Hapax Legomena

Hapax Legomena is a seven-part film cycle by American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. The complete cycle premiered in November 1972.

For the linguistics term, see Hapax legomenon.

Production

Nostalgia, Critical Mass, and Travelling Matte were the first three of the films to be completed. Frampton began to see them as "a single continuous effort" and, by late 1971, said he "was entirely clear about what was to be done."[1] He considered Hapax Legomena "a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities."[2]

The cycle's title refers to hapax legomenon, a word that appears precisely once in a text corpus. Frampton was interested in the problem that their meaning can be difficult to determine because their context is limited to a single appearance.[3] Frampton had made reference to the phenomenon through his earlier short film Lemon, whose title is a hapax legomenon in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.[4] He originally proposed using Hapax Legomena as the title for a collection of short poems before settling on it for the cycle of films.[5]

Works

Nostalgia
Main article: Nostalgia (1971 film)

In Nostalgia, still photographs taken by Frampton are slowly burned on a hot plate. Michael Snow reads personal comments by Frampton; however, the images are shifted such that photographs he discusses appear after the corresponding narration.[6]

Poetic Justice

Poetic Justice shows a stack of papers, on a table next to a plant and a cup of coffee. Page after page is placed on top of each other, forming a script that tells a surreal story.[7] At the suggestion of Nathan and Joan Lyons, Frampton published it as a book.[1]

Critical Mass

Critical Mass shows a domestic argument between two characters. It begins with a dark screen and only audio, leading into the main section where the image track is fixed-length segments that partially repeat over each other and the sound track is edited to move in and out of sync with the image.[8] The film was Frampton's first time working with actors. He cast Barbara DiBenedetto and Frank Albetta from Binghamton University as the couple and had them improvise based on a premise he wrote. They shot it in a single take.[1] The film's title comes from critical mass, the smallest amount of nuclear fuel needed to sustain a chain reaction.[8]

Travelling Matte

Travelling Matte began as video of Binghamton University that Frampton shot on a Portapak. He refilmed the footage on a television, manipulating the image with his hand between the camera and the screen.[9] The film's title refers to a travelling matte, a filmmaking technique where a changing shape is used to merge more than one image.[2]

Ordinary Matter

Ordinary Matter shows moving images of landscapes and monuments. Frampton shot much of the footage during a trip to England. For the film's soundtrack, he read through the Chinese syllables in a Wade–Giles table, but without intonation. Its title comes from ordinary matter, matter that makes up nearly all the observable universe.[2]

Remote Control

Remote Control is divided into five sections, each of uses the same 100-foot reel as its source footage. Frampton filmed television broadcasts one frame at a time whenever the shot changed or panned. The five sections modify the footage in different ways and use different schematizations for displaying numbers from 0 to 40.[2]

Special Effects
A frame from Special Effects (1972)

Special Effects shows only a white dotted outline of a rectangle which moves around a black background.[10] It is accompanied by a synthesized soundtrack.[2] Frampton created the film by shooting a static image from a distance with a handheld telephoto lens, such that the slight tremor of his body is rendered as the motion of the rectangle.[11]

Themes

Several works in Hapax Legomena deal with other visual arts. Nostalgia and Poetic Justice include stories about photography. Travelling Matte shows the transfer of video to film, and Remote Control transfers television images to film.[2]

Frampton noted that the cycle contains autobiographical elements. He separated from his wife after Nostalgia was completed, and the second and third films in the cycle discuss sexual jealousy and relationship struggles.[2]

Release

The complete Hapax Legomena cycle premiered in November 1972 at the Walker Art Center.[12] Nostalgia and Critical Mass were the most commercially successful films from the cycle.[13]

Bill Brand supervised a restoration of the films in 2009, supported through Anthology Film Archives, the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.[14] The first three films in Hapax Legomena—Nostalgia, Poetic Justice, and Critical Mass—were released on home media in 2012 as part of the Criterion Collection's A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.[15]

References
  1. MacDonald, Scott (1979). "Interview with Hollis Frampton". Film Culture. Vol. 67–69. pp. 158–165.
  2. Sitney, P. Adams (2008). Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. Oxford University Press. pp. 105–120. ISBN 978-0-19-533114-1.
  3. MacDonald, Scott (1985). "Interview with Hollis Frampton". October. 32: 103. doi:10.2307/778288. JSTOR 778288.
  4. MacDonald, Scott (1980). "Interview with Hollis Frampton: The Early Years". October. 12: 116. doi:10.2307/778577. JSTOR 778577.
  5. Frampton, Hollis (1985). Odlin, Reno (ed.). "Letters from Framp 1958-1968". October. 32: 53. doi:10.2307/778284. JSTOR 778284.
  6. Birchall, Danny (2010). "Things Said Again". Film Quarterly. 63 (3): 55. doi:10.1525/fq.2010.63.3.55.
  7. Schwendener, Martha (January 2, 2014). "Phantasms of an Analog Twilight". The New York Times. Retrieved June 5, 2022.
  8. Michelson, Annette (1985). "Frampton's Sieve". October. 32: 162–166. doi:10.2307/778291. JSTOR 778291.
  9. MacDonald, Scott (2015). Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967–1977. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-5889-2.
  10. Jenkins, Bruce (1985). "The Red and The Green". October. 32: 84. doi:10.2307/778287. JSTOR 778287.
  11. Sitney, P. Adams (1974). Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514886-2.
  12. Eisenstein, Ken (2012). "'The Archives of Our Memory': Hollis Frampton's Marmoreal Mammary". The Moving Image. 12 (1): 103–104. doi:10.1353/mov.2012.0035. S2CID 191320644.
  13. Tuchman, Mitch (1985). "Frampton". Film Comment. Vol. 24, no. 4. p. 38.
  14. "Summer Films at the National Gallery of Art". June 29, 2009. Retrieved June 5, 2022.
  15. Swen, Ryan (March 11, 2019). "Where to begin with Hollis Frampton". British Film Institute. Retrieved June 5, 2022.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.