Surface Tension

Frampton on Surface Tension: Quite frankly with Surface Tension, I didn t propose to attack so grand as the Sound-Image relationship. I wanted to make a film out of a relatively small number of simple elements, which would be of a piece, to see how much resonance I could generate among those elements. As you know, the film fundamentally contains 3 shots - a man talking while his digital clock runs; a single dolly shot from the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge to the lake in Central Park; and a goldfish swimming very slowly back and forth in a tank outside the sea. Further, it contains only 2 quite simple sounds: one, the sound of the telephone ringing 37 times; and the other, a prose description which for the average speaker of English comes through as a single prolonged sound because it s in a foreign language - in this case, German. Naturally, I had other and more subtle concerns to work out within the body of each of the 5 or 6 blocks of material that I was using. I did certainly want it to be a sound film and I didn t see how I could do it without sound to build up the internal reverberation I wanted among the various parts of the film... but I wanted it to be a very simple sound film, or a film that used sound in a way more simple and obvious than most sound films have - namely, in part as the most direct kind of sensation and presentation rather than as a directly parallel explication or echo or reminder of something that happens to be going on on the screen. Maxwell s Demon, as you remember, is also a sound film, and one reason I chose the sound I did - the sound of film perforations - just plain film perforations - was not only to increase the mass of some of the interspersed shots in the film, but also because I wanted to use the first sound that film ever made which is the sound of film itself. I wanted to use the most fundamental kind of sound in Surface Tension, perhaps, simply as the next stage. As a general footnote, I should say that I think of my films in part as an effort to reconstruct the history of films as it should have been... (The narrator s voice belongs to Kasper Koenig, as indeed also the text he extemporizes).