A hermeneutic of polyvalence: deciphering narrative in Lewis Klahr's The Pettifogger (2011)

Experimental animations are often as dense as they are brief, and yet they rarely receive in-depth treatments in scholarly and critical discourses. This chapter offers a close reading of Lewis Klahr’s enigmatic and polyvalent collage animation The Pettifogger (2011). Klahr’s work blends structures and modes of engagement found in classic Hollywood narrative with poetic modes of expression that are germane to avant-garde cinema. The evocative indeterminacy of Klahr’s particular approach to collage animation not only conveys powerful senses of mood and poetic feeling but also encourages viewers to actively participate in the recognition and construction of narrative meaning. With its microanalysis of the intricacies of a work by one of the most prolific and well-known contemporary American collage filmmakers, this chapter aims to demonstrate that examining experimental animations in their specificity is a particularly productive way of approaching their formal and narrative complexities.