Artist in Person Preceded by: Altair (1994, 8 mins) and Whirligigs in the Late Afternoon (1996, Silent, c. 25 mins). New York-based animator Lewis Klahr has been creating enigmatic, edgy collages for over twenty years. As in his earlier work, tonight's films are collaged from images of popular culture, recut and reconfigured to loosen new and unexpected associations. In The Pharaoh's Belt (43 mins), his longest single work to date, there are repeated images of a boy asleep beside an impossibly lush cake, and a blindfolded boy moving through a product-cluttered suburban home; is he happily dreaming, or nightmarishly struggling to find his way? In both ventures, he encounters an extraordinary plenty of hypercolorful objects that transform and change scale, a flux of violent wrestlings and seductive imaginings. At once documenting Klahr's own milieu and dreaming another version, these beautiful poetic films are strangely compelling-the familiarity of the array of images culled from magazines, picture books, and other conduits of consumer culture is perturbed by the haunting juxtapositions and homemade style of animation. It's not just that the familiar is defamiliarized; it is embedded with nostalgia and then torn away, leaving traces of fantasies, memories of fears, fragments of hope.-Kathy Geritz A different program of Klahr's films will be shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque, Thursday, March 21. (Information: 415-558-8129.) (added GREEN (62))