ABOUT LARRY GOTTHEIM
Larry Gottheim was born December 3 1936 in Booth Memorial Hospital, the Salvation Army Hospital then located in Manhattan. His family lived in Brooklyn, and moved to Sunnyside Queens where he grew up.
As an early teenager he took clarinet lessons from the avant garde composer Meyer Kupferman. He went to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan as a music student He played in the All City High School Orchestra and the Queens Symphony.
He went to Oberlin College, graduating 1957. In 1956 he was elected the "Russia Rep.” He traveled to Moscow and Kiev at the height of the cold war. At a youth congress in Prague, he was invited to Poland, where he soon joined the Student Satirical Theater..
He did graduate work in Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he received a PhD in 1963. . His dissertation was "The Ideal Hero in the Realist Novel.”The main discussions were of Dostoevski ("The Idiot”) and George Eliot.
He got a Fulbright Fellowship to Munich in 1961.
He taught in the English Department at Northwestern University 1962 - 64.
In 1965 he joined the English Department at Harpur College. It became the undergraduate school of the State University of New York at Binghamton.
As president of the Harput Film Society he started making films. He was able to teach a film class while still in the English Department. He started a regular academic department in cinema that had a focus on personal experimental cinema, the first such department in the world. The first transitional cinema classes were taught by Gottheim and Ernie Gehr. Gottheim brought Ken Jacobs into the department, and they developed the curriculum. Nickolas Ray, joined the department for 3 years. Ra;lph Hocking began to teach video classes and developed the Experimental Video Center. The department was celebrated, and many of the major film artists from the US and Europe had screenings and visiting faculty positions. Gottheim was Department Chair for most of his career, teaching filmmaking and aesthetics. He retired in 1998.
His films have been screened at festivals, museums, university departments and other venues throughout the US, Europe and asia. He has been the recipient of many awards, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
In the early 2000s he served as President of the Board of the NY Filmmakers Cooperative.
His book "The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and his films” was published in 2024 by the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York and Eyewash Books, Paris.
In 1094 he started, as a secondary activity, 'be-hold, Inc, conducting sales and auction of historical photographs. It was dissolved in 024.