Landscape Films of Larry Gottheim and Forrest Sprague

Larry Gottheim - Fog Line | 1970 | Color | Silent | 10.5min | 16mm | 24fps

Larry Gottheim - Doorway | 1970 | Color | Silent | 7.5.min | 16mm | 16fps

Larry Gottheim - Thought | 1970 | Color | Silent | 7.5.min | 16mm | 16fps

Larry Gottheim - Barn Rushes | 1971 | Color | Silent | 34min | 16mm | 16fps

Forrest Sprague - Epiphany (I) | 2013 | Color | Silent | 17min | Digital | 24fps

FOG LINE (1970) - Larry Gottheim10½ minutes, Silent, Color, 16mm, 24fpsThe fog lifts on a scene. For an attentive viewer the mental fog could also lift. It doesn’t go from white to full clarity. It just shows a piece of time, a section of a process in the landscape and in the mind of the viewer. The entire image slowly changes, the sky, the ground, what’s at the edges. The main features are the three trees and the wires. The trees stand there, manifesting their being. They have a soft shape without outline. The lines of the wires are something else. They relate to drawing rather than painting, the controlling mind rather than the imagination. The implications of this contrast go right through my work. There is something ethereal, ghostly. The viewer is invited to explore the screen, looking here and there, each person following a different path. Those whose path includes entering into the very emulsion that makes up the image are rewarded by the sight of ghost horses, the first animals in my films. -L.G.

DOORWAY (1970) - Larry Gottheim7½ minutes, Silent, Color, 16mm, 16fpsFinally I moved the camera, in a slow pan from one side of the wide door of my wife’s pottery studio to the other. While the camera is panning left, the visual sense is of the features of the near and far landscape moving right. The doorway itself marks a plane separating the inside from the outside, as windows will do in other films. Because of the change in temperature between the inside and outside there is a pulse that is visible along with the shutter’s pulse when the film is projected at the correct silent speed. This pulse seems like the pulse of vision that emanates out from the camera, making a moving cow stand frozen behind another. That image stands out from the other material as most charged with meaning, but it too passes by. The lines of hills and fences end edges continue the motif of the line in Fog Line, and prefigure Horizons. -L.G.THOUGHT (1970) - Larry Gottheim7½ minutes, Silent, Color, 16mm, 16 fpsThe last of my continuous shot silent films. There is a very limited field of view, with small sliding and focus motions, but a lot to see. The previous films grew out of formal ideas, without much conscious concern with meaning, but now I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, and so I gave it this title. -L.G.

BARN RUSHES (1971) - Larry Gottheim34 minutes, Silent, Color, 16mm, 16fpsI noticed a play of moving light between the slats of an old barn I passed every day on the way to my house. This led me to film it from a car window as the car drove up the road, turned and continued up the hill. I filmed it in extreme slow motion – the fastest camera speed. The barn is seen from the side, then front, then from the other side. The film is made of 8 passes across the barn, each the length of a 100 foot roll of film The light and the relationship to the foreground grasses, the sky, and the woods behind, change in each pass. Each roll of film is slightly exposed to light at the start or end, moving into a zone of images that have not passed through the lens, but are directly in or on the strip of film. Once I saw the originally unintended element of repetition, I seized on it as a fruitful meaningful element in this and other of my films. The barn manifests itself, as do other things and creatures in my films. It is both passive, as I am with the camera, and active, almost alive. As in Blues the fully revealed milk seems to rise above the bowl, so here another miracle occurs as at the end the foreground grasses seem to pass behind the barn. These films are mysteries. -L.G.

EPIPHANY (I) (2023) - Forrest Sprague17 minutes, Silent, Color, Digital, 24fpsI was not originally planning to film the remnants of a recently demolished church situated across my apartment building. To see an establishment almost one hundred years old gone within hours presented a tabula rasa I had not experienced in the making of other films. Once the workers and construction vehicles entered the scene they began a dance in excavating the remaining debris, I had an almost instant moment of clarity that I must document this until completion. It became evident that there was a harmonious relationship at play between man, earth, and machine. The amount of instances of non-verbal communication between the construction crew created an ambiguity and tension that influenced an implied narrative. I was initially planning on making Epiphany a single film. Now it as become five, almost by pure decision of its own. -F.S.

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