Date: 1993 Running Time: 25:10
In The Pharaoh's Belt: Cake Excerpt, Lewis Klahr offers a condensation of one strand of a longer work composed of modern hieroglyphics. These pictographs capture the collective dreams of modern society by taking familar images of advertising and consumer goods and divesting them of their usual associations and contexts in order to cloak them with deeper and more devious patterns of desire. From these fragments Klahr fashions a series of collage arrangements that resemble allegorical shop window displays. "In this excerpt Klahr constructs a dream-like scenario centering around a wheezing convalescent pajama-clad boy cushioned within the sugary recesses of a layer cake, simultaneously sheltered by its sweetness and drowning in its richness. Within these iced folds of maternal solace he dreams of the five o'clock world of briefcases, masked businessmen, and mysterious transformations managed by detached hands of power. While a blind-folded boy wanders through a landscape both familiar and threatening, a minuscule athelete ascends from this playground of treats and pitfalls into cosmic reaches where desires of a different sort are ignited. The recurring image of a mermaid promises a new form of solace and adventure, and receives, at last, the boy's asthmatic heart.
As in his earlier film Picture Books for Adults, Klahr provides a series of
images which seize one with an uncanny familiarity. He enacts a drama of
childhood liberation from the maternal depths through an encounter with
threatening masculine images, yet he rejects a simple Oedipal drama of growth,
conflict and maturity in favor of a drama of initiation into the ambiguities
of desire. Never have Klahr's colors been as rich and seductive as in this
excerpt, never have his collages evoked so powerfully both the landscape of
dreams and the reaches of memory. At times hilariously funny, trenchantly
ironic or disturbingly sinister, this voyage recalls earliest memories and
fantasies, but from an adult perspective. [Like Von Stroheim's Greed it is
appropriately dedicated, 'to My Mother.'"
(Tom Gunning)