libidinal energies, while forming new productive spaces of unbounded potentiality within the gaps or closets left in the purposefully crafted, purposefully flawed object. This allows not only Klahr, but also the viewer, to experience the ecstatic and engage with affective history within everyday life. I wish to thank Maureen Furniss, Lewis Klahr, and the anonymous reviewers who have provided a wealth of insightful feedback. I am also grateful to Michele Pierson who first introduced me to Klahr’s work and who encouraged me to further develop the original version of this essay. 1 James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Dial, 1956). 247.2 Tom Gunning, “Lewis Klahr’s The Pharaoh’s Belt and the amnesia of Modernity” conference paper, Der Blick der Moderne, Vienna, Austria (June 1996), 14. 3 As Klahr notes, “Jimmy was the perfect character to do this with, as he was a nerdy screw up who offered comic relief. Conventional straight American male culture often assumes or accuses these kinds of men of being gay whether they are or not. Jimmy also represented another avenue into the Superman mythology by allowing any young boy fan whose ego was already too damaged to relate to Superman’s power, a chance to fantasize themselves into the mythology as ‘Superman’s best friend’.” Lewis Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).4 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).5 Chris Stults, “Collective Unconscious,” Film Comment (May/June 2010): 58-63. 6 See Tony Pipolo, “The Illustrated Man” Art Forum 51.7 (Mar 2013): 243-49. Klahr’s earlier work was shot almost exclusively on 8 or 16mm. 7 Pipolo, “The Illustrated Man.”8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University, 1991), 96.9 The found footage film has been employed by a range of queer avant-garde filmmakers and revolves chiefly around the redeployment of images of Hollywood stars. These films, from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) to more recent queer avant-garde films like Remembrance (Jerry Tartaglia, 1990) Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, 1991), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rapaport, 1992) and Where Lies the Homo? (Francois Monette, 1998) employ the aura of Hollywood stars as a site of identification and re-appropriation for the queer spectator, but they are locked in a fairly rigid dialectic with the iconic. See William Wees, “The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found Footage Films” Cinema Journal 41.2 (Winter 2002): 3-18.


66

Ryan Watson is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA. He is writing a book tentatively titled Militant Evidence: Witness, Archive, and the Postdigital Radical Documentary. His work has appeared in Afterimage, Invisible Culture, and the Journal of Film and Video.

10 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).11 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).12 A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999), 22. 13 Rees, 23. 14 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985), 34, 38. 15 Conversation between Lewis Klahr and the author (30 March 2015).16 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, (1971. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), 18.17 Lefebvre, 21. 18 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).19 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).20 See Jean François Lyotard, Discours, figure (1971. Paris: Klincksieck, 1985) and Jean François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1993). 21 Gunning, 7. 22 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005), 140. 23 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink, 1993). McCloud is merely suggesting one way comics are intellectually discarded, he does not agree with this notion. 24 Hillary Chute, “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay and the Framing of Comics,” Modern Fiction Studies 54:2 (Summer 2008): 271. 25 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976).26 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. 27 See, for example, Andre Breton, “The Crisis of the Object.” Surrealists on Art. Ed. L. Lippard (New York: Spectrum, 1970). 28 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight, 136.29 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).30 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” (1992) in John Storey, Ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (3rd ed.) (Harrow, UK: Pearson, 2006), 261.31 Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 30-31.32 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).33 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).34 Klahr, interview with the author (9 Nov 2008).35 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Books, 1987), 61-62.36 Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 61.37 Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 19. 38 Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction” [Special Issue: Queer Temporalities] GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13:2-3 (2007): 163. Freeman draws on Benjamin. See also Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 262.

©2015 Ryan Watson


67ANNO-MATION:

HIDEAKI ANNO FROM ANIMATION TO LIVE-ACTION, AND BACK AGAIN

by Aaron Michael KernerShinseiki Evangelion is looking forward, toward an integration of all popular media—television, manga, movies, and video games—into new forms in which distinctions between real and virtual, viewer and viewed, man and machine, become blurred and finally cease to matter. O Brave New World, that has such animation in it. - Mark Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film 1

It is premature to crown Hayao Miyazaki’s successor, but Hideaki Anno is certainly a contender. Both have a huge following, as well as histories that have intertwined. The relationship between the two animators dates to the early 1980s, when Anno presented Miyazaki with his portfolio. Impressed with Anno’s skills as an illustrator Miyazaki tasked Anno with illustrating some of Miyazaki’s 1984 feature Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). Years later, for the 2013 film Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises), Miyazaki made a conscious effort to look for an untrained voice performer to play the primary male character, Jiro Horikoshi. He wanted someone with an authentic cadence—and he eventually turned to Anno. Prior to working with Miyazaki, as a student Anno had labored on a number of small collaborative projects, including DAICON IV (1983). This low-tech 8mm animated film now enjoys cult status. It was made for the 22nd Japan Science Fiction Convention in Osaka and can be read as a compendium of popular visual culture. After working on Nausicaä, however, Anno became (in late 1984) one of the founding members of the animation production company Gainax, and he would go on to direct his own animated films and television series. He is best known for his animated television series “Shin Seiki Evangelion” (Neon Genesis Evangelion), which ran on Japanese TV between 1995 and 1996 and was at the heart of a franchise that has enjoyed a large and faithful fan following. Included among its many media products is the 1997 animated feature Shin seiki Evangelion Gekijô-ban: Air/Magokoro wo, kimi ni (Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion), which provided a kind of alternative conclusion to the series and also signaled the director’s move into a series of live-action features. In fact, the film contains some live-action elements within its ending. In the late 1990s, Anno turned his attention to live-action films: Love and Pop (1998), Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual, 2000), and Kyuti Hani (Cutey Honey, 2004). In this series of works, one can find both continuities with Anno’s previous work and new directions, as the director aspired to take his work out of the round of pure pop culture. Thomas Lamarre notes that Anno “is notorious for his comments about the childishness of anime and of anime otaku,”

Lewis Klahr's Pony Glass: Queer Collage Animation, Retroactive Contingency, and the Everyday

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