Larry Gottheim: Knots & Entanglements

Tag: Event Calendar

Date and Time

• Friday, Nov 7, 2025  7pm - 9pm

Location

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Details

Larry Gottheim: Knots & Entanglements
Presented in partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque
Larry Gottheim in person
Friday, November 7, 2025, 7pm
Admission: $12 (discount for Shapeshifters & SF Cinematheque members)

Working in film since the late 1960s, the cinema of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim is an observational cinema, rewarding contemplation, stillness and active intellectual engagement and offering uncannily commonplace imagery rife with elusive metaphor and/or accumulating into densely immersive conceptual conundra. In Gottheim's films, time slows, hesitates and seems to move in novel and non-linear directions, the circularity of experience a recurring aspect of the master filmmaker's rich body of work. Gottheim's recent book, The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films (published 2024 by Eyewash Books and the Film-Makers' Cooperative) is a ruminative and musing career-spanning culmination, teasing out longitudinal threads and uncanny occurrences in the oeuvre, presenting the artist's body of work as a multi-faceted whole, a throughline of thought and material-based philosophy.

In celebration of this publication, San Francisco Cinematheque is honored to present a three-program residency (in partnership with the Roxie Theater, Gray Area and Shapeshifters Cinema) presenting selections from the artist's vast body of work, from early single-shot films, still lifes and nature studies to the complex sound/image constructions of later work to the very recent films completed 2019–2024.

Cinematheque's whirlwind survey of Gottheim's works wraps at Shapeshifters Cinema with later period films and recent digital videos, each a dense and sensorially confrontational collage of off-the-cuff cinematography and/or collaborative encounter, from "Sorry/Hear Us" (1984), an open-ended group project exploring temporal and linguistic reversal to recent digital works Entanglement (2022) and A Private Room (2024), each a confounding rebus-like audio/visual puzzlement. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING: Thought (1970), "Sorry/Hear Us" (1986). Entanglement (2022). A Private Room (2024).