In 1985, friends of mine in Somerville, Mass. started renting a storefront on Highland Ave. just East of Davis Square and opened it as a used bookstore. This was before the T Red Line opened in Davis, and this spot was strategically located on the 96 bus line or the long loping walk from Medford to Harvard Square. A number of these new entrepreneurs were alumni of the Tufts radio station WMFO or had worked at the Somerville Theater. Lenny DiFranza, who had managed the theater and served as program director at WMFO, and Jeff Strauss, a film and literature student, were two of Some Books' initial signatories. They re-painted the sign out front to read REALITY CENTER, up from REALTY CENTER as it had once been occupied. Jake Dillon built bookshelves from discarded wood into every nook and cranny of the place. This funky little shop became a significant meeting place for many of us, and we took turns running the shop and organizing events there; usually 2 people would manage the place for 4-6 months, burn out and pass the candle. There was a late-night breakfast joint across the street that didn't open until 11PM. (Was it called Kay and Chips or Phyllis and Ted's? I think the former. Rodney Dangerfield was always singing "I don't get no respect" from their jukebox.)
I recall a number of marvelous micro-events taking place at SOME BOOKS. Tracy Chapman did some sets of her acoustic music before signing to a major label. Kip Chinian showed a brilliant series of large format (20x24") Polaroid photographs of himself in Viet Nam war make-up. And myself and Bill White organized monthly screenings of 8mm films, as we were both amateur filmmakers. Bill managed a number of movie theaters in Cambridge including the Orson Welles, and he was a serious movie buff who I believe writes reviews for a paper around Seattle, where he's from.
Bill and I called the film meetings Wide Open Cinema, a name I came up with for our film organisation or company. My theory was that film could be anything, or something different in the hands of whoever used it. There is also reference to opening the camera aperture to let more light in and take focus, and a minor reference to sport, of a player "being wide open" to make some sort of play. You get the picture.
Anyhow, we had several meeting of this film group. Bill showed his remake of Murnau's "Sunrise". I showed my growing body of super8 experiments. A guy named Todd Larsen showed his super8 narrative attempts. I rented some 16mm experimental films and showed them at the Somerville Theater and at Mass Art Film Society, Saul Levine's salon-like screening series intown. Jeff Plansker and I started showing our films side-by-side on 2 projectors as "Toronto/Spain". Harvard Epworth Church had a wonderful film series in those days and Ricky Leacock taught at MIT. Somerville had a developing cable access studio where I tried to create some programs, but found it a bit of a club. From there, I reached out to the larger World of filmmaking and got swallowed by it.
But that period at Some Books was significant to a number of people. I dedicate this blog to them and that time, the foundation for my love of cinema. Ah, Somerville.
Friday, March 9, 2007
The Triumph of VHS
January 17, 2007
Since moving to Los Angeles at the start of 2006, I've been advised by friends to make a short film for the youTube audience. While i haven't quite gotten myself to target creations so site specifically, I have had occasion to view video clips on youTube, usually following a link in an e-mail i receive. It is a great greeting card to send a friend a link to some shared musical or film clip stored on youTube/Google's mammoth hard drive. Recently, I received an e-mail linking me to youTube and some Hollis Frampton film clips someone had posted there. This was intriguing, since Frampton is a very obscure and usually film-pure film-maker, meaning I don't know of him approving of his films being transfered to videotape in his lifetime. Film is film and should be projected onto a movie screen by a movie projector at 24 frames per second (or 16 frames per second if made for "silent speed"). Although Frampton did anticipate and comment on film's eventual absorption into computer culture.
Frampton died of cancer in 1984. Hollis Frampton's films are distributed exclusively, I believe, by the NY Filmmakers Co-op, an organisation which stores, ships and receives its collection of aging 16mm film prints for public presentation. The MoMA may also have an attachment to Frampton's films, I believe they hold some restoration and negative rights as deeded by Frampton's heirs, his wife Marion Faller.
Anyway, the youTube search for "hollis frampton" returned a short stack of Frampton titles, which was a bit shocking, since it has always been so difficult to see these films; they are like small pieces of the Grail of filmmaking. Frampton's work is rarely screened, usually in blink-of-an-eye retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image or Anthology Film Archives. I didn't have time to click and view each of the excerpts that someone had uploaded to youTube from their PC, but i did take a look at 2 clips from "Magellan" (Drafts and Fragments), a section in which Frampton remade the history of cinema in the style of Lumiere, in 1-minute films capturing some essence of motion special to the film medium. Where the Lumieres filmed a train entering the station, Frampton filmed a barn silo open to the sky with starlings flying, his son pulling a fishhook from the mouth of a frog, the same silo being pulled down by a truck, a cat toying with a downed bird. These film-clips, converted somewhere along the way to video, were accompanied by a discussion on the soundtrack between HFrampton and another filmmaker Robert Gardner. I don't recall having heard Frampton's voice before and hearing him discuss his views and the purposes behind his filmmaking was a great glimpse behind the curtain. I assume this video was cablecast on a public access TV channel somewhere in New York State and some viewer recorded it or it snuck out of a university media lab.
Now, in the era of internet all-purveyance, such material becomes available on a grand scale, as the odd VHS recorder-collectors copy out their collections into the internet-ether. And the bizarre truth is that in this time of super low-res video viewing on the web, even the poorest translation of an old VHS tape looks acceptable. We are awed by the availability of so much material that the picture quality is overlooked, or seen through. With time, I'm sure the image quality of "films" on the www will improve; but for now we live with an internet of fast and dirty film fragments, approximations of their original forms. The frame rate is variable; we see a summing or skipping average of frames per second (4 or 5?) rather than anything close to cinema's standard 24fps. The moving picture equivalent to the audio mp3. Stamp collecting in lieu of a fine art collection.
2 days after that initial viewing I returned to the Hollis Frampton youTube link and these films had been knocked off. I assume someone had reported these clips as pirate material, not copyright free, and so they were removed. I don't openly condone the exchange of artists' materials without their consent, but I will say it felt like a crack in the Deathstar. Information wants to be free and films are made to be seen I think. Low-res bootleg video clips from Hollis Frampton films are not going to hurt the estate of Hollis Frampton. If anything, these small pieces of film history would lead new seekers to his work and to experimental film history in general.
Update: Since January, I found a viewable stream of Frampton's great "Zorn's Lemma" on UBUweb. And this week (early March) it appears that the Frampton clips are back on youTube. In late Spring 07 I found that the Frampton clips are all from "Screening Room", an officially released, yes cable or public TV document, an illustrated interview of Frampton available as a dvd from www.studio7arts.org
Another note: Steve Polta at the SF Cinemateq and I curated a show of Hollis Frampton films in the Summer of 2005, notes of which are viewable at http://filmersalmanac.net/frampton.htm
Since moving to Los Angeles at the start of 2006, I've been advised by friends to make a short film for the youTube audience. While i haven't quite gotten myself to target creations so site specifically, I have had occasion to view video clips on youTube, usually following a link in an e-mail i receive. It is a great greeting card to send a friend a link to some shared musical or film clip stored on youTube/Google's mammoth hard drive. Recently, I received an e-mail linking me to youTube and some Hollis Frampton film clips someone had posted there. This was intriguing, since Frampton is a very obscure and usually film-pure film-maker, meaning I don't know of him approving of his films being transfered to videotape in his lifetime. Film is film and should be projected onto a movie screen by a movie projector at 24 frames per second (or 16 frames per second if made for "silent speed"). Although Frampton did anticipate and comment on film's eventual absorption into computer culture.
Frampton died of cancer in 1984. Hollis Frampton's films are distributed exclusively, I believe, by the NY Filmmakers Co-op, an organisation which stores, ships and receives its collection of aging 16mm film prints for public presentation. The MoMA may also have an attachment to Frampton's films, I believe they hold some restoration and negative rights as deeded by Frampton's heirs, his wife Marion Faller.
Anyway, the youTube search for "hollis frampton" returned a short stack of Frampton titles, which was a bit shocking, since it has always been so difficult to see these films; they are like small pieces of the Grail of filmmaking. Frampton's work is rarely screened, usually in blink-of-an-eye retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image or Anthology Film Archives. I didn't have time to click and view each of the excerpts that someone had uploaded to youTube from their PC, but i did take a look at 2 clips from "Magellan" (Drafts and Fragments), a section in which Frampton remade the history of cinema in the style of Lumiere, in 1-minute films capturing some essence of motion special to the film medium. Where the Lumieres filmed a train entering the station, Frampton filmed a barn silo open to the sky with starlings flying, his son pulling a fishhook from the mouth of a frog, the same silo being pulled down by a truck, a cat toying with a downed bird. These film-clips, converted somewhere along the way to video, were accompanied by a discussion on the soundtrack between HFrampton and another filmmaker Robert Gardner. I don't recall having heard Frampton's voice before and hearing him discuss his views and the purposes behind his filmmaking was a great glimpse behind the curtain. I assume this video was cablecast on a public access TV channel somewhere in New York State and some viewer recorded it or it snuck out of a university media lab.
Now, in the era of internet all-purveyance, such material becomes available on a grand scale, as the odd VHS recorder-collectors copy out their collections into the internet-ether. And the bizarre truth is that in this time of super low-res video viewing on the web, even the poorest translation of an old VHS tape looks acceptable. We are awed by the availability of so much material that the picture quality is overlooked, or seen through. With time, I'm sure the image quality of "films" on the www will improve; but for now we live with an internet of fast and dirty film fragments, approximations of their original forms. The frame rate is variable; we see a summing or skipping average of frames per second (4 or 5?) rather than anything close to cinema's standard 24fps. The moving picture equivalent to the audio mp3. Stamp collecting in lieu of a fine art collection.
2 days after that initial viewing I returned to the Hollis Frampton youTube link and these films had been knocked off. I assume someone had reported these clips as pirate material, not copyright free, and so they were removed. I don't openly condone the exchange of artists' materials without their consent, but I will say it felt like a crack in the Deathstar. Information wants to be free and films are made to be seen I think. Low-res bootleg video clips from Hollis Frampton films are not going to hurt the estate of Hollis Frampton. If anything, these small pieces of film history would lead new seekers to his work and to experimental film history in general.
Update: Since January, I found a viewable stream of Frampton's great "Zorn's Lemma" on UBUweb. And this week (early March) it appears that the Frampton clips are back on youTube. In late Spring 07 I found that the Frampton clips are all from "Screening Room", an officially released, yes cable or public TV document, an illustrated interview of Frampton available as a dvd from www.studio7arts.org
Another note: Steve Polta at the SF Cinemateq and I curated a show of Hollis Frampton films in the Summer of 2005, notes of which are viewable at http://filmersalmanac.net/frampton.htm
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