This Action Lies (2018) by James N. Kienitz Wilkins. © Automatic Moving Co.
Thursday, January 23, 2025, 7:30 pm
All Over Coffee
Films by Dorothy Wiley, Hollis Frampton and James N. Kienitz Wilkins
Presented in association with The Lab
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets coming soon
A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.
— Hollis Frampton (1972): A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative
Cinematheque’s 2025 exhibitions commence with a peculiarly caffeinated coupling of two still life narrative experiments—Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (Hapax Legomena II, 1972) and James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ This Action Lies (2018)—two films exploring the mechanical gaze of the camera, the passage of time and the paradoxes of written and spoken language presented in cinema space, each rife with digressive humor and philosophy.
Annette Michelson on Poetic Justice: In Poetic Justice, Frampton presents us with a “scenario” of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are “projected” in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale […]. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table.… and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.
James N. Kienitz Wilkins: This Action Lies is a movie about the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives of an object that may not exist in a room that cannot exist, while at the mercy of a mistrustful monologue. In other words, a defense of cinema.
Program opens with Dorothy Wiley’s graceful domestic meditation Coffee (1977).
SCREENING:
Coffee (1977) by Dorothy Wiley; 16mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 8 minutes. Exhibition file from Canyon Cinema.
Poetic Justice (Hapax Legomena II) (1972) by Hollis Frampton; 16mm b&w, silent, 31 minutes. Print from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
The Action Lies (2018) by James N. Kienitz Wilkins; digital video, b&w, sound, 32 minutes. Exhibition file from the maker.
TRT: 71 minutes
This program is titled in homage to San Francisco artist Paul Madonna: An explanation of All Over Coffee is that it’s a comic strip without the comic. […] A series about storytelling using image and text in nontraditional ways.