Sequencing with Eddy
At the beginning of November 2024 I reached out to a friend of my friend—Eddy Rakovic, and asked him for some film recommendations that would be helfpul in building *this* website. Specifically, for films that experiment with typography, in a way that it becomes an important part of the image or narrative. We met up for a coffee and Eddy gave me a short introduction to two films: Zorns Lemma (1970) by Hollis Frampton Drowning by Numbers (1988) by Peter Greenway. Both of them, are based on a clear sequence that creates the holding structure, and in both cases, to create that sequence, script or typography were used. I found Zorns Lemma particularly interesting, because of its radical approach, that felt very experimental and DIY, I started to look for more information on the director—Hollis Frampton.
Below I re-publish part of an interview with him, originally included in October vol. 32 issued by MIT press. Hollis Frampton was interviewd by Peter Gidal, who was also a filmmaker.
London, May 24, 1972.
Gidal: What do you consider Zorns Lemma to be about?
Frampton: Oh, dear! Are you asking that question?
Gidal: Absolutely.
Frampton: Well, I can, at least, tell you what the film came out of, and how it reached its present form. I first began using a movie camera at the end of the fall of 1962. At that time I was, in a way, being systematically forced into cinema by my work in still photography. I’d been working for a long time in series, sometimes long ones, and there were things about the still series that began to trouble me. For example, if you have a bunch of photographs that you believe cohere even in book space, let alone on a gallery wall, there’s no way to determine the order in which they’re seen, nor the amount of time for which each one is seen, nor to establish the possibility of a repeat. So that already had me thinking of film, as a kind of ordering and control, a way of handling stills.
Gidal: So the control element is time?
Frampton: Yes. Then at the same time I was thinking a lot about photography’s standard paradoxes. You have all these spatial illusions, and even tactile illusions, whereas somehow a cultural reflex has you believing that when you’re looking at something, it’s real, let’s say. Even if you’re assembling the impression from only the barest, most abstract kind of thing, at the same time the thing is absolutely undeniably flat; it doesn’t have impasto; it has nothing; it is perfectly superficial; it has only an outside. That paradox seemed to me most strongly embodied in some stills I had made of words, environmental words, in which the word as a graphic element that brought one back to reading (and being conscious of looking at a mark on a surface), emphasized the flatness of the thing. And at the same time the tactile and spatial hints that were compounded with it, the presence of the word within the image, were full of illusion. So that I’d begun to make a bunch of these still photographs, and I thought, “Well, I’ll make them into a film,” and I shot more than 2,000 words in 35 mm still with the idea that I was just going to put them on a stand and shoot them. And I did a little of that, as a matter of fact. It’s perfectly dead. It was simply going absolutely no place. Well, that’s how the thing began: as a concern with that spatial paradox or set of spatial paradoxes, and the kind of malaise generated as you get further into it. There still are a few of those original black and white photographs. They all have some real object lying on top of them. The oldest one is the word Fox, from the old Brooklyn Fox Theater. I think it is the first one I made ... dark blue sky, some little straw flowers or paper flowers on top of it as a memento to the sentimental nature of the occasion.
Gidal: Before you go on about your concerns in Lemma, could you briefly, descriptively give an idea of Lemma itself?
Frampton: Can I describe it?
Gidal: Yes, and then go on to the conceptual source of the actual film. But first clarify somewhat the film itself.
Frampton: Well, that’s easy. There are three parts. The first part is five minutes long, soundtrack with no image. A woman recites in a schoolteacherly voice twenty-four rhymes from the Bay State Primer, which was designed to teach late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century children the alphabet. It’s: “In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” The primer is oriented towards death, towards acceptance of authority, a kind of rote learning in the dark, I suppose. The second section opens with an enunciation of the roman alphabet itself, with as little context as possible. The letters are made of metal. Actually they were typed on tinfoil and photographed in one-to-one closeup. That’s how it developed. They weren’t cast.
Gidal: They look like huge, cast, three or four feet tall, silver …
Frampton: In the body of the second section, the main section of the film, which is forty-five minutes long, there are 2,700 one-second cuts, one-second segments, twenty-four frame segments, of which about half are words; the words are alphabetized. The reason for alphabetizing them really was to make their order as random as possible, that is, to avoid imposing my own taste and making them into little puns or something like that—much as the encyclopedists of the Enlightenment thought they could somehow categorize all human knowledge, or a large part of it, under the initial letter of the name of the subject. So that it just happens that quaternions are found in volume so-and-so under q. It’s crazy when you think about it, though it does generate some intelligible phrases, some odd pairings. Let’s see . . . there’s a Hart Crane sort of line early on that reads, “nectar of pain”; there’s a phrase of Victorian pornography, “limp member,” which sticks out like a sore thumb, a limp thumb, perhaps, straight out of My Secret Life or A Man and a Maid. That happens of course. Most words (not all, but most) were from the environment; they’re store signs and posters and things like that, and one finds out very quickly that very many words begin with c and with s, and so forth; very few begin with x or q, or what have you. One quickly begins to run out of q’s and x’s and z’s. Essentially one is using a chance operation. And, as always with a chance operation, along with some things that you want, it also generates holes. Fate has problems. It’s always true. And, having taken care of the operations, one has to think a great deal more about the holes. I don’t know at what point the notion supervened of substituting other images for words as they disappear in each alphabetic slot. I first thought all the images would be different. It would be what John Simon called (fake Slavic accent) “just a jumble of imaches!” You see ...
Gidal: May he rest in peace.
Frampton: Well, whatever. And for quite a long time I held that notion of the film. The greatest bulk of time was spent shopping in Manhattan for the words themselves. I can’t say I did it every single day for seven years, but I did it for seven years, and I shot actually four times as many words as I used, as well as duplications. The word shot comes up again and again; I think I used it five times. It was difficult to choose, but some just didn’t work for one reason or another. Rather than make 1,350 entirely different shots, I found that I could achieve the same degree of randomness by using twenty-four and dissecting them, exploding them. Once that occurred to me, the possibility of developing an iconography ...
Gidal: As separate …
Frampton: Yes, as separate from the words and what they were doing … presented itself; from then on it was easy. I still remember the images I shot and didn’t use. There was one of sawing wood, sawing a board, that I tried several times to get together. Many of the images are in some sense sculptural; they have to do with generative acts concerning three-dimensional space rather than two-dimensional space.
Gidal: But each image is one second long, so that whether the image is visual or visual-verbal, the time span is the same.
Frampton: Yes, that’s right. They’re all one second. Well, in actual fact they’re not all one second. I suppose I should talk about this. All of my work contains mistakes. Presumably everybody’s work contains mistakes. Sometimes I find mine when I’m making them and lock into them in one way or another; sometimes I find them out later. Some people think the whole thing is a mistake. But if you think about any long and comparatively ambitious work, you’ll see it contains errors of some kind or other. The Divine Comedy contains metric errors where Dante got locked into the text and had to fight his way out of it; it doesn’t always come off so well. So I decided to incorporate deliberately a series of kinds of errors.
Gidal: A system of errors?
Frampton: Right, so that I’d know where they were, since they were going to be there anyway. I won’t go into this at the moment, but there is one class of metrical errors. There are twelve images which are twenty-three frames long and twenty-four which are twenty-five frames long. I don’t think I generated those myself. The person who was helping me cut the footage down into one-second lengths, determined - by his own chance operations—where they were, and cut them.
Gidal: I noticed the “errors” while watching the film again. Still, it comes across very clearly that it’s one-second segments. You feel a certain tension at moments when it breaks. But not to the point of mystification, so that one thinks, “Is it a second or not?” The basic time segment is one second.
Frampton: But then that’s an elastic interval. It depends upon how much there is in the frame to see. Some are very simple and very graphic so that you almost start to get bored. There are others in which there is at least a suggestion that if you saw that one second repeated fifty times, you would still be frantic, that your eyes would be crawling around the frame still trying to extract stuff from it. Anyway, let’s try to get on with the description of the thing. All of the words are finally replaced by images. The last one, c, a red ibis flapping its wings in the Bronx zoo, is seen for only one second in the film’s entire hour. Then finally there’s a section, ten or eleven minutes long, in which a man, woman, and dog walk from very near foreground across a field of snow, a distance close to 400 yards, disappearing finally into pine woods. This is, for all intents and purposes, a continuous take, although it is not, in fact. It’s made up of five 100-foot rolls. Suggestions of fogged ends are left in and dissolved! So—if you’re at all into the materiality of film—it suggests several times that it’s about to end, then dissolves into a new image, then finally goes out to white. There’s a track on the last part which consists of six women’s voices reading a text by Robert Grosseteste, who was Bishop of Lincoln. The text, On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, is a beautiful medieval Latin treatise which is variously translated—translated, vulgarized by me, then cut down to about 620 words. It’s read—pocketa-pocketa—at the rate of one word per second. The text itself is, I think, apposite to film and to whatever my epistemological views of film are. The key line in the text is a sentence that says, “In the beginning of time, light drew out matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.” Which I take to be a fairly apt description of film, the total historical function of film, not as an art medium, but as this great kind of time capsule. It was thinking about this, which led me later to posit the universe as a vast film archive (which contains nothing in itself) with—presumably somewhere in the middle, in the undiscoverable center of this whole matrix of film-thoughts—an unlocatable viewing room in which, throughout eternity, sits the Great Presence screening the infinite footage.
Gidal: Screening unshot negatives.
Frampton: Well, whatever! It is, then, the infinite intelligence which, in the act of screening, imagines the images into the frame so that they reflect back into the projector. You can, one can, make a whole religion out of this thing! (Laughter from Marion Faller, Frampton, Gidal.) We’re trying. I plan later to have more to say about that. This is my metaphor because I am a filmmaker. Borges has a wonderful story called The Library of Babel, in which the entire universe has been transformed into a library of books. While conjecturing as to the actual structure of the library, he manages to reconstruct the entire history of human thought. All through this one metaphor! The cinematic metaphor seems to me to be more poignant, more meet.
I end the interview around the moment where I lost my focus and started exploring the references. The full interview is available here. The two other sections of this website link to most of materials that I found through that interview and asking my friends.
