Larry Gottheim has been a key figure in the history and development of American avant-garde cinema since the 1970s. His work often shares the simple structure of the earliest films but also relates to minimal, conceptual, and process art practices. Gottheim is the founder of the extremely influential cinema department at SUNY Binghamton. His book The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (Filmmakers Co-operative/ Eyewash, 2024) details his reflections on the evolution of his work and provides an extraordinary window onto the development of avant-garde American cinema in the late twentieth century. In it, his own account of his lifelong exploration of the boundaries of cinematic perception combines with the reflections of other major film artists and critics on the importance of his work. In 2025 a major retrospective at the MOMA in New York celebrated the work of Gottheim, from his first film, ALA (1969), to his then-latest, A Private Room (2024). Renowned for his 1970 film Fog Line, Gottheim has continued to challenge notions of what it is to truly see and be present when viewing moving images; his work encourages deep meditation. The series began with Gottheim’s silent works—continuous shots of bare landscapes in upstate New York—and went on to focus on his subsequent sound films, including the Elective Affinities, a series of four feature-length films: Horizons (1973), Mouches Volantes (1976), Four Shadows (1978), and Tree of Knowledge (1981). Gottheim’s more recent film works explore philosophy and family, driven by complex editing and sonic designs.
Larry Gottheim has generously made his most recently completed film Q & A publicly available to view here for the first time. I spoke to him using a conceptual, fragmented approach on the topics of the interdisciplinary, editing, filming process, language, and creative connection. Audio links to Larry’s answers are provided in red to tie in with the importance of color to his work, and to the recent publication of his book, The Red Thread. With thanks to Julia Petrocelli for recording the audio of Larry in Yonkers, New York, July 2026.
ACCEPTING
One of the phrases that stays with me most deeply from Angeline Johnson’s narration in Mouches Volantes is “He accepted a bowl.” Accepting is a major part of my work on Q&A and other films. Events and elements come my way and if they seem like gifts I accept them.
At first there were only two letters, Q and A. I had used the letters A and B in my film A Private Room, suggested by the use of letters in quantum mechanics lectures I was following on YouTube. When I was on a screening tour I often heard people use “Q and A” as jargon for what I would normally call a discussion after a screening. I jokingly told my friend that that would be the title of my next film. By some unexplained leap of thought she began to talk about whale bubbles as a way for humpback whales to surround a school of small fish by making a circle of bubbles from their blow holes to trap them to be devoured. In turn I took a leap of thought to the way elephants could communicate by stamping their feet.
I began scouring YouTube for scenes of elephants and whales. I accepted only a very few. At this time someone who had interviewed me ten years earlier asked if he could do another interview. I accepted. Now there were actual questions and answers to join the elephants and whales.
I met you and we shared many common interests that led to a joint screening at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn. I asked you to submit a group of questions that I would try to answer. These questions were subtle and thoughtful. They brought important themes into the project.
I described the project to Juliana, who sent me a Zen koan about dogs. This was another leap that I accepted. As is usually the case with koans, the master’s response was challenging, unexplainable. I accepted dogs into the world of animals in which I was working.
My son Hand came home one day with a baby raccoon. I asked my new intern Catherine (Anton) to film them playing with each other. With quantum mechanics still running around in my brain, I began to think about AI, another pairing of letters. Trying to comprehend it, I thought of GPS, another grouping of letters, as an example. I asked Catherine to film images from car GPS screens and landscapes from the front and side windows of a car. This evoked the memory of my early films. I was led to include a couple of scenes from previous films. Your original questions led me to think of this film as a retrospective of all my work.
I had used children’s wooden blocks in my previous film A Private Room; I accepted them into the groups of material for the project. They were elements of a leap of thought to animals and the scene of the boy with the shovel that ends the film.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
I had two questions and two answers. The biggest leap on my part was to connect them to the two bodies of accepted animal material. That provided the structural basis of the film. The first interview questions were paired with GPS images. The voice of the answers was paired with elephant material. The questions from the second interview, yours, were paired with whale imagery. The answers with blocks.
These pairings were arbitrary at first. The idea of pairing them was originally just based on the sonic and cinematic nature of the material. It was full of implications, but these came during the editing process. There was no thematic or ideological motive behind them. This isn’t a documentary film. It questions the documentary. Most of the material comes from the internet, rather than live filming.
The racoon material and the Zen story were not part of the questions and answers, so it seemed natural to connect them. These became the central ones. The dog never actually appears but his back is central.
VIRTUAL HYPERLINKS
Everything in the film opens a pathway to thought. It’s as though you can “Click” on something and it will open some of these pathways, like a dropdown menu. This will vary from viewer to viewer and change or increase when you see the whole film or see it again.
An example is “Africa.” This is not just the continent of elephants. What is it? What does it mean when it is where I am “along from?” Another example is the sound of a dog barking in the Zen story. Like all Zen koans, it shocks the mind by its paradoxical nature. Here it connects with all the other sounds including those from the GPS.
The virtual dropdown menu is both shaping of a child’s minister, expanding downward, but also horizontal, relating to other elements in the film. It really should be seen several times. Each time more and different ideas will be on the virtual drop-down menu.
The blocks enforce a certain approach to education. There is a subtle manipulation in what is on the six faces. As the child plays with them, certain concepts are learned. They include letters, words and representative images. These are major themes in the film. The scene with the boy with a shovel that ends the film originally appeared in Tree of Knowledge. That film includes images from a film for children explaining seasons. The question in my earlier film challenges that explanation, and it has that force here. ”Do you know why?” is a question that challenges the very concept of questions and answers. It is the sound of a dog barking in the Zen koan. As the boy looks up at the cloudy sky, his mind opens to something that is not recognized in the kind of knowledge that the blocks represent.
INFLUENCES
I distinguish between films that I love, and those that actually influenced my work. The actual influences would include Godard, Antonioni, early Warhol, and most specifically Hollis Frampton and Peter Kubelka.
You mentioned Michael Asher and properly so. I remember one thing in particular. On the grounds of a major collector’s house in Beverly Hills, there were numerous sculptures by important contemporary sculptors. Michael’s piece was a slab placed on the border between the collector’s property and his neighbours. As Michael talked about it, it took on the quality of what I am now calling a virtual hyperlink. Lines and borders have been essential in much of my work, starting with Fog Line. I think Michael recognized that. It made him welcome me to his classes.
SILENCE
Silence is not nothing.
It is relative. It depends on sound to come into existence.
When we are talking on the phone and the other person hangs up, it is normal to say it went silent. The phone is silent but all the other sounds in the room continue. The baby is still crying in the next room. Cars still pass outside. We can hear them.
When we hold a phone to our ear when it is not turned on it is silent. But it is not a silence that we can feel. To feel true silence, we need sound or the expectation of sound that is turned off or surprisingly absent.
My films are what they are for an audience in the zone of attention that exists when the film is projected or viewed on a computer screen or monitor. It does not exist for a “viewer” who is not in the zone of sympathetic attention. They may think they are watching the film, but they are not experiencing it.
When the lights in the screening room go down, the silence begins. The audience feels it. The intensity of this silence continues into the film. It belongs to the film.
In the “silent” era, there was no such expectation. When the first films were projected the novelty was thrilling. Soon many audiences became impatient with the absence of sound, so there was often a piano accompaniment or even a large orchestra as with D.W. Griffith’s mammoth features. Intertitles with printed texts compensated for the unheard dialogs. If the film had no physical sound these texts gave the illusion of sound when they saw characters speak.
Some thoughts that float in the jungle of our mind while watching a film truly belong to the film. There are mental events prompted by elements of the film itself. They are virtual sounds, analogs of actual sounds that come through our ears. They exist in our minds and bodies. They can be influenced by our memories.
In Fog Line, the main events are when the first image snaps into life out of the darkness and silence and returns to the darkness when the film ends. There are no other events that strong. But something happens when we turn our attention from one part of the screen to another. Your attention might bump against an edge of the projected rectangle or turn to some place else within the image. For example, when my gaze moves near the lower right corner, or to the line of fog near the top, or to study the wires. These are very weak events but are important parts of the film, differing for each viewing and viewer. If you are attentive you can feel them. They make something like a sound in our inner ear.
In a typical sound film, the abundance of strong events overpowers the weak ones. When the film is without physical sound the play of weak events can be more clearly felt. They are experiences of silent sound.
In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness nothingness is associated with freedom. In silence, we can be free to let our mind and memory wander. There are elements in film images themselves that direct our attention. We can let ourselves follow these directions and give ourselves over to the limitation of our freedom to wander. Sound can strongly reinforce these directions.
We can watch Harmonica without the sound. It is still an interesting film. When we now watch the film with its sound, it is obvious how the sonic events eclipse the beautiful weak sounds that we experience in the silent version. There is not a frame in that film that is not without physical sound. Silence is there by its absence.
In Fog Line the lines of wires have something conceptually akin to the strong events, while the nature of fog is associated with weak ones. The experience of the film differs when we look at the wires from when we watch the trees come into being.
In Blues the continuous movement of the film running through the camera is segmented by each appearance of the spoon that removes some of the berries into the unseen space outside of the frame. The segmentation of continuity is essential to the film.
In Corn the film passes through the camera continuously for the time of one roll. The movement of the sunlight runs smoothly and slowly, seamlessly through the film, registered in the reflection on the counter top and the side of the counter area as well as on the still tassels of the corn husks. The continuous time of the film is segmented by the appearance of the ears of corn being uncovered while the outer husks are placed in the bowl. There is then a period of silence. It is segmented again when the steaming ears are brought in from the dark space of their cooking. There is another period of since in which we watch the still life of the corn and the slow passage of the steam into its disappearance. It is similar to the disappearance of the fog in Fog Line.
The silence allows us to experience time as the sunlight moves continuously as its presence changes. This slow movement of the light pattern allows time to enter the ceremony.
Silent sounds can also be experienced in Doorway when the moving camera “plays” the fenceposts like the strings of a musical instrument.
Much of my future work plays with the relationship of these silent sounds with the actual sounds that move with and around them.
In Barn Rushes the segmentation is extreme, as one roll ends and another begins. Within each camera roll, we see the barn from three sides. However, the camera is not run by a battery, as with previous films, but with a spring wind motor within the Bolex camera. The film speed I chose is the fastest possible, so the full wind ends quickly. The car stops and the spring motor needs to be rewound. The start and end of each wind creates a strong event, though less strong than what happens when the film cuts from one camera roll to the next.
Each wind of the camera shows a slightly different side and frontal view of the barn. There are visual movements that have sounds associated with them. The play of light coming into view, slowly pulsing against the slats in the front of the barn is strongly felt. Even stronger is the continuous dance of the foreground grasses as they move across the screen. The car moves at an irregular speed. The grasses register this movement. Nearing the end of each roll the car speeds up as it rushes towards the new side of the barn. The film is moving through the camera at its fastest speed. Even beyond this “slow motion” the film is moving through the projector at its slowest speed. This allows every movement of the grasses to be felt. The film becomes a complex musical work, a work of virtual music. The grasses seem to be dancing. They are dancing to unheard music.
Horizons displays the full range of virtual sound events. The one-second color inserts provide irregular beats. The cuts from and to the color inserts are strong events. Some of the cuts from one shot to another are sometimes strong events and sometimes weaker ones. There are many kinds of events within the shots themselves. The flow of these events runs through the entire film, giving it a virtual sound experience that structures the visual content of the shots themselves.
The formal rhyme schemes that organize the film material can not be experienced throughout the film. One can only focus on them from time to time. They may never reach full consciousness. The color inserts hint at them.
Rhyme in poetry is a matter of sound, the sound of words. To think of rhyme as something between shots is to transfer something from the world of sound to something silent.
The essence of Mouches Volantes is in the contrast between physical sounds and virtual sounds that can be experienced in silence. A beautiful poetic narration by the widow of the blues singer Blind Willie Johnson provides the structure. Images from my own family are edited against this narration, creating a sound film. The family images fall into seven groups, for example my children playing in the snow, my wife in her bee suit attending the hive, and others. Material from each of these groups is edited against the same spoken text.
What do I mean by “edited against?”
The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films is now available from Filmmakers Co-operative/Eyewash Books.
Larry Gottheim is an eminent avant-garde filmmaker, influential educator, writer/philosopher, trained musician, doctor of comparative literature, linguist, and key figure in the world of experimental art. Much of his work utilises ideas of rhythm, syncopation, connection and contemplation. He lives in Yonkers, New York. https://www.larrygottheimfilms.com/
Clare Archibald is a Scottish writer/artist working solo, collaboratively and collectively with text, image, sound, materials, objects and place. Most recently she has installed and screened work in Denmark and Peru and published Unseen Formations: From Fife to Lanzarote with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (available from August). She lives in Burntisland, Fife. Bluesky @archieislander IG @versionsofundefined @applicabletenses http://clarearchibald.com/
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