In 1967, Larry Gottheim started the Cinema Department at Binghamton University which was the first regular undergraduate program that dealt with cinema as a personal art. Considering the theme of nature in art and functions of racial, cultural and personal identity, Gottheim’s practice explores the ways in which time, movement, and becoming are bound up in a complex relation between formal cinematic patterns and pro-filmic subjects.

Bozar and Cinema Parenthèse present two programmes with Larry Gottheim, in his presence for the first time in Belgium in 40 years. Larry Gottheim (°1936) became, together with Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr, one of the US most prominent and leading ’structural’ avant-garde filmmakers in the 1960s. From his late-1960s series of sublime 'single-shot' films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-1970s and after, his cinema is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement.

As one of its nodal points, this screening circulates around, or rather, emanates from the energy, theory and practice of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998). One of France's foremost theoreticians of the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Lyotard had a keen interest in cinema, and especially in experimental or underground film.