Is It True That I'm No Longer Young?

For better or worse, Lewis Klahr's metier might be melancholia. The experimental filmmaker pieces together fragile portraits of longing and despair, creating evocative moving image collages that echo yearnings of the past but remain timeless. Klarh's 2008 film False Aging is currently featured on the Web site of the London-based arts agency Lux, offering a rare change to see the Los Angeles artist's work online. Divided into three sections, the 14-minute short opens on a falsely upbeat note, with a woman describing her hopes for her future as she leaves the midwest and heads to New York City. The source? The Valley of the Dolls. The second section grows darker as Jefferson Airplane's 1968 song "Lather" plays, with Grace Slick's voice musing on the pain of growing old. The third section features an imagined Andy Warhol, bitterly pondering his loneliness and isolation. The images, snipped from magazines from decades past, are innocuous enough - birds, clocks, faces, hands, cars, windows, curtains - but Klahr combines them in provocative ways, inching them around in front of the camera to craft figures of angst. Indeed, united with the voices and music, the pictures conjure pain and loss, but it's a luxurious and robust pain and longing, and like the best melodrama, incites the desire for more. Indeed, what you lose in the small frame size and stuttered download online gets compensated for in the ability for instant replay.