http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/surface-tension/
The interest and excitement, it turns out, comes from the fact that Criterion has just published a 2dvd set titled A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY, which contains 24 films by HF made between 1966 and 1979. SURFACE TENSION is one of the 24 films. Each of the films in the set merits the kind of re-examination that SURFACE TENSION has gotten on the NYTimes website. Last night, Jeff and I made our monthly pilgrimage to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, where I hoped to pick up the new Frampton set. What a long time coming... to be able to walk into a record store and buy the new Hollis Frampton record (Do You Feel Like We Do jokes aside) is very much a Holy Grail achieved. Similar to the recent find of film of the Rams vs. Giants Yankee Stadium game I attended with my father in 1970. In 1985 I made a short film titled FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, an optical printer expansion of 1 roll of super8 film into 7 minutes of 16mm film. The super8 was shot in October of 1984 en route to Buffalo from Boston and back, to see a show of Frampton's work at the Albright-Knox Gallery. Frampton had died just earlier that year. The MIT Press publication RECOLLECTIONS AND RECREATIONS may have been the catalogue raisonne for that Frampton exhibit, which included many photographs, xerography, even books with bullet holes in them ("The Tortures of The Text"). The evening of my overnight visit, the entire HAPAX LEGOMENA series of films was screened, almost 3 hours of film. I shot my roll of super 8 around the Albright-Knox and ran into the nearby Forest Lawn Cemetary with the Beaulieu 4008ZM running around 8fps.
After finishing FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, I arranged a screening of the film at a gallery in Boston as part of David Kleiler's Rear Window series. I rented Frampton's SURFACE TENSION to accompany FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON and to see the film myself, since no one else was showing his work. Fortunately, P. Adams Sitney and others had written gushing descriptions of Frampton's film triumphs. One of the great properties of Frampton's work is its conceptual nature: even a verbal description could create a strong filmlike image in your head. I devoted the next 5 or 6 years of my life to studying and promoting Frampton's work. I rented ZORN'S LEMMA and projected it one Saturday in the Somerville Theater on a Kodak Pageant arc projector the theater owned, part of a series of "Extended Theater" shows my friend Lenny DiFranza organized. I became somewhat obsessed with Frampton's MAGELLAN project, his metafilm history involving the creation of a film (or more) for every day of the year. I rented WINTER SOLSTICE and projected it on Dec 21 several years in various locations. WINTER SOLSTICE is the film that I most love Hollis Frampton for, and its inclusion in this Criterion set must be heralded as a landmark in experimental film publishing. I don't know of any film which has so completely taken me into a space of ecstatic film rapture. Focusing on the intense activity within a steelworks, we are treated to long passages of cascading showers of sparking steel fragments against an austere black background. The camera shutter creates motion effects akin to abstract animation, as flurries of yellow sparks fly in all directions. By his definitive capture of this light show, moreso than Dziga Vertov in Enthusiasm, Frampton has defined what an industrial art can be: a machine which reveals. He is a little bit Vulcan, a god of metals, through this film. I have't yet watched the dvd transfer. Frampton made films that made the day you saw them important. With Magellan, he also said that each day is invaluable, could be a day of Great Inspiration for the creative mind. I never met him but learned so much from him. He is sorely missed but finally celebrated publicly with this Criterion release.
