HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA at Anthology of Film Archives

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema, and his seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

HAPAX LEGOMENA was recently preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1973, 36 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.


PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound on CD.
REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent.
SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, b&w.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.


Sunairi: The first program I enjoyed so much, maybe I had more concentration??  "Nostalgia" started out with precise idea of talking about film maker's past life as a photographer, while burning picture by picture, telling stories of his experiences of taking photographs of things, people and observation and friendships and so on, while dropping names.  Then slowly he would talk about one photograph while showing another photograph burning, so you have to remember what he is saying while looking at burning photo of the story he told before.  Then elegantly, he finishes with a story while showing another photograph about his taking picture of a corridor while missing the moment by a truck driving into that corridor and later finding out there were mirroring reflection of a building's window to a window of the truck, scaring him to quit taking pictures while declaring to become a film maker with this film.  It is sort of "Blow Up" scenario while discovering an image on the photograph he took, which brings the photographer into an unknown problem, in Framtpon's case, end of his photograph.  


As I remember Frampton's name often from "October" magazine, he is structuralist.  That shows in the first, "Nostalgia" as well as "Poetic Justice" which is basically a film with flickering script/poetry type of narrative.  I would almost say it was imaginative, but most of the times were dry, and here and there especially in the sex scene, as depicted in text, like outside of the window of a couple having sex, there were pigeons, people, scenes and Hyenas.....doing all kinds of things which were imaginative and it seemed maybe the whole script could have been just while a couple is having sex........However, it is great structural excursive and as often with experimental works, it was long.


"Critical Mass" was interesting, couple fighting.  Constant humor in observing two bickering, repeating, cutting almost like music while the images repeats, sometimes they won't synchronize with the sound, beautifully turning white with countless circles appearing. 



Then, the second program was just excruciating.  Maybe the first one with fast motion landscape was nice.  Ordinary Matter with filming TV? in fast motion was just so long and excruciating. Special Effects was nice sound and it was mostly about that.