Time Lapse Looped in Hollis Frampton's Remote Control

It is surprising that Hollis Frampton's published writing contains no explicit reference to time-lapse cinematography.¹ After all, Frampton straddled the disciplinary boundaries between science and art, claimed dual status as still photographer and filmmaker, and made movement and time central to his theoretical speculation, a cluster of investments that would seem, at the least, time-lapse adjacent. Moreover, some form of the technique appears in his films Surface Tension (1968), Ordinary Matter (1972), Pas de Trois (1975), and, the subject of this essay, Remote Control (1972). In this film, which occupies the sixth position in the seven-part Hapax Legomena, Frampton applies time lapse, a technique with phylogenetic roots in the natural sciences, to flatly inorganic subject matter: the television set.

The foundation for Remote Control is a hectic sequence of programs that appeared on Frampton's TV over the course of an evening. With the focal length of his Bolex set to eliminate anything outside the box, Frampton filled a hundred-foot roll (about 2 minutes, 45 seconds) with images of faces, cowboy hats, cars, city streets, talk show hosts, and other transmitted ephemera, taking about one frame for each change of the visual field (figure 1). This fervid condensation was shot in color but printed to black-and-white stock and flipped horizontally (compare figures 2 and 3). The film's twenty-nine minutes (depending on projection speed)

Figure 1.

Remote Control (Hollis Frampton, 1972).

Figure 2.

A cropped, horizontally flipped image of Cab Calloway in Remote Control (Frampton, 1972).

Figure 3.

The same image from figure 2 as it originally appeared in Madigan ("The Midtown Beat") (NBC, 1972).

consist of loops of this sequence punctuated by seemingly random insertions of black title cards displaying circled white numbers from 0 to 40 that, according to Frampton, represent abstract principles for organizing moving images (figure 4).² The most frequent number to appear, the number 1, is always accompanied by a graphic of a variation on a square with dotted-line edges receding into one-point perspective, as though being projected (figure 5).³ Frampton's unusual time-lapse methodology ensures that successive frames are entirely different from each other, creating what his compatriot Peter Kubelka would call "strong articulations."⁴ This results in a lightning pace and abstraction of the images, whose specificities become general arrangements of visual patterns. Battered by this "further and further acceleration of the eye," we skim the surface of the film trying to grasp an object that outpaces us.⁵ After ten repetitions of the loop (one of which appears in color), numbers scattered throughout, the film comes to an abrupt end.

While Hapax Legomena is arguably considered Frampton's greatest cinematic achievement, critical exegesis has heavily favored its first three parts: (nostalgia) (1971), Poetic Justice (1972), and Critical Mass (1972). Consensus holds that the quartet of "back-half" films, which includes Travelling Matte (1971), Ordinary Matter, Remote Control, and Special Effects (1972), are weaker entries. Even Frampton partisans such as P. Adams Sitney and Scott MacDonald have called these films "disappointing" and "rather unmemorable," respectively.⁶ Remote Control has received perhaps the least amount of attention, which has cemented its reputation as peripheral, helpful for its intertextual illumination of the other films in the series but not fully autonomous, nor, in Frampton's terms, is it a "summary film," that is, a sui generis work such as Zorns Lemma (1970) that can be

Figure 4.

Remote Control (Frampton, 1972).

Figure 5.

Remote Control (Frampton, 1972).

easily recognized as exemplary of an oeuvre or broader artistic current.⁷ In fact, Frampton suggested that Remote Control may be the only nondetachable film in Hapax, intelligible only in its relationship to its siblings.⁸ Hapax's films are routinely understood to be chapters in an ironic autobiography tracing Frampton's artistic trajectory from photography to cinema...