Hollis Frampton Selection 4: Video Film Review (1981)

WNET/THIRTEEN production - Kathy Kline States, 1967, 17 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr404.png No, not the United etc. but the conditions, forms in which things exist. Somewhat abstracted, a solid, a liquid and a gas: salt, milk and smoke: falling, pouring and rising are the stars of this classical film. Sheets, streaks and wisps, the protagonists are all white (light). The background, zero place, is black (no light). Silence. The ongoing film reveals the ephemera compartmented in a pattern of temporal proportions in which lengths of salt sheet activity are gradually overtaken by liquid streaks which are in turn overtaken by smoke drifts. But another solid is the sliceable, arrangeable film material itself: the intercutting and the logic of the arrangement introduces something diamond-like, sculptural to the natures presented. There is a profoundly satisfying unity of ends and means that is both natural (the way the protagonists behave) and artificial (the artist s structure). The sum is cultured, beautiful. - Michael Snow Information, 1966, 4 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr405.png Frampton on Information: Hypothetical first film for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonable principles, given: 1) camera; 2) rawstock; 3) a single bare lightbulb. I admit to having made a number of splices. Less, 1973, 1 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr406.png Near the end of 1973, Frampton realized that he had not finished a single film over the course of a year. He promptly conceived and executed LESS, a doubly punning work in which a minimalist Frampton generates a twenty-four frame (one-second) loop of the incremental blacking out of a nude image by photographer Les Krims. - Bruce Jenkins Process Red, 1966, 3 37 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr407.png A first attempt to approximate more than one visual modality in a single brief work. Sightings from the retina, optic nerve, cortex. With this small film, I felt that I had got the bit in my teeth HF Apparatus Sum, 1972, 2 34 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr408.png Frampton on Apparatus Sum: A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a roomful of cadavers. Not the First Time, 1976, 5 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr409.png (nostalgia), 1971, 36 , sound http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr410.png In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton s comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience. - Bill Simon In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton s films. - P. Adams Sitney (nostalgia) is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images. I began probably as a kind of non-poet, as a kid, and my first interest in images probably had something to do with what clouds of words could rise out of them... I think there is kind of a shift between what is now memory and what was once conjecture and prophecy and so forth. - Hollis Frampton Prince Ruperts Drops, 1969, 7 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr411.png Two repetitive, banal rhythmic acts - as it were from the observe and reverse of a phenakistiscope disk - factored and expanded into a cinema filmstrip. Note: Prince Ruperts Drops are not a confection or a nose candy, but a physical demonstration of extreme internal stresses in equilibrium. HF Carrots & Peas, 1969, 5 http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr412.png A traditional side-dish of mixed vegetables inhabits a succession of traditional art-styles. The sumptuous, sometimes tiresome paradox of the static image in film, is rudely presented in the form of an art historian s slide-lecture... for which genre of discourse the spoken commentary is of about average relevance to the image. HF The Birth of Magellan: Cadenzas I & XIV, 1977-80, 9 23 , sound http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr413.png The film about the bride in which two gentlemen, who we may presume to be bachelors, strip more or less bare a putative bride of some sort. HF The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall I & VII, 1977-80, 35 , sound http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr414.png Frampton wsa especially fascinated by Eisenstein s theory of vertical montage, the notion that filmic structure could be built not only horizontally (sequentially), like a melody, but vertically, like a chord. In the MINDFALL sections of Magellan Frampton used desynchronized sound, along with super-imposition and a complex editing structure, to approach the possibility of vertical montage - Harvey Nosowitz DOCUMENTARY: Video Film Review, 1981, 29 , sound http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr401.png WNET/THIRTEEN production - Kathy Kline Steina: nostalgia analysis, 3 , sound http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr402.png Palindrome analysis, 7 , silent http://orx-qx.visions.cz/images/fr403.png