MAKING LIGHT OF IT

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(uncredited photograph via Anthology Archives)
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We're a little over a month away from the forthcoming Hollis Frampton Odyssey DVD/Blu-ray release via The Criterion Collection , and there are few better introductions to the man and his work than his interview with Scott MacDonald, included in A Critical Cinema.  As I've mentioned several times before, MacDonald's A Critical Cinema series is an extremely accessible, insightful and essential read; a fantastic investment for those looking to get a firsthand view of the diverse scope of, as MacDonald terms it, the critical cinema...

(As with the Brakhage DVD/Blu-ray in the coming weeks I'll be posting more articles and ephemera on the works that will be included in the release)

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(Ordinary Matter by Hollis Frampton)

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(Zorns Lemma by Hollis Frampton)

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(Critical Mass by Hollis Frampton)

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(Traveling Matte by Hollis Frampton)

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(all stills via Anthology Film Archives)

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(S:TREAM:S:S:SECTION:S:SECTION:SS:ECTIONED by Paul Sharits)

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(Film stills courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

"All that is is light." - Dun Scotus Erigena

"To see a world in a grain of sand." - William Blake

These the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the "first spark" of refracted film light.

-Brakhage's program notes for The Text of Light

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(From Canto LXXIV by Ezra Pound)

(From Canto LXXXVII by Ezra Pound)

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage... by Bruce Elder)

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See Robert Grosseteste's On Light here...

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(From The Text of Light by Stan Brakhage; courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

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(Essential Cinema committee)

Earlier this week Mike Everleth over at Bad Lit, a site that should undoubtedly be near the top of your bookmark list, transposed The Essential Cinema repertory list, along with some of the history behind its conception.  To this day the list itself can serve as a very positive tool for those looking for valuable insight into some of the aims associated with key members of the movement at that time.  While the road to making the list seemed by all accounts predominantly paved with good intentions, there is no doubt that this effort rubbed some the wrong way.  In fact Scott MacDonald, a key scholar of the avant-garde, named his essential series A Critical Cinema in outright opposition to the committee’s repertory label of The Essential Cinema.  In a Critical Cinema 4 he muses:

"In The Essential Cinema there is a photograph of the Anthology Film Archives selection committee (Ken Kelman, James Broughton, Sitney, Mekas, and Kubelka), the group that had selected 'the Essential Cinema'-the 'nuclear collection of the monuments of cinematic art,' to use Sitney’s phrase-that would become the repertory of Anthology Film Archives.  Stephen Shore’s photograph of the committee, it seemed to me then, perfectly captured the dimension of Sitney that I was rebelling against.  There is something rather forbidding about the photograph, something arrogant, even hostile; and, in the 1970s, when so many of us were coming to grips with issues of gender and sexuality, and confronting whatever dimensions of patriarchy had infected us, this photograph seemed particularly reactionary…Of course, the committee’s presumption in selecting the ‘monuments of cinematic art’ seemed utterly typical of patriarchs everywhere."

Another key figure who had struggled with selection process was Stan Brakhage, who had written a mere two years earlier a fiery letter to Jonas Mekas concerning his withdrawal from the Filmmaker’s Co-op (which is an issue worthy of examination all unto itself).  In the following letter to P. Adams Sitney, Brakhage, among other things, highlights some his concerns surrounding the task proposed by the committee.