Title: Yale
Authors: Frampton, Hollis, 1936-1984
Year: 1971
Subjects: Duchamp, Marcel,; Eliot, T. S.; Experimental films.; Motion picture producers and directors; Avant-garde (Aesthetics) United States.; Independent films.; Motion pictures United States History
Abstract: This audio recording contains a lecture given by the filmmaker Hollis Frampton at Yale University on December 12th, 1971. Frampton presents four parts of his film Hapax Legomena, including Nostalgia, Critical Mass, Traveling Matte and a draft version of Cascade (later renamed Special Effects). Frampton describes two works in progress Ordinary Matter “an excursion into pure corn” and what later came to be the film Poetic Justice as consisting of “two tableaux, two versions, one for men and one for women.” He goes on to say: “I have been forced to conclude not that there are similarities between music and cinema but that they are the same thing. In that case, the cinema of the ear was simply discovered 100,000 years before the cinema of the eye. If you can accept that much then cinema becomes not the youngest but the oldest of the arts, and has a patent claim to a certain kind of respectability that even painting, with its claim to the new stone age cannot hope for even within its own family.” Frampton then discusses Critical Mass as a retinal film, “half shadow show, half film.” He discusses Traveling Matte briefly, and his Duchamp plans for what came to be Ordinary Matter. He goes on to talk about the role of our cultural assumptions play in viewing images. Compares the soundtrack in Nostalgia to the notes in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Discusses the ephemerality of Duchamp’s Étant donnés in respect to his plans for the film “Ordinary Matter.”