Two short experimental avant garde works by Hollis Frampton are the focus of my final entry here on the Criterion Collection films of 1966. In wrapping up my recent coverage of earlier years, I've turned to the works of Stan Brakhage, whose films generally don't get assigned a specific release date by IMDb, presumably because nobody is really all that sure when such low-budget, hand-edited reels were first threaded through a projector and put up on a screen for the entertainment/amusement/bewilderment of the artist and his circle of peers who gathered together in assorted lofts, galleries and warehouses to view these curiosities. But since Criterion didn't include any Brakhage offerings from this particular year in either of the two anthology volumes dedicated to him, I'll turn to the next obvious choice, the aforementioned Hollis Frampton.
Given my relative lack of exposure and familiarity with the artistic scene from which these films emerged, I can honestly admit that if Manual of Arms and Process Red, the two films up for discussion here, had been mistakenly attributed to Stan Brakhage, I would have gullibly fallen for it, since there's not all that much difference that I can discern in what Frampton was doing at this stage of his career and what Brakhage did back at a roughly similar phase of his artistic development back in the mid-1950s: rapidly edited closeups of assorted bohemian types in anonymous, enigmatic settings, often fixing the camera on portions of body parts, in and out of focus, with odd angular camera movements, garish lighting, and no traditional sense of narrative purpose as far as story-telling was concerned - all interspersed with lots of blurry smears of light, darkness and color, the result of rapid pans, random inserted bits of leader and other film stock that most directors wouldn't think twice of disposing of but would be aghast at including in their final product.
Of course, Brakhage went on to create some visually dynamic loops in a very distinctive style, following his penchant for handcrafting the actual film itself with paint, plant and insect bits and other experiments in creative damage. From what I've seen, Frampton didn't follow Brakhage's lead in severely manipulating the individual film cells, but he did go on to carve out his own recognizable niche in the mysterious realm of high concept experimental filmmaking. My main hang-up with these two examples of his early work is that he hadn't quite established that individual voice that produced memorable results.
The 17-minute long Manual of Arms is the lengthier of the two pieces, described by Frampton himself as a "snapshot album" that included 14 friends of his at the time, the only name of whom I recognize is that of dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp. We see each of them introduced in alphabetical order (though I only learned that by reading the typical extravagantly loquacious liner notes found in such collections; there are no credits shown on screen other than the HF logo that Frampton used to signify that the film was done.) Their faces are all lit from the left side and I suppose that with close enough scrutiny, one can read various character attributes into their gaze, their hair style, their poise in front of the camera. After we run through that sequence, each model takes another turn before the lens, sitting on a stool, doing mundane things like drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, trimming fingernails, caressing a can of beer, nodding, smiling, gesticulating, glancing and sometimes even talking, though we don't hear anything they say. Occasionally, the lighting effects and compositions have a striking, evocative quality, but just as quickly, we're shuttled away into random technical explorations before any kind of prolonged contemplation can settle in. I suppose that if I were personally part of this artistic clique, or had close acquaintances in that milieu, this film would be a precious, priceless artifact, but for the most part, this feels more like flipping through an artist's sketchbook, Frampton's training manual, as it were, rather than the catalog of militant weaponry he would wield in subsequent attacks on aesthetic complacency that the film's provocative title suggests. Here's an excerpt:
More successful, perhaps simply because it's shorter (at 3 1/2 minutes), though it's also definitely more visually interesting, is Process Red. Here we don't see any faces - it's all hands, objects (saltshakers, cigarettes, ashtrays and chairs, hardboiled eggs, lighters, nuts and bolts and coffee mugs), overlaid with bright fuschia tints and intercut with light smears, black leader and geometric textures. I don't think it amounts to all that much, though for the sake of a few minutes of hot pink instigation, I can put up with a fair measure of artistic self indulgence, and even admire the audacity of the effort. Still, I'm glad to know from previous viewings that there's a lot more interesting stuff to be found in A Hollis Frampton Odyssey. But dig this anyway:
OK 1966, I'm done with you! It's been a great year but I'm ready to embark on a new adventure that will take me (and my dear readers) through the legendary Summer of Love - and beyond...
Next: Zatoichi's Cane Sword