La Transversale : Time Travelling
Nostalgia
Hollis Frampton
In 13 sequences, a photograph lies on top of a burner on an electric stove. As the picture slowly burns and turns to ash, a narrator reminisces about the next photo in the next sequence, i.e. as we watch one photo be destroyed, we hear about the next photo we’ll see. Although not identified in the film, the narrator is structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow, yet the photos and the stories that go along with them both belong to the director, Hollis Frampton.
"In (Nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton's films."
P. Adams Sitney (Visionnary Films : The American Avant- garde, Oxford University Press, 1979)
