Artificial Light

Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portraitshots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking informally. The individual portraits shots into a picture of the moon… There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. The chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis, his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formula. Usually the logic he invokes is that of paradox -a Modernist tendency that finds its literary apogee in the stories of Jorge Borges. In a recent lecture at The Millennium in New York, Frampton hypothesised an atemporal alternative to the history of cinema, illustrated by a sequence of his works. With Artificial Light, which was not completed in time for the lecture, he challenges the newest historical phase of the formal cinema, the structural film.-P.Adams Sitney.