We’ve had a busy few weeks, getting back up to speed with ourselves. On the 21st September we’ll be recording an episode fresh from a few hours of Olaf Nicolai’s twenty-four hour Marx. We’ve also got some other odds and ends in the works, including a long-overdue finale to our Godard season. Keep your eyes out - and open. For now, here’s some early-evening reflections from Owen on American filmmaker Hollis Frampton.
What connects a lemon (changingly lit from a roving source of light), a hyperlapse of a man seated next to a clock, and a photograph - burning, dramatically - on an oven’s ovoid element? In the annals of the American avant garde (I’m speaking cinematically, of course), the work of Hollis Frampton is notable for the playful attention it pays to its own mutability - to its joyous variability. This is what Ed Halter describes as Frampton’s “ecstatic” vision, how he was ready “to walk forward into the unknown”. Amazed.
A slow Saturday night, creeping toward bedtime (hungover, actually; it is 12.34am), I began thumbing my way through YouTube uploads of his shorts - the transfers all in various states of quality, some lucid, others rotten. A patient gloaming takes over, and the oftentimes irritability of form (it can be difficult to settle into a rhythm of watching startling things) actually doesn’t settle over me, and instead I was really enjoying myself, sprawled on the sofa, in the half light, distant and mostly thoughtless.
In their (sort of) collected box set of Frampton, Criterion call his films “audacious [and] brainy”. I guess this is true. They are certainly clever, playful, and pregnant with possibility. But again, it’s their mutability - their inherent, integral diversity - which marks them all out as Frampton films. In their total difference, they become alike - part of a singular project connected by returning, recurring passions. When he died in 1984 - early, and sadly, at 48 - he had completed some sixty films. And this is a lot of films! And their humour is front of mind, for me; poppy and smiling. Even (nostalgia), from 1971 - an emotively ‘sombre’ film - has as its formal conceit a very funny thing. For each of the twelve photographs that we witness being burned (without the hand of a match, this is mechanical - almost autonomous), with the voice of Michael Snow reading the recollections of Frampton (another act of removal), we also realise, actually, that the voiceover (Snow’s) is describing the photo we are about to see, so that the first photo that we witness is never described, and that the final description has no corresponding image. Acts of delay, offsetting, adjacency. This is the work of memory and remembering structured and stretched by the breaking of film’s formal language. Memory as a desiring against displacement’s continued ebbing and flux, a confrontation with delay. Where did I put my glasses? They’re on my head.
In Surface Tension, the humour - again - is formal, almost structural. A hyperlapse of Frampton sitting on his windowsill, next to a big clock - which he pauses and ‘plays’, instrumentally, as if it controls the lapse of the camera itself - shows that he is literally making a film about time, and that the filmmaker - the artist - is a mechanic of time, its orchestrator. Time is given a filmic form. In the film’s third part, we witness a goldfish swimming above/on top of waves of rolling, crashing brown water. Again, a formal gesturing toward delay, the offset, and how these things - when brought together - speak to cinema’s unique quality of threading (and then bending) time. The fish is in the water even while it is not. Filmic form (montage, editing, overlapping) is a mechanism for marshalling and dictating time. This is where Frampton becomes a bit Tarkovskian - with his playful “sculpting in time”. Yet again, the playful and the poignant collide. This is a lot funnier than Tark’s singular joke. But the humour is - I think - still decidedly serious.
Dismantling, re-making, re-assembling. For Frampton, these are generative acts. A concern - really - with displacement and displacement effects - of what displacement ontologically “is”. Writing in Artforum in 1971, Frampton (an equally digressive and playful theoretician) spoke of this “task” in wrapt and striking terms:
“If we are indeed doomed to the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe, and fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe, it is reasonable to suppose that such an artifact will resemble the vaults of an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film”.
Let’s unwrap this, actually. The “task” is probably art, is also probably living, and these things are convergent. It is an act of mirroring, of doubling. The filmmaker makes the world in the image of the world, and in order to do so - the “task” - he must dismantle it (and, therefore, reassemble it again). In the process, he creates the infinite film as stored in an infinite archive. See, this is generative? Works such as Lemon could - in theory - go on forever, and in many senses they do. The same applies for Heterodyne (1967). This flicker film of geometrical shapes and colours is necessarily - as Frampton argues - a replication of the form and look of the world. So it goes on forever. The triangle is every hill, every slice of cheese, every bite taken out of a sandwich. The green is the hill’s rolling grass, &Etc. It goes on, multiplying, the film becoming an act of documentation actually, albeit an act of documentation that makes the world just as it mirrors exactly the world itself (and then perhaps destroys it). Dialectical, simultaneous. In the act of doing this, the filmmaker - the artist - disappears; just as they are rendered into Godliness, just as they are born. And so on, again.
Looping back, I quoted the oft-repeated phrasing of “always already”. Heidegger glosses it (immer schon) as a thing that precedes its own perception. Funnily, it sounds a lot like “immersion” - to be in the midst. That’s clever, actually. For Blanchot, this inveigles it as a kind of terror, for his Disaster - the holocaust, say - is impossible to perceive, impossible to locate, being “always already” happening. But counter to this, Frampton’s “always already” is made in the moment of its perception. Rather than preceding it, it is the arrival, even if that arrival is already there and is also already becoming, will become. The world is your stuff. This privileges perception as a structuring, making act. Seeing is believing. And it’s belief’s undoing, too.
Frampton, of course, took this deeper - sustaining a serious look at the “modularity” of life’s most constituent elements (he’d call this an attempt at making a “synthetic” film). In part, this centres on the relationship between language and image, each of which - in his mind - “trespass in the other’s house”, creating disjunctions, “conundrums”, and “circularities”. One might gesture toward them as a kind of molecular interplay, of electrons and star stuff colliding off of one another. It’s Hadronic, really. By allowing these acts of trespass to happen, and to explode, we reveal often “grotesque” and annihilating moments that are - in turn - linked by surges of “electrovalent attraction”. This allows meaning to happen away from the academics of phyla and dictionaries, and instead happens in the moment of collision. It happens when you see it. In (nostalgia) - back to this - those collisions are at their most on-the-nose; the recollection displaced visually, a moment of unmooring where we realise that the most “valent” thing is not to describe the photograph you’re seeing, but to describe the photograph almost - as it were - against seeing, just as the doctor treats the slipped disc - and not that which is still in place. This disjunction loosens us from the documentarian rigidities of “film as record” or “film as narrative”. It transforms film into a space of generative possibilities, of explosive disjunctions. In Artificial Light (1969), we get a “single filmic utterance” given twenty times - a series of portrait shots of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, hanging out. Quickly, you realise there’s a structure underpinning their appearance. The beginning is the end, backwards (a moon zoomed away from, a moon zoomed toward). Superimpositions of portraits dissolve into subsequent portraits, albeit upside down (at first), which - by the ninth iteration - throw you entirely with their dyed colour and hastening speed. It is enigmatic but precise, obscure yet directional. Of course, we realise that these are variations on the same scene seen twenty times. Ways of seeing; multifarious, infinite, but tending toward entropy - and decay. Each repetition seems to promise that it adds some greater understanding, but it does not. There’s both precision and total randomness, and increasingly fretful misunderstanding. The risk grows - the filmic inflections becoming less secure and tethered, even while they seem to seem more filmy, more directed. Beguiling - and ultimately unsettling. You could see it as a practical exercise (a form of “elaboration”). Or you could see it as a critique of the limits of “structural” film.
Academic, obscure. True. But in Zorns Lemma (1970) - his perhaps most famous film - we get a glimpse of birth, life, and death. Elsewhere, his works perform a sort of handshake with the viewer, inviting them inside - interpret for yourself. A “cinema of the mind” emerges (again, “electrovalent”), creating the possibility of film as an act which is always about perception and translation; not just of the filmmaker’s, but of the person actually consuming their work as a unit of information. Frampton rejected P. Adams Sitney’s 1969 effort to categorise this as a “structural cinema” - not necessarily for the accuracy (or not) of the interpretation, but for the lawlessness of labels and categorisations. Not predetermined, but un-determined - and always in a state of potential. The film isn’t made; it is seen, and in the act of seeing it is understood. Generated with the watching. These films - causing contradictions to fly, between image and sound, language and image, Etc - create a vibrant space of interpretation, but they also offer the possibility of synthesis; of coming to embody a particular consciousness. Earlier, Frampton had spoken of his desire to “[make] film over as it should have been”. Here’s undoing, and an approach toward remaking.
Far from a spiralling into total abstraction, their thingness - their autobiographical nature - was also essential. In Critical Mass (1971) a man and woman engage in a heated argument. He was, at that time, going through his own divorce. All of life is here; not just his own, but cinema’s - and history’s. Increasingly, his work would take a mythic, astronomical approach, conceived as cycles and arcs which could - in theory - span hundreds of films. This he called the “metahistory” of film, and it pointed toward a grander project of making that would speak to film itself in the modern age. Not to make the same stories in the same tired old ways, but to stir together all of its elements - the planets, the stars, the dust, the waves - and to explode them - again, here’s the Hadron collider - into new and future-gazing formulations. Information (from 1966) anticipated such a thing; the film being a series of bobbing, ducking, fizzing orbs. This is a new thing made out of the tools at hand. In his words:
“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". - HF
And like all traditions - and all bulbs - it too would bring light, falter, and then burst.