Lewis Klahr's The Pettifogger: Collaging the crime – in pictures

'My film chronicles a year in the life of an American gambler and conman circa 1963. This image depicts my protagonist, the Pettifogger, deeply engaged in his greatest passion. The drawing is a comic book version of the actor Robert Vaughn from the hit 1960s American TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (it ran during the James Bond craze). I love to use these comic book characters drawn from TV shows because the likenesses to the actors they portray are so inconsistent – an inconsistency that in this film parallels my protagonist’s occupation as a conman. As you can’t help but notice, various fragments of text balloons and captions are embedded in The Pettifogger’s hair. I could have blacked these out but liked the metaphor they created – that the character’s history is visible in these remnants' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'The Pettifogger is a diaristic, first person montage full of glimpses, glances and the quotidian. This soap dish is the first image in the film and immediately establishes the significance of the everyday. I spent years collecting various gambling imagery for the film, and this was the very first image I found. It was in a photocopied 1950s industrial plastics instructional manual in a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from where I live in Los Angeles. I leafed through the bound lesson pamphlets until I happened upon this image, which I instantly knew would be important to me. I didn’t know how it would be important but the book was only a dollar. It wasn’t much of an investment so it seemed like a good risk' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'The Pettifogger is also a world of decaying ephemera – this has always been an important aspect of my collage films – a kind of overtonal montage that asks you to taste colour and texture with your eyes. But since I began working with digital technology full-time in 2007, I have found the impact of these explorations greatly enhanced. Every pore and abrasion of these analogue relics seems to come even more alive on HD' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'My visual world is an 8x11 universe. A world of miniatures turned into giants when projected on a movie screen. It is a world of transposition and slippage, of collage substitutions: an envelope window becomes an actual window but never stops being an envelope window. My illusions simultaneously assert and unmask themselves, create their own fiction while puncturing and deflating it. For those who trespass here you must beware of the guard dog of believability' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'Swizzle sticks are an important element in the Pettifogger’s alcohol-fuelled jazz world. 1963, the year my film is set, is a kind of pop borderline in American culture between jazz and rock culture. This swizzle stick is my favourite of my collection – it gives off a sublime kind of Joseph Cornell eternal blue when lit properly. When I started creating experimental collage animations back in the early 1980s, the rules were that shadows weren’t allowed unless they were drawn on. But I had no use for this notion of "proper technique". I thought, if shadows were so expressive in so many other kinds of film-making, why couldn’t they work with cutouts? To this day I still look for the expressive value in so-called "mistakes"' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'I found these leaves pressed into a page of an encyclopedia I bought in a restaurant/bookstore on the Massachusetts Turnpike driving from Boston to New York City in the 1990s. Sometimes I keep things around for a very long time in my archives before I can find the proper context to use them. Other times I have no choice, and have to use things quickly. Since I’ve moved to Los Angeles I’ve been incorporating more and more local flora and fauna. But these plants always have to be used on the day collected if I’m interested in the brilliance of their colours' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'The late, great blacklisted Hollywood writer-director Abraham Polonsky stated that all crime films (especially about larceny) are really about capitalism. The Pettifogger is an abstract crime film, an allegory set within this booming period of America. It is an elliptical narrative that stands just out of reach at the edge of consciousness, inducing a fog of reverie pitched somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. But it still is a crime film – one that offers a sensory exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism, something I’ve always been very anxious about. A crime film that ponders, on a formal level, what appropriation and stealing have in common. This bird image appears right at the end of the film, and lends a great sense of summation to the Pettifogger’s life gradually crashing and burning' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'Cutouts have a hieroglyphic essence, an ability to make metaphor out of simple juxtaposition. This blue shirt floats in front of a nocturnal bridge, suggesting the presence of a man unseen (the Pettifogger). The bridge suggests his travel, his unsettled rootlessness. Shorthand and compression – the poetic lifeblood of the elliptical collage narrative' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London

'I can’t remember where I found this Las Vegas street-scape. (But there’s so much I can’t remember – people usually think my films are about remembering, but they’re really about the inevitability of forgetting.) This large image – bigger than 8x11 for a change – had much to unpack. It figures prominently throughout my film as the Pettifogger makes several visits to this city of luck and chance, opportunity and despair. This photo had many secrets but none greater and more relevant for me as a collage artist than the discovery of the musical group’s name on the marquee to the left of the Pettifogger: The Cutups' Photograph: Lewis Klahr and LUX, London