The Century of an Eyesplice

My graphic score to the scenes and events in Un Chien Andalou.





On February 22 of 2000, Luis Bunuel's 100th birthday, we presented "The Century of an Eyesplice" at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, under the curatorial guidance of Kathy Geritz. A newly restored print of Un Chien Andalou by the Eastman House was screened, along with Simon of the Desert, Viridiana, and a tattered print of Chien Andalou with a soundtrack I created for the occasion. We had a cake made to look like the "diagonal box" and Eric Gergis played the accordeon. David Larcher was in town and we had martinis afterwards at a bar across the street.

The soundtrack was composed from various sources, many olde records, in recognition of LB's original soundtrack using 78rpm records of Wagner and tangos. I hired Gibbs Chapman to help me cut the audio; he taught me to use ProTools. The basic soundtrack was transferred to 16mm magnetic stock and played on an interlock projector at each of three major presentations of the piece. I acquired the interlock machine and a Westrex mag recorder at Palmer Films liquidation sale just months before. I also acquired a print of Chien Andalou from a liquidation sale at distributor Budget Films. Film was liquidating.

The first screening of the new soundtrack was in Berkeley on Bunuel's birthday. I used a contact microphone to amplify tabletop objects as another layer of sound on top of the basic "bed" tracks. The film seemed to me to be about the terror of household objects. The razor is the first "wild object" of the film. Sound effects of cutlery were slowed down to sound like swordblades as Luis sharpens his razor. Or perhaps it was a recording of fencing. The slice or eye-splice is a burst of piercing controlled feedback.

The man rides a bike, his goofy musical theme sampled from a music box toy (It's a Small World After All). The man is a wind up toy himself, and the same winding key might open the absurd box he wears around his neck. The bicycle is also imitated by rolling a squeaky wheel on the contact board, a piece of wood with piezo disc contact microphone attached. Staples in the wood are plucked to approximate ant-legs, running in and out of a hole in the man's hand. This image, from Dali's dreams, is so contemporary; I think of it often as I watch young people stare into their palms, consumed by smartphones. A nylon wire (fishing line? kite string? raquet string?) was stretched when the woman grabs a tennis racket to fight the man off. An antique vocal madrigal is played to accompany the dragging of the donkey-skinned pianos, a religious procession. Hundreds of vinyl pops were digitally erased from that recording.

The second screening was a week later at The Blinding Light in Vancouver. Alex MacKenzie built an entire Surreal City series around the event. And the third screening was at ATA in San Francisco, where I used firecrackers during the gunfire scene; they were exploded in a box at the top of the stairs and their realism surprised even me.

The man falls into his field, onto the back of a statuesque female nude which disappears and he is carried off by some passers by--the don of this parkland and his garden workers. A beautiful propellar plane engine sound accompanies the fade to black. A door opens and the woman enters to stare down the death-head moth on the wall. I found an exquisite, sparse loop sample from an old record which fits the black and white film emulsion here like a glove. And then a chopstick was vibrated along the edge of the soundboard; it flutters like large insect wings. I sometimes sampled that and slowed it down to great effect.

There is a scene in which the second man (the Challenger?) comes to the house, rings the doorbell (actual martini shaker with ice recorded and mixed with bells), he is let in and when he enters the room I used live radio to accompany his actions. At the Berkeley screening the radio insert found a BBC news voice saying: "Mad cow disease", which was in the news at the time.

I continued to work on the soundtrack and sent a few copies out on VHS. I tried to create an alternate version of the film but got bogged down. Only recently have I gotten around to remixing the piece for web presentation. Please view it here.

Un Perro Andaluz, 80 Anos Despues

2009 was the 80th anniversary of the Bunuel/Dali film UN CHIEN ANDALOU, known in Spain as Un Perro Andaluz, and recognized today as a universal surrealist masterpiece. Although made in France, the film is in many ways a Spanish import, as Bunuel moved between Spain and Paris, writing the scenario from their dreams at Dali's home in Cadaques. Bunuel made the film with his mother's generous gift from her savings, her escudos, the nickel coins with a shield on the back. Bunuel premiered the film in Paris equipped with stones in his pockets to repel attackers. The 80th anniversary found the Tabakalera center in San Sebastian working with the Filmoteca Nacional on an exhibition and symposium to discuss the film's history and present a film restoration made from the original film materials. See here.

Maybe a year ago, I stumbled across a BFI blog where film enthusiasts and archivists were discussing recent dvd and blu-ray releases. The BFI had produced a dvd of L'Age d'Or which included Un Chien Andalou in the set, and somebody offered the information about the Spanish restoration project. I have been looking to import this book+dvd for at least the past 9 months. The set is a catalog for the exhibit which opened in San Sebastian and visited a few other Spanish cities. The restored film is online and looks gorgeous in the small frame. I had a new Holy Grail: finding a hard copy of this restored film. I looked online at bookstores in Spain and Spanish amazon, the European amazons and asked European friends. It is still difficult to import a rare book, even with the internet. The cost, 30 or $40 on the street in Spain, would probably approach $100 from a large bookstore, with shipping and import fees. I decided to wait and see if it would turn up via some American distributor or museum store. Every few months I remembered to look into it. This summer (2013), I called Schoenhof's in Cambridge, probably the biggest importer of foreign books in the US, where I had bought many Spanish books during my years in Boston, and asked them about ordering it; still around $100. Then I checked ABEbooks, the consortium of independent booksellers online, and someone in the US appeared to have a copy of the set: the 2 book volumes, 46-page Basque summary and the dvd of the restored film--the complete edition, at $65 + $10 shipping. On further inquiry, shipping would be an additional $8.70, bringing the total to $83.70. Still not cheap, this seemed a fair price for something I had been searching for so long. It arrived only a few days later. It is another classic piece for a Bunuel collector, a hardboard case holding 2 books and the film. I have an entire large bag filled with books on and by Bunuel. I have a multi-region dvd player. The last incredible film find was when I discovered that Hollis Frampton's films were out on a Criterion dvd. It was an incredible year for film. Don't ask me to borrow either of those dvds.

Film Department Letter

I wrote this letter of introduction when applying for an art school film job a few years back.

Thank you for looking at my materials as I offer myself for consideration to teach film (there).
What do I think I could bring to your film department?
I have a great love of film and an even greater interest and concern for the lives of people looking for ways to express themselves with film. Of course we are at a time when film as THE MEDIUM is rapidly being displaced by digital means; knowing computers is more important every day. A professor of film at an arts college must know how computers can be used to solve problems and expedite production of ideas into moving pictures.

I have feet in both realms: the digital and its parent analog.
I have collected films and film machines for 25 years and have learned something from each of the formats. I studied animation with Flip Johnson using Bolex cameras, pegboards and lights. Richard Lerman taught filmmaking and sound and became a friend. I taught myself to use the JK optical printer. Soon after, I switched to super-8 filmmaking, which is largely a do-it-yourself media, although some "teachers" included the young German filmmakers, my peers: Matthias Mueller, Jurgen Reble, Caspar Stracke, and all the European, Canadian and American artists I spent time with (Yann Beauvais, Cecile Fontaine, Mike Hoolboom, Alex MacKenzie, Bradley Eros, Jeanne Liotta). I lived super8 film for several years, traveled to numerous festivals. I experimented with many telecine routes, from "Do-It-Myself" to Bob Brodsky's service. I have owned many super8 cameras and projectors and used most existing filmstocks. I bought ORWO super8 cartridges in East Berlin.

Unfortunately, I don't recommend super8 as heartily as I once did, largely because the number of reliable or repairable cameras and projectors has declined. With a good camera, super8 remains a tremendous image making medium, but please have it rendered to digital video ASAP. Super8 projectors are largely unreliable at present.

I've always believed in COLLABORATION as an important avenue of creativity and I've sought out other artists with whom to work.

Parallel to filmmaking, I have studied and practiced RADIO as an art form. I decided somewhere early on that a radio transmitter is a PROJECTOR for sound, and I've always found radio to have great commonalities with film as an expressive tool. My soundtrack work grew out of radio shows I did at the same time as making films; the concurrent practices feed off of one another.

Using film as a PERFORMANCE medium is another area where I've had a lot of experience, beginning with the ALMANAC project, where I used 2 projectors to present the work. I have soaked myself in Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema tome and am a great proponent of breaking the single-channel stream of film presentatrion. Working with Wet Gate, where we developed the use of the 16mm projector as a performance instrument in concert, has been a great outlet for my need for a true film practice. (Wet Gate will perform at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Friday Night series on January 29th, 2010.)

I do, however, appreciate and champion well made single-channel films. I am not quite the dilettante I was even 10 years ago.

The past 10 years I have tried to function in the wild world of community and commerce, first working in Public Radio and then creating soundtracks for film and television, often for commercials. Again, with a foot in 2 different worlds, I have stayed in touch with the experimental art world while trying to bring my skills into the larger film industry. Perhaps like Paul Sharits and others who wanted to see if they could apply experimental principles to more commercial (or accessible or just distributed) work, I moved to LA 4 years ago. My most recent new project involves writing the script for a teleplay or original series, based on my father's life. I have ongoing relationships and projects with creative people which I am nurturing.

I have always seen film as a great communicating force and have wanted to inject myself into that, into the great machinery of projectors and television screens that can reach people all across the world. Here in Los Angeles that means beginning with a script, so that is an important starting place. I don't mean to say that film cannot contain or even be based upon improvisational elements. When I was younger. film was much more of a diaristic medium for me, whereas now I want to consider carefully each time I engage the film apparatus. It's too expensive a medium at this point.

Hollis Frampton: Incidental Holographer

Although I never met Hollis Frampton, the American film maverick who died of cancer at the age of 48 but left a legacy most 100-year-olds would be proud of, I studied at his feet. And later at his footage. But at the start it was mostly footnotes. While the early-1980's did provide some wonderful growth in the arts: artists' book publishing, performance spaces opening, multi-media forms emerging, the art of film was showing its first stages of decline, largely due to increasing costs, but also with the new interest in portable video, among other causes. So a lot of the great experimental film of earlier decades was not being actively screened. I'm talking Boston. There was Saul Levine at Mass Art showing his personal favorites. There was New York, where almost anything could be seen in the course of a year, but I couldn't live in New York, my birth city. The only way I found to internalize the great works of avant-garde cinema was reading about the films in books by P. Adams Sitney (Film Culture Reader) and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art), among others.

The two filmmakers whose ideas jumped off the pages of those books and bit me the most were Stan Vanderbeek and Hollis Frampton, both visionaries and meta-film activists. Vanderbeek, after a period of playful animation and collage films, turned to ideas for presentation including his Cinedome, which envisioned a geodesic sphere intended for projections; the interior was an ocular theater. Vanderbeek went so far as to imagine the cyber-future where films could be beamed in from elsewhere on the globe, collaged or mixed with any manner of other projected film on the spot. It was a beautiful vision, one which inspired a number of my own attempts at multi-projector harmony.

Frampton was a more traditional maker, cutting his films to A and B roll perfection and trying to wrestle every bit of mind muscle he could from one standard 16mm projector, just as he had gathered the images while gripping the camera. Singlehandedly. Frampton's major opus, Magellan, has every bit the same spherical intelligence as Vanderbeek's Cinedome. Magellan imagined a unique film to be projected for each day of the calendar year, effectively encircling the viewer in a humongous film loop and rendering a 3-dimensional clarity of vision. Frampton called it "circumambulating the hemispheres", and my own early film practice was largely inspired by the idea of capturing a place by walking a circle through it with the camera ON. While Frampton may not have described his work as seeking 3-dimensionality, I have been struck for the 28 years since his death at the proximity with which his ideas rub up against theories of poly-dimensionality. While the film image may not pop off the screen in a Frampton film, the thought-activity in response to his films must be considered something akin to mental holography. The work is just that active.

Frampton was a poet, linguist, photographer and dabbler in several arts--painting was what he seemed to admire most--and it was quite a natural move for him to abandon much of the rest once the film bug had bit him. We know that Frampton's earliest staging of Magellan was an art piece where he hung some pieces of plaster (?) in the studio and made a kind of walk-through sculpture. There are also the word-picture series he worked through in photographs and film: Ways to Purity, which collected odd signage fragments from lower Manhattan and, of course, Zorn's Lemma, the 1970 film which clearly established Frampton's genius. Not only does Zorn collect a movie version of the catalog of word signs seen in Purity, but his radical re-imagining of the alphabet begins with each letter hammered out of aluminum foil on a typewriter. The graphic impact of this alphabet, projected with a nice 250 watt bulb, cannot be overstated. The letters are downright cubic. I don't know if he was an admirer of Kubrick, but perhaps vice versa. The two filmmakers form a very small subset of intelligencia. The unrolling of Frampton's New Alphabet across the middle half of Zorn's Lemma is one of the great passages of film time. As each aluminum foil letter is replaced by a moving film image, the sensation becomes akin to the opening of windows. And it's not a house of windows, but the viewer's head and mind, the language centers, which are opening, and each letter becomes a flowing form much as ideas take form and move in the mind. If this isn't something close to holography then I'm hallucinating. It may be faux holography or something akin to anaglyphs, the red and green windows of early 3D movie glasses. Frampton turned to the motif of Red and Green himself; it is a major motif in Magellan.

Another early film worth mentioning here, which sometimes defies comment by its brilliance, is Palindrome, from 1969. The film presents a short strip of abstract shapes and forms repeated in a series of variations, positive, negative and other effects, regularly broken up by an equal length (24 frames?) of black or silence. (It is a "silent" film.) However, the great gift of palindrome is the music that this silent "image track" plays in your head. Frampton sets up a regular rhythm with the image turning on and off as it runs through, and then the subset of tinier variations happening within the image set plays another rhythmic dance which becomes music in the head. I would again argue in favor of considering this film an example of extramural holography. Frampton pushes the silent medium into the realm of sound as it is imagined in the mind by vision. The film explores a part of the brain that is usually dormant, a kind of inter-ear-eye canal.

And then there's Magellan. Frampton's final film project contains too many parts and pieces to fully evaluate here, but several of the films clearly suggest and create 3-dimensional states of mind, an effect Stan Brakhage might have called hypnagogic.

Mindfall is a film shot in Puerto Rico and contains beautiful and lush tropical footage, although Frampton subverts the elegance of his host island with disconcerting sound effects and he super-imposes two images throughout its entire half-hour length. Using A and B roll as a clever way to double-expose, Frampton provides the materials of stereo-vision without resorting to a 2-camera-2-projector system. He proposes that there is a cinema multi-tasking mind, which should be able to view and decipher more than one image stream at once. So, if two separate strands of thought or action coincide, maybe like a talented drummer playing one rhythm with his right hand and another with his left (and another with his feet!?), is that something one could tag as approaching holographic? (Stereo vision being a multi-task of parallel eyes.)

Winter Solstice is in some ways the crowning achievement of Frampton and Magellan. Shot in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh, the camera captures metals in various states of vulcanic transformation: liquid, solid, and most remarkably as flying patterns of showering sparks. This is magma. Usually a 30 minute experimental film on one subject is a tedious affair, but here is an example of time melting under the heat of such spectacular capture. Dali is jealous of this film. The cascades of burning ore fragments create patterns similar to some created by Bill Brand in the optical printer using rows of repeating and tumbling images. There is a constantly new feeling to the framed image. The camera shutter works in time with the shower of metal flowers to unbelievable effect. It seems re-animated. Vulcan lives. A Frankenstein effect of the material coming alive again under each projection. Again, an argument for holography.

Frampton pursued a goal of meta-film creation and, along the way, happened upon some radical techniques which elevated his bibliotic project to the level of euphoric discourse. He wanted to catalog a series of films, and shots within the films, that represented the entirety of human education and experience. Frampton and Magellan, by following the arc of the calendar, by walking a set path of stones through time, erected a World's Fair Globe to film consciousness, a bubble which collapses when it's not perceived through the right lenses. Circles of confusion abound.

Criterion published a dvd collection of Frampton films in 2012.

In 1999 or so, editor Berin Golonu invited me to write an article for ART WEEK's issue on Surveillance. This was published in ART WEEK 31, No. 9, 2000.

THE ARTIST IS WATCHING BACK
    By Owen O'Toole
    Since Sony's introduction of the video Portapak in 1968, artists have been exploring ways in which video, so often aesthetically linked to the commercial complex of television production, can actually express the personal, the poetic, the sculptural and the political. Video is unique from film in its immediacy; the tape can be rewound and viewed instantly after recording, then recorded over again, unlike film which preserves a one-time record of events and must be chemically developed. Video recording is particularly well-suited to the long watch of documentary coverage, while film has been used more often to record and add cinematic flourish to premeditated drama or to rigorous plastic montage.
    A fascinating use of the video apparatus, something noted right off by artists and business interests, is what is called "closed-circuit television." The camera serves almost as an intercom, connected by wire to a distant television or monitor for viewing. No recording unit is necessary, just a camera and a monitor. This was seized by the business world as a marvelous security device and the era of surveillance video was born. Artists have used television's closed-circuit potential since that beginning. An amazing aspect of our market-culture is that these mass-produced tele-envisioning machines have gotten out into the hands of so many creative people. While the security-state minded world of business and finance viewed their surveillance apparatus as protection from external, or internal employee threats (and installed it everywhere), artists have elegantly used video's reflexive properties for self-portraiture; it has proven a medium with a capacity to be every bit as beautiful as painting (Mary Lucier, Bill Viola). The artist finds wonderful use for a machine which otherwise is used to blend, chop and grind.
    Ray Beldner, primarily a sculptor and installation artist, has done a number of works commenting on corporate uniformity. Surveillance appears as one aspect of the new urban landscape in which we have come to accept a man-made or mirror image of the world as the totality of our relations with nature. Beldner cleverly clusters channels of closed-circuit video beside monitors playing back prerecorded material to multiply and confuse the sense of live action. He also curated On The Money, a show in which artists altered legal tender, raising issues of "who is watching or reporting," since defacing money is illegal. Beldner's sewing of dollar bills into a sack to carry horse dung is a clear editorial statement, hopefully supported by the First Amendment. Other Beldner installations find racks of business suits standing for populations of office-commuting, white-collar workers. One popular piece, Converse/Confer/Conceit, has pigeon cages built above suit racks, allowing pigeon guano to paint the shoulders of the drab uniforms, revitalizing them. The effects of a society of surveillance are bound tightly to the technology.
    Of course, video cameras have become expert witnesses in cases against overly violent security forces (Rodney King). Even more so than film, the video camera gives anyone the power of being the "roving reporter," stirring up dirt or just being in the right place at the right time. Some strange contradictions are at hand, in which utopian possibilities of unfettered creativity and self-awareness meet seemingly opposed notions of "big brother watching," the dystopian present of a market-driven planet as viewed through TV-Darwinism, and the artist is watching back.
    Kim Trang's videotape Ocularis: Eye Surrogates serves as a miniature history of surveillance in a mere twenty-one minutes. Trang set up a 1-800 number and invited the public to call in episodes of surveillance from their lives, then wove those voices together with a variety of mundane video material, everyday camcorder shots slowed down or shot from above to simulate surveillance-mode, including footage of driving and waving at friends in another car (who also have a camcorder handy!). "Surveillance is kind of funny because it creates anxiety and boredom simultaneously. The searching gaze is anxious because surveillance is a form where one watches for something to go wrong. But it's also stultifying watching monotonous footage of real-time video," state the voice-overs. The tape is an argument for the basic joys of the video camera while also carrying several warnings on the box: Always have camcorder ready in case of imminent disaster!
    I think that a definition of art could be 'paying attention.'
    --John Cage
    Since 1984, Orwell's prophetic year, surveillance has increasingly been the subject-content of video artists' work. In 1987, Branda Miller and Deborah Irmas curated an extensive exhibit at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions titled SURVEILLANCE. The show was a major survey of such work and presented videotapes, photographs and installations. Miller expressed the purpose of the show as "stimulating the viewer to look beyond the fetishistic examination of the technology itself in favor of the multifaceted information gathering process' greater implications." The show was international in scope and featured many artists, including John Baldessari, Louis Hock, Martha Rosler and Michael Klier. The catalog even included a Freedom of Information Act kit, with a form and instructions on how to obtain FBI files.
    With the advent and growth of cable television, Americans--those who watch the tube--have been fed a diet of image-content which demands more and more of the same, feeding a voyeuristic syndrome which has peaked in the confrontation and exhibition of daytime talk shows like "Sally Jesse Raphael" and "Jerry Springer." MTV's "The Real World" plugged into the fever for so-called "reality TV" which now harvests cash crop with "Survivor" and "Big Brother" (though locking a group of strangers in a house, or island, and observing them like rats, or watching them eating rats seems a rather forced hand of reality). The blossoming Internet has also absorbed its weight of this surveillance-exhibition culture drift. Eyeball cameras and CU-See-Me software have turned college kids in dorm rooms into cyberspace celebrities available for viewing 24-hours-a-day. Charge it to your VISA and help pay my college tuition. Thank you!
    Video art has finally been entering the museum canon with big shows such as Seeing Time (selections from the Kramlich collection) at SFMOMA, and of course, Nam June Paik's Guggenheim show in New York, which may have been the art event of the year. In 1999, the M. H. de Young Museum invited curator Glen Helfand and artists to examine the museum from the inside out in an exhibition titled Museum Pieces. "The artists and I were, outside of practical restrictions, given an impressive amount of free reign. We scrambled through the attic, poked into files, gained access to security cameras, and navigated the internal bureaucracies," states Helfand in his voice-over narrative for the Museum Pieces video produced by artists Sergio De La Torre and Julio Morales. An installation by De La Torre and Morales that was included in the exhibition, mixed active surveillance video on an elegant rear-screen sculpture, making fun of the surveillance pre-occupation of institutions while offering up its aestheticised future.
    San Francisco and its southern Silicon Valley are at ground zero for the testing and questioning of this new media. Micro-technology develops and is used to support moving-image art in museums and galleries at just the time when we begin to move away from image in general. Steve Seid, curator of video at UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, spoke of "a surveillance that doesn't necessarily involve moving images." For instance, Seid talked about a recent computer surveillance program called Spector: "Spector is more along the lines of where things are going. A lot of surveillance is displaced out of the image-world that we tend to think of. It's going towards the informational rather than the image, collating more and more data about everyone. It's more about consumption than policing." We've become trained through media saturation to police ourselves. "The kind of thing Safeway does when you belong to their club. They not only know what you buy, but when you do. Analysis gets into finer and finer detail, data becomes a (virtual) image of you. They no longer need an image or picture."
    The Bureau of Inverse Technology is a collective of artists working in close critique with science and technology. The videotape bitPlane is a remarkable work, an austere piece of surveillance video which manages to nose-in on the current state of technology from a new angle. Using a remote-controlled model plane equipped with a low-res video cam and transmitter, the Bureau invaded industrial airspace over the hi-tech campuses of Silicon Valley's major corporations, giving us a chaotic aerial mapping of the source-landscape of so much of our current technical necessities; a beautiful piece of pirate-radio surveillance. In her discussion of the Bureau's projects, theorist Natalie Jeremienko asks, "What is the political fabric of the information age? And what interventions can be made in a place where economics gets equated with politics, where diversity is rendered in homogeneous database fields, and where consumption forms identity?"
    Seid counters with a sobering glimpse into the future of consumer profiling: "You can go to a boutique on the Web, punch in your dimensions here, and they customize a mannequin with your dimensions. They put the blouse on you!"
    Owen O'Toole is a filmmaker and sound artist living in Northern California.

SEEKING A FRIEND

The apocalypse film genre is one that draws me like a moth to the flame, so I took a rare film pass to see SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, not because I'm a fan of Steve Carell or Kira Knightley. They both did a fine job in the film, but this movie is in some ways akin to a Bresson film, wherein the actors are there more as models to deliver their lines and let the ideas, the atmosphere, do the talking. There are a lot of good actors in SEEKING A FRIEND, but the film is made with such a casual demeanor that everyone gets to downplay their usual serious parts, even though the subject here is pretty serious: an Earth apocalypse by giant meteor. It's enlightening to watch people have to decide what's truly important in their lives and throw everything else away. With 3 weeks to live people turn to doing what is really important to them. I have watched some of Laura Linney's TV show THE BIG C recently and, diagnosed with advanced cancer, she goes about life in an entirely new way, no longer putting up with the bullshit that we often settle for in our assumedly livelong days. Linney's character waits several weeks to tell her family she has cancer, not wanting to fall too quickly into the trap of their sympathy and condolence. Carell and Knightley are drawn together in their final 3 weeks on Earth by a similar mutual detachment that allows them to make the most of the wretched situation and approach death somewhat at peace. While some people fall into the pit of their own worst qualities, these blessed souls find their higher selves at the final hour. It's an encouraging prospect: that apocalypse could be an opportunity for redemption on Earth and entirely unrelated to Christian legends of rapture and ascension. Goodness is its own reward. There is a funny scene at a TGIF-style restaurant named somewhat akin to a Hitchcock film, where the waiters seem to be all on ecstacy and the meal devolves into an orgy that must be escaped. Breaking into old friends' abandoned mansions and feasting from the restaurant grade freezer never tasted so good. There are also faint whiffs of THE OMEGA MAN in depictions of streets wandered by lost souls awaiting the end. The music theme, the High Fidelity-ish love for vinyl-- Kira walks through half of the film holding a short stack of LP favorites-- is amusing in a Music For A Desert Island way, but the retro-romantic Bacharach section was a bit indulgent to me. The sweetness of Things That Will Be Lost if we lose this world is definitely worth stating again and again and is a great function for film: to remind mankind not to crap his own nest, but Bacharach pushes the kitsch button in this instance. Otherwise I do laud writer-director Lorene Scafaria for her accomplishment; it's well written and shot, and I'll seek out her NICK AND NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST (writer) to see what else she's made of.

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY

Last week, my friend Jeff Plansker forwarded me a NYTimes article about Hollis Frampton's 1968 film SURFACE TENSION, which contains a race-walk through New York from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park using single-frame "timelapse". Writers Andy Newman and Michael Kolomatsky, as lovers of the New York they report on, have held the clip up for examination on the Times' website, including the repeated appearances by Frampton's then-girlfriend, and they also created a side-by-side comparison of the walking tour from Frampton's film and from their own cellphone.

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.