Los Angeles–based artist Lewis Klahr's films most often take the form of collage, excavating popular culture and his personal past through the colors, textures, and graphic representations of magazines, children's books, postcards, encyclopedias, and comic strips-for starters. While he continues to mine our shared culture and radically reimagine it through his cutout style and expressive and haunting use of sound, in his most recent work he ventures further into moody abstraction and ambiguity. In the dreamlike, poetic Daylight Moon (A Quartet) (2002–04, 40 mins, Color, 16mm) Klahr gives himself permission, he says, to “take on some of the richest source material imbibed in my childhood,” to recall a Middle America of baseball games, war, and migration. While the majority of his films can be presented either on their own or as part of series, in The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003–04, 33 mins, Color, 16mm), Klahr more directly explores sequential narrative. The trilogy comprises one story told three times, in three different durations. We move from twenty-three minutes to nine to one, as Klahr increasingly compresses a crime story to its essentials. The imagery is appropriated from four issues of a comic book based on the TV show 77 Sunset Strip.

Daylight Moon (A Quartet): Valise (2004, 14.5 mins), Hard Green (2004, 5 mins), Soft Ticket (2004, 7 mins), Daylight Moon (2002, 13.5 mins). The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy: Two Days to Zero (2004, 23 mins), Two Hours to Zero (2004, 9 mins), Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1 min, Music by Glenn Branca, excerpt from “The Ascension”).