Engram Sepals2001

The dead body remembers. The Tibetan book of the dead meets film noir. An elliptical narrative of adultery and corporate espionage set to a score by Morton Feldman and shot in high contrast B&W. There's a glimpse of Eternity in those deep, luminous blacks. The title film from my feature length series ENGRAM SEPALS (Melodramas 1994-2000) which traces a history of American intoxication from World War 2 to the 1970's. "L. Ron Hubbard employed "engram" – a biological coinage meaning the permanent change wrought by stimulus to protoplasm – to characterize repressed traumas. In a different sense, Carl Jung used the word to describe imprinted "racial" memories. Collage filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who calls his latest cycle Engram Sepals, is an artist who traffics in both pyschic scars and cultural remembrance, conditions he suggests are organic by attaching engram to a botanical term for flower stem." – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice