Rachel Moore, author of Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) [MIT Press 2006] will discuss the program.

For Frampton, a polymath fluent in several languages, the word nostalgia ought not be equated with the German word Sehnsucht, which means “longing,” but with its Greek meaning: “the wounds of returning.”  With this connotation, (nostalgia)’s process of resurrecting and destroying Frampton’s old photographs is charged with the pain of “the lumps one takes (HF)” while remembering.  As thirteen still images burn to ash on a hot plate, as the movie camera registers the metaphorical disappearance of Frampton’s years as a photographer in New York, a voiceover wryly reminisces about friends and failures. The narration plays with the relationship between sound and image, granting Frampton  control over the viewer’s experience—a power vital to his interest in cinema as a system whose structure the viewer discovers in ordered time.

In 1983, Frank Stella was invited by Harvard to give the Charles Norton Eliot lectures; the following winter, he was featured in an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum entitled Frank Stella Selected Works. Frank Stella at the Fogg documents a gallery talk and interview with Stella during the show. Beginning with paintings he made in 1958 and continuing through his work from the early eighties, Stella comments on various pieces. Looking back at a painting from the sixties, he jokes that “it may never be that easy again.” Another piece prompts him to imagine how he would do things differently, if he were to return to it. Faced with his output from the last thirty years, Stella is alternately pleased, amused, and slightly regretful, as his audience, and the camera, elicit moments of introspection that give us insight into seminal paintings from his career.

While working at a photo lab, Frampton found that the waste at both ends of the rolls of processed film—where chemicals worked on the emulsion through clips used to attach the film to the machine—produced images far too interesting to be discarded. For Palindrome, Frampton selected images which he described as “tending towards the biomorphic,” resembling abstract surrealist painting. However, the rigid palindromic structure that Frampton imposes on the images—a motorized sequence based on “twelve variations on each of forty congruent phrases”—deviates from the subjective aesthetic of the expressive, demonstrating Frampton’s interest in the “generative power” of films composed by rules and principles.