“For A New Cinema” was the impassioned title of Afterimage No. 4 and that issue brought together both sides of the “two avant-gardes” that were proposed in an influential essay by Peter Wollen. On the one hand here in the issue was the more demonstratively political “counter cinema” of Godard and on the other the more formal avant-garde represented by the important theoretical text of Paul Sharits’ “Words Per Page” and a long and important interview with Hollis Frampton (published in The Reader). For Afterimage this was an avant-garde which aligned itself with the most ambitious modern painting, writing and music. With his masterpiece of 1970, Zorns Lemma, Frampton was an exemplary figure for the journal’s editors and not just for his films but for his richly elaborate writings on cinema and photography. They later published his lovely speculation “A Stipulation of Terms for Maternal Hopi” in Afterimage 8/9.

Hapax Legomena is an ambitious cycle of seven separate and very different films, each of which can be considered independently. Together they offer an exploration of the possibilities of cinema from the autobiographical and the narrative to using system structures exploring the basic parameters of film itself. All of the films involve the spectators in the creation of what they are watching.

A photographer’s perverse autobiography through which we are taken by the voiceover of Michael Snow, (nostalgia) plays on Frampton’s own immersion in the New York art scene. Poetic Justice is a script which calls upon viewers to create their own imaginary film, and Critical Mass is a starkly visual, sonic quarrel that builds upon repetitive structures. This takes us on into films in which Frampton leads to the very basis of cinema; film in Special Effects is reduced to film frame, print, colour, sound, time.

There will be an intermission before Travelling Matte.