introduced by Michael Zryd
presented in association with Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Series
[members: $5 / non-members: $10]
In his drive to explore and catalog the possibilities and parameters of cinematic representation, Hollis Frampton delighted in paradox, frequently creating complex conceptual structures that pitted the precision of language against the abstraction and excess of photographic representation. Visiting Frampton scholar Michael Zryd of York University, Toronto, presents two of Frampton’s most significant cinematic propositions. Taking the projected white rectangle as a maximalist basis of all cinema, A Lecture evokes a profound consideration of cinematic “aboutness” and stands as one of the cinema’s most significant challenges to a reconceptualization of the art form, while his 1970 masterpiece, Zorns Lemma — described by Peter Gidal as “the attempt to break down the authority of language” — leads viewers away from logical and linguistic order into an exhilarating world of imagery, color and light. (Steve Polta)
The original audio recording of A Lecture has been preserved and made available for this event by kind permission of the Harvard Film Archive.