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
