[Nostalgia] is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images. I began probably as a kind of non-poet, as a kid, and my first interest in images probably had something to do with what clouds of words could rise out of them...I think there is kind of a shift between what is now memory and what was once conjecture and prophecy and so forth.  

Hollis Frampton's 1971 black and white film (nostalgia) is composed of twelve still photographs, each accompanied by a voice over commentary and reminiscence, though sound and image are out of synch. The camera shows us one image while the voice describes another, yet to come. Each photo is marked sonically by nostalgia and anticipation. The movie camera "shows" each photograph, and simultaneously registers its destruction. One by one the photos are placed on a gas ring and each shot lasts as long as it takes for the photograph to burn up. The movie camera registers this disappearance, this burning up of the still image, as movement, it animates the still image as it destroys it—the photographs curl and tremble and dance, shudder, waver, and crumble into ash. (nostalgia) thus stages an encounter between photography and cinema, between stillness and movement, sound and image, present and past. In recording and destroying the still photographs cinematographically Frampton, in a sense, remakes them. He also documents a discovery: the final commentary describes how, at the moment of taking the photograph, the camera had captured something he had not seen. This aberrant chance detail, caught and revealed by the mechanical apparatus, is subjected to scrutiny via enlargement, so he tells us, to such an extent that it becomes virtually illegible.