London International Animation Festival 2020

Edge of Frame presents: Circumstantial Pleasures + pre-recorded Screen Talk

Expired December 1, 2020 5:00 PM
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The feature-length animation Circumstantial Pleasures will be followed by a post-screening discussion with the Director Lewis Klahr and Edwin Rostron from Edge of Frame.


Following the sell-out success of our partnership with Edge of Frame at our last four festivals, EOF return with three curated programmes of work at the intersection of animation, experimental film and artists’ moving image. Specially curated by Edwin Rostron – the London-based artist, animator, writer, curator, editor of Edge of Frame blog and festival juror these programmes celebrate this incredibly rich and vibrant, yet often marginalised and hard to define art form.


A collage contemplation of the contemporary zeitgeist focussing on capitalism and its systems of distribution and the ecological crisis this has wrought. A feature length series comprised of 6 separate films:


Capitalist Roaders (2016, 18min)

Ramification Lesions (Microbial Stress) (2019, 7min)

Ratchet The Margin (2016, 7min)

Virulent Capital (2018, 9min)

High Rise (2016, 2min)

Circumstantial Pleasures (2019, 22min)


Seven years in the making, Klahr’s dystopian six-film cycle couldn’t be more attuned to the present moment, and the swirling paranoia and rapid change of the preceding decade. With a hard-edged clarity and eye popping colour, and accompanied by music from David Rosenboom, Tom Recchion and Scott Walker, Klahr’s film cycle is a profound and unsettling evocation of our contemporary experience.


“Leaving the seductive mid-century imagery that Lewis Klahr’s best known for far behind, Circumstantial Pleasures looks at the raw materials of contemporary life and distills them into a demanding and powerful work of anxiety, alienation, agitation, and abrasion. The film consists of six short works (ranging from two to 22 minutes) that convey the experience of being alive in the 21st century in ways that few other films have”

Chris Stults, Wexner Center for the Arts


“In my 20’s, as collage emerged as my primary form of expression, my use of outmoded source materials in my films to explore the pastness of the present was always front and centre… I always knew I would at some point create a feature length series of films that used largely contemporary images to explore the current zeitgeist. Beginning in 2012, Circumstantial Pleasures gradually developed into that work.”

Lewis Klahr


Director’s Biography

Deemed “the reigning proponent of cut and paste”, Lewis Klahr has made collage films since 1980. His work has screened throughout the USA, Europe, and Asia, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Commercially, he’s created special effects and animation for TV shows, music videos, and feature-length movies. Based in Los Angeles, Klahr teaches in the Theater School at the California Institute of the Arts. He is represented by the Anthony Reynolds Gallery London UK.


With Special Thanks to the Arts Council England


Recommended age 15+


  • Year
    2016-2019
  • Runtime
    65 minutes
  • Country
    United States
  • Filmmaker
    Lewis Klahr