[Frameworks] Experimental films on photography

[Bernard Roddy]

Dear Albert:

This is a nice invitation to read (I quote it below). For me it leaves too
much to consider. I had two reactions.First, I have been interested in
conceptual art's use of photography. Under these terms we would have to
impose a "post-photographic" restriction on what constitutes acceptable
examples in your list. I would submit a short list of classic texts written
by artists for publication in 1969 and 1970.

But I also just taught a course in which I used standard narrative cinema
in order to think about traditional philosophical material. And the film,
Memento, became interesting for reasons having nothing to do with any
experimental film.

Or so it would appear. One could undertake a whole research agenda in which
the role of memory in the understanding of shot relationships is explored.
This concerns the experience of the spectator when the questions concern
the order of events and their causal relationships. In his Matter and
Memory Henri Bergson was preoccupied by 19th century research that involves
brain lesions. Bergson uses results in neurophysiology to confirm his
hypotheses about memory.

But it was in order to get a handle on Deleuze's reference to the memory
image that I found myself reading Bergson. Deleuze is extremely casual with
terminology, but Bergson isn't. What Deleuze means by the memory image and
the time image can only be appreciated, of course, by reviewing a history
of narrative cinema. But what Bergson means when he discusses research into
memory disorders can be appreciated by any artist working with images that
replicate perception.

In Memento Leonard takes instamatic photographs that are developed before
his eyes. They are only part of his basis for deciding what he will do in
the future, but as images fixed on paper they make possible repeated
experience of the circumstances of some past event.

Why burn a photograph documenting something you did? What is the
significance of a character's understanding of the value of a photograph
for the understanding that a spectator has of the plot?

Bernie


- - - - - -

Hello all,

I was making a list of experimental film practices on photography and I was
wondering if you could suggest more titles.

At first I wanted to focus just on movies where photographs are deleted
(burned, destroyed) or denied but I only know *(nostalgia)* for Hollis
Frampton and the project *Found Monochromes* by David Batchelor (slides).
Does anyone know other films where the main purpose is the destruction or
the invisibility of photographs?

On the other hand I have started a list of films made from photographs.
There are dozens of films (some of them animations) where the object of
analysis are still images, from filmed Polaroids to appropriation of
advertising images from magazines or the accumulation of digital images
found on the internet:

*Transformation by Holding Time* by Paul de Nooijer
*Pasadena Freeway Stills* and *Hand Held Day* by Gary Beydler
*Production Stills* by Morgan Fisher
*Frank Film* by Frank Mouris
*Boy Meets Girl* by Eugènia Balcells
*Wall *by Takashi Ito
*Photodiary *by Takashi Ito
*Clandestine Porn Film* by Augustin Gimel
*DIES IRAE* by Jean Gabriel Périot
*The World as Will and Representation* de Roy Arden

Do others come to mind?

Thank you,
Albert Alcoz
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