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Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia
Hollis Frampton reminisces about twelve photographs, which burn one by one. Because the voice and images are not synchronized—each story belongs to the photograph that follows, not the one we see—a dual perception of time is created. As a viewer, you navigate between the photo you expect to see and the story accompanying the previous one.
Before Frampton became known as a filmmaker of the New American Cinema, he was mainly involved with photography. In Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia, he presents 11 of his photos, taken between 1958 and 1966, plus one by an unknown photographer. The photos depict friends in the New York art world, moldy spaghetti, and two toilets imitating a crucifixion. He reminisces about all 12 of them. After about a minute, the photos catch fire and burn to ashes. By filming the charred remains, Frampton in a sense recreates them.
In Frampton’s black-and-white film, part of a larger work titled Hapax Legomena, memory and anticipation merge.
Bio Hollis Frampton
Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American avant-garde filmmaker and pioneer of digital art. He is known for the broad and restless intelligence in his films. In addition to being an important experimental filmmaker, he was also an accomplished photographer and writer, and in the 1970s made significant contributions to the emerging field of computer science. He is considered one of the pioneers of structuralism, an influential style that uses the basic elements of cinematic language to create works that investigate film form at the expense of traditional narrative content. Along with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, he is one of the major avant-garde filmmakers from the New York of the 1960s.
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- This film was #28 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025