Frames for Frampton (1985, 16mm, 7 min, color/sound)

By 1984, I had been studying experimental films for a year or 2, after first getting into filmmaking through an animation class with Flip Johnson at the Boston Museum School. I loved animation, but the classroom was a boys' club of exploding frogs, so it was out into the street with a super8 camera. I was also devouring anything I could read on the subject of experimental film, which sounded great in theory from the many books and scholarly articles on the heroic phase of New American Cinema (1950's through 70's). Unfortunately, by the early 80's screenings of these films were rare events and there was a seeming generation gap between the super-productive 70's and the bureaucratic reaganomic 80's. Video was replacing expensive film practice. Anyway, 2 filmmakers whose work I was drawn to from my readings were Stan Vanderbeek, who conceived of a Cinedome theater with internet-style exchange of motion pictures in multi-projection, and Hollis Frampton, who brought to film both a rigorous language-science and wordplay, humor. His film Zorn's Lemma is an incredible meditation on the matter of our alphabet (and can be viewed in funky internet-o-vision at: http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html). Both of these men died young of cancer, but they each brought to film an unusual understanding of its potential as a liberating device of communication, a language beyond language. Shortly after Frampton's death in 1984 I learned that the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo was mounting a show of his work, and I arranged to travel there to see the 3 hours of films called Hapax Legomena (a literary term meaning a word which appears only once on a written work). I shot one roll of Kodachrome super8 on the trip; a flight to Buffalo, the taxi to the museum, the grounds behind the museum, a run through the nearby cemetary and the bus back to Boston. This pilgrimage film was blown-up to 16mm on the Museum School's funky JK optical bench, a radio noise soundtrack was added, and it went out to some film festivals and collections in Japan and Germany. I met many filmmakers. This led to the larger film project dedicated also to Frampton: The Filmers Almanac. Frames for Frampton was in the Canyon Cinema catalog and collection for several years, but since the film did not rent they invited me to take it out of "circulation". It is now part of the Sonnet Lumiere film album.