Engram Sepals is a feature-length series of seven moving and exhilarating short films that, as Klahr says, "trace a trajectory of American intoxication—both sexually and substance-wise—from the Second World War into the 1970s."

Going back to the original meaning of "melodrama" (music + drama), this music-filled program features several of Klahr’s most acclaimed films. (81 mins., 16mm).

Accompanying Engram Sepals is a rarely screened cult classic directed by Josef von Sternberg, who created some of the most sumptuous melodramas ever made. The Shanghai Gesture, one of the most decadent films to come out of classic Hollywood, follows Gene Tierney into a Shanghai gambling den. There she becomes entranced by the hedonistic goings-on and obsessed with the house hunk, Victor Mature. Time Out Film Guide calls the film "subversive cinema at its most sublime." (106 mins., 35mm)

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Engram Sepals includes the following films:

Altair (1994) 8 mins.
Altair was included in both the 1995 Whitney Biennial and New York Film Festival and is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

"Altair offers a cutout animation version of color noir. The images were culled from six late 1940s’ issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and then set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky's Firebird (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged, leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist's story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman's battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above, but instead a fascination with the color blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s."—Lewis Klahr

Engram Sepals (2000) 6 mins.
"The dead body remembers. The Tibetan book of the dead meets film noir. An elliptical narrative of adultery and corporate espionage set to a score by Morton Feldman."—Lewis Klahr

Elsa Kirk (1999) 5 mins.
"In the mid 1990s I unearthed three photographic contact sheets of three different women in a thrift store in the East Village. Only one was named and dated—Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 '63—but all looked like they were from the same photographer and time period. There were 12 images per sheet of these models/actresses and I found myself quite moved by the strong sense of aspiration in their poses, by the poignant blend of fiction and reality. At first, I was unable to translate these images into collage animation. So instead, I began making xerox enlargements of the sheets that I turned into a series of flat collages. Eventually these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style of the completed [work]—an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of cutouts two decades ago, but had never been able to capture on film."—Lewis Klahr

Pony Glass (1997) 14 mins., 30 secs.
"Pony Glass is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen's secret life. In this 15-minute cutout animation, Superman's pal embarks on his most adult adventure ever as he navigates the treacherous shoals of early 1960s' romance trying to resolve a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. A three-act melodrama—each act has its own song—filmed in my signature collage style that 'unmasks' our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do."—Lewis Klahr

Govinda (1999) 23 mins.
"A three act countercultural coming of age melodrama told from a generational rather than individual point of view. Beginning with appropriated student, super 8 footage of a 1970s' alternative high school and finishing with footage I shot a month after college graduation of my brother’s hippie wedding, Govinda charts a path from innocence to too much experience."—Lewis Klahr

Downs Are Feminine (1994) 9 mins.
"Lewis Klahr's Downs Are Feminine unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr's oneric collages graft 1970s' porn of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping/Architectural Digest décor (varicolored crab-orchard stone foyers, modacrylic sunbursts, jalousie windows and orientalist metal scrollwork), interior states where characters despoil themselves in Quaalude interludes of dreamy couplings. In this out-of-touch realm, touching is intelligence gathering for a carnal knowledge that will never attain its platonic ideal. The whole atmosphere is pervaded with euphoria, a hopelessness without despair, a contentment beyond longing."—Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival

A Failed Cardigan Maneuver (1999) 15 mins.
"Children in a garden of outsized fruit dream of food and love, then grow up to have unhappy office love affairs in the glamorous Manhattan of the late 1950’s."—J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Studio Visit with Filmmaker Lewis Klahr from Wexner Center on Vimeo.