Four Shadows Larry Gottheim, 1978

Like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of four image segments and four sound segments wheel past each other in sixteen combinations (a family of Gibbon apes, a landscape measured, a shadowed diagram after Paul Cézanne, a wintry urban scene, a text by William Wordsworth, a climactic scene from Claude Debussys opera Pelleas et Melisande). The stately ceremony can generate rich sensuous cinematic pleasure as well as a freeflowing stream of associations. Containment and flowing free, these are some of the issues. The third film in the Elective Affinities cycle.