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Friday,
November 20 + Saturday, November 21
Hollis
Frampton’s Hapax Legomena
Introduced
by Rebecca Sheehan, The University of Pennsylvania and Haverford
College
Hapax
Legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon
refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire
oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature. – Hollis Frampton
Hollis
Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above
all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American
avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious
and wide-ranging intellect, he was a voracious reader from childhood,
and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics,
science, mathematics and philosophy. Frampton was active as
a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically
short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time
he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range
and inventiveness are unsurpassed.
Frampton’s
seven-part Hapax Legomena is arguably his greatest
completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand
alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole
– an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations
into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling
encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing
avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling,
conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, Hapax
Legomena is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.
Hapax
Legomena was preserved
through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film
Preservation Foundation and undertaken by the Museum of Modern
Art, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving
Image Archiving and Preservation Program and Bill Brand, professor
in the NYU program and project conservator.
Friday,
November 20 at 7pm
Hapax
Legomena Program I
Nostalgia
- Hapax Legomena I
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1971, 16mm, 36 mins, b/w
[T]he
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
Poetic
Justice - Hapax Legomena Il
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1972, 16mm, 31 mins, b/w, silent
Frampton
presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which
the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’
in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the
tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however,
in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’
‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only
the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and
the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection
of the mind. – Annette Michelson
Critical
Mass - Hapax Legomena Ill
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1971, 16mm, 26 mins, b/w
As
a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with
all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or
women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very
funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you
can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look
at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface.
You have to look at them a number of times before you are able
to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again
and again, and is amazingly clear. – Stan Brakhage
Saturday,
November 21 at 2pm
Hapax
Legomena Program 2
Traveling
Matte -Hapax Legomena IV
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1971, 16mm, 34 mins b/w, silent
Traveling
Matte
is the pivot upon which the whole of Hapax Legomena turns. –
Hollis Frampton
This
film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the
framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand,
wherein others only attempt to read the future. – Stan Brakhage
Ordinary
Matter - Hapax Legomena V
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1972, 16mm, 36 mins, b/w
A
vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives
headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure),
Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument
to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting
along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live;
and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. – Hollis
Frampton
Remote
Control - Hapax Legomena VI
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1972, 16mm, 29 mins, b/w
“[In
Remote Control], the images speed up to the point where
every successive frame is different from every previous frame,
so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice
within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices
that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening
the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that
is generated among them… It was shot in a single evening, off
the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an
evening.– Hollis Frampton
Special
Effects - Hapax Legomena VII
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1972, 16mm, 11 mins, b/w
I
wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so
much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something
that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of
synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids
of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things
– most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen
at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame. – Hollis Frampton
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