CRITICAL MASS - SCREENING SERIES
FALL 2009:
Thursday, October 15 – 6:00pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center
Presented by Conversations at the Edge
(The Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
HOLLIS FRAMPTON: SOLARIUMAGELANI
Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins in person!
CATE presents a rare screening of three exquisite yet lesser-known works from 1974: Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice. Part of Magellan, Frampton’s unfinished epic film cycle intended to screen over 369 days, these works take on the primordial rhythms and energies of life and death within a pasture, slaughterhouse, and steel mill. Introduced by SAIC professor and Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins and followed by a book signing of Jenkins’s On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009). (1974, ca. 95 min, 16mm)
Summer Solstice (Solariumagelani) (1974, 32 min, 16mm)
"...the operations that dislocate a film like SUMMER SOLSTICE—I hope irreparably—from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy farm document, or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure—the intrigue, possibly—of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching." (Hollis Frampton)
Autumnal Equinox (Solariumagelani) (1974, 27 min, 16mm)
"...filmed in a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, MN...Frampton utilizes a shooting strategy that flattens and pictorializes a palpable space of action that includes not only cattle (now seen hanging from huge meathooks), but even on occasion, figures. The abattoir is seen in the fleeting movements of Frampton's hand-held camera. The shots generally begin and end with swift panning movements, which effectively flatten and abstract the objects of this work environment. And although a brief passage of green leader is used to mark each cut, the smearing effect of the rapid camera movements tends to elide the shots, to make the flattened color planes run together." (Bruce Jenkins)
Winter Solstice (Solariumagelani) (1974, 33 min, 16mm)
"Shot at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works in Pittsburgh...WINTER SOLSTICE is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal—all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. The complex abstract compositions that flash upon the screen in full-scale explosions of white light or in the aftermath of effervescent sparks reflect Frampton's painterly handling of the camera (hand-held and fluid) and his rhythmic use of color (blue frames are used to mark each cut). While WINTER SOLSTICE pays homage to the work of a number of New York school painters, its steel mill setting represents, as Frampton noted, 'A pretextual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors.'" (Bruce Jenkins)
Visit Conversations On The Edge.
*****
Friday, November 13, 8pm at Block Cinema
Presented by Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
FRAMPTON AND FRIENDS
Introduced by School of the Art Institute Professor Bruce Jenkins
A program of films made in collaboration with or in homage to friends and artists in Frampton’s circle.
A & B in Ontario (with Joyce Wieland) (1984, 17 min, 16mm)
"...there is in A&B IN ONTARIO the reflexive presence of Frampton as a contemporary 'man with a movie camera.' Eighteen years after the original material was made, the film was assembled (during the summer after Frampton's death) by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties) shoot each other with cameras." (Bruce Jenkins)
Manual of Arms (1966, 17 min, 16mm)
“Courtly dances with friends and lovers, in the form of a 14 part drill for the camera, incorporating physiognomic & locomotor evidence related to the lens by 13 artists and an historian, namely: C. Andre, B. Brown, R. Castoro, L. Childs, B. Goldensohn, R. Huot, E. Lloyd, L. Lozano, L. Meyer, L. Poons, M. Snow, M. Steinbrechner, T. Tharp, J. Wieland.” (Hollis Frampton)
Artificial Light (1969, 25 min, 16mm)
"ARTIFICIAL LIGHT repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait-shots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lap-dissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon... There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. That chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis; his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formulae. Usually the logic he invokes is that of the paradox... In a recent lecture at the Millennium in New York, Frampton hypothesized an atemporal alternative to the history of cinema, illustrated by a sequence of his works. With ARTIFICIAL LIGHT, which was not completed in time for that lecture, he challenges the newest historical phase of the formal cinema, the Structural film." (P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture Reader)
Snowblind (1968, 6 min, 16mm)
Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in imitation of 3 historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work.
Surface Tension (1968, 10 min, 16mm)
"The influence of minimal art (rather the aesthetic of minimal art) on the avant-garde cinema is very great. Most of the important young filmmakers, especially on the East Coast, might be considered minimalists. Certainly Hollis Frampton's SURFACE TENSION is from that milieu. The film itself has three parts: a comic static shot emphasizing the passage of time; a fast motion tour through a city with fractured German commentary; and a slow seascape with fish floating midscreen. In this last section phrases translated from the German commentary are printed over the image. Of all the films seen in this festival, SURFACE TENSION is technically and spiritually the newest." (P. Adams Sitney, Program note, Maryland, 1969)
Visit Block Museum of Art.
*****
Saturday, December 12 – 8:00pm at Chicago Filmmakers
Presented by Chicago Filmmakers
BIRTH OF MAGELLAN
Hollis Frampton's unfinished Magellan Cycle was to be the crowning achievement of the structuralist filmmaker's career but, in 1984, he died before he could complete it. Planned to run 36 hours in length and to be viewed over the course of 371 days, the cycle loosely follows Ferdinand Magellan's five-year journey around the world. Instead of providing a linear narrative, Frampton breaks down the voyage into a rediscovery of the tools of perception and social integration.
"By the time we have got out of school, we have learned to punch in by 8:15 in the morning, we have learned to read 'no right turn,' we have also on our own looked at 15,000 hours of unregulated, ungoverned, undecoded images that constitute our real education. I grew up like that - everyone grows up like that, Magellan is a film that, like all things (since I have not had the luxury of perfect alienation, but only the partial luxury of imperfect alienation) comes out of an imperfect understanding of my culture. It is probably easiest to imagine it as a project if it is understood not as a project in drama, or in literature, nor as a project in sculpture, but as one that subsists as a work of sculpture in time rather than space." - HF
Matrix (1977, 28 min, 16mm)
"This is a work that is central to the Magellan voyage. There are multiple layers of imagery (slaughterhouse footage, steel mill footage, imagery of cows in a field, hexagonal shapes apparently punched into the film material) which are all presented simultaneously. The superimposition of what are, I assume, variously filtered layers of colour material which creates a glorious flow of shapes" (Scott MacDonald)
Mindfall I & VII (1977-80, 36 min, 16mm)
"Frampton was especially fascinated by Eisenstein's theory of 'vertical montage,' the notion that filmic structure could be built not only horizontally (sequentially), like a melody, but vertically, like a chord. In the MINDFALL sections of "Magellan" Frampton used desynchronized sound, along with super-imposition and a complex editing structure, to approach the possibility of vertical montage." (Harvey Nosowitz)
Cadenzas I & XIV (1980, 11 min, 16mm)
"CADENZA I offers up multi-layered references to the primordial, to birth, and to Creation. CADENZA XIV: the laugh track...variously suggests a partially displaced relation to the silent comedy in CADENZA I, a reaction to the blatancy of the sexual symbolism and perhaps even an irreverent reflection on the emotion-laden symbological practice of the poetic tradition of personal filmmaking." (Bruce Jenkins)
Visit Chicago Filmmakers.
*****
WINTER 2010
[The information below is tentative at the moment; check back later in the fall for more details or visit the White Light Cinema and Doc Films websites to join their email lists]
Friday or Saturday, January 16 or 17 – 8:00pm at The Nightingale
Presented by White Light Cinema
Zorns Lemma (1970, 60 min, 16mm)
+ possible shorts
Visit White Light Cinema.
*****
January 22 and 23 at Doc Films (University of Chicago)
Presented by Doc Films
Friday, January 22Hapax Legomena (complete series) (1971-73, 202 min. total):
Nostalgia (1973)
Poetic Justice (1972)
Critical Mass (1971)
Traveling Matte (1971)
Ordinary Matter (1972)
Remote Control (1972)
Special Effects (1972)
Saturday, January 23
"Fragments from Magellan"
Yellow Springs (Vanishing Point: #1) (1972, 5 min.)
Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments (1974, 51 min.)
Pas de Trois (1975, 4 min.)
Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976, 14 min.)
Not the First Time (1976, 6 min.)
For Georgia O'Keeffe (1976, 4 min.)
Quaternion (1976, 5 min.)
Procession (1976, 4 min.)
More Than Meets the Eye (1979, 8 min.)
Gloria! (1979, 10 min.)
Visit Doc Films.
*****