The Moving Image Source Calendar is a selective international guide to retrospectives, screenings, festivals, and exhibitions.
Descriptions are drawn from the calendars of the presenting venues.
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Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena
March 25-31, 2009 at
Anthology Film Archives
, New York
Hollis Frampton-photographer, theoretician, philosopher, and, above all, filmmaker-is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect-he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics, and philosophy-combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade and a half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.
Frampton's seven-part Hapax Legomena is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole-an enigmatic structuralist "autobiography," a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, Hapax Legomena is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.
This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of Hapax Legomena, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writing of Hollis Frampton, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton's critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.
In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton's A Lecture, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago), each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast.Featured Works:
Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia (1971, pictured); Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice (1972); Hapax Legomena III: Critical Mass (1971); Hapax Legomena IV: Travelling Matte (1971); Hapax Legomena V: Ordinary Matter (1972); Hapax Legomena VI: Remote Control (1972); Hapax Legomena VII: Special Effects (1972)
Program information:
