Paul,

Thanks for the negative "evidence" of the Frampton "revival" in the form
of your account of the MoMA's installation of "Lemon."

Would the MoMA even consider showing a commercial narrative feature this
way? Talk about marginalization, and from *the* museum that pioneered
giving serious attention to film as an art form.

There exists in the Frampton file at Anthology some rather sad
correspondence between him and the MoMA, in which he pleads with the
museum that for the retrospective that they wanted to give him, they
should pay at least some rentals for his films; I believe he even
offered them a discount. They at the time were hoping to obtain the
films rent-freed, though a few years earlier they had paid rentals to
Brakhage after he made a big stink about it.

It has always appalled me that art museums will present films in video
projections with ambient light and so on as if they were paintings but
under conditions as inappropriate to film as it would be to show
paintings under far-too-dim illumination. They apparently don't get that
most films are made to be shown in darkened rooms to seated audiences
and not as gallery installations, and that a video of a film is a
reproduction in the same way that a photograph of a painting or a fresco
is a reproduction. It's one thing to justify videos of films in the home
on the grounds of accessibility, just as one uses art books (don't
worry, I'm not now reopening that debate again, whatever side you are on
in it), and quite another for a museum whose mission is to show original
art objects to do this. When they show reproductions of paintings,
typically as part of a show when they feel they need "evidence" of
something that can't travel (a Mantegna fresco in a Mantegna show, for
example), they identify it as a photo of a painting, but just as
typically art museums don't identify a videos of a film as a video of a
film. I won a small victory when I got a young assistant curator at
Northwester's Block Gallery to change a wall label to read something
like "Video copy of 16mm film," from a label that had just listed the
title and filmmaker. If you return to MoMA, Paul, I'd be interested to
know what the MoMA's label says; they, of all museums, they, being such
an early collector and preserver of film, should be able to get it right.

For what it's worth, Marilyn Brakhage has been getting requests from art
museums to show Brakhage films in this way, as loops off the DVD, and
has been turning them down.

This is not the first time that "Lemon" has been severely if
unintentionally dissed by culterati who display no understanding of this
wonderful little film. About ten years ago "Wide Angle" published an
article by a SUNY Purchase professor named Greg Taylor about Robert
Breer, an article that contended (not completely unreasonably) that
conventional strategies of interpretation and finding meaning were
inappropriate to avant-garde film, and that Breer's films were "beyond
meaning." (I don't have the article in front of me so my summary will be
inexact.) Taylor opened by citing two examples of finding meaning in
avant-garde films from a book by Maureen Turim, the second more dubious
than the first. This is a typical academic strategy: use the existing
literature to show problems therein that help support your thesis, if
possible to make it clear that your thesis is sorely needed, even
inevitable. In his third and final example, meant to outdo the first two
and "prove" his case, he quotes Turim to the effect that in Frampton's
"Lemon" the fruit obviously serves as both a metaphor for the female
breast and for the solar system. Taylor concludes this introduction with
a flip comment to the effect that we can thus see how absurd the
interpretation of avant-garde film can become.

I read this in shock and amusement and also horror, thinking, "Oh my
god, he's never seen 'Lemon'"! If you have, you know that the Turim
quote he cites is hardly an "interpretation" at all, but rather more of
a pretty banal plot summary. Frampton's eponymous title character (whose
performance style might be described, in light of our recent discussions
of acting, as uber-Bressonian) is filmed in "profile," with the
protruding nub or bud pointing horizontally to the right; while not
every person seeing this may immediately think of a female breast, it's
hardly an exceptionable thought. I've temporarily placed a scan of an
image from the film's opening at http://www.fredcamper.com/T/Lemon1a.jpg
for all to see. Frampton's film depends in part on the bright, thick
saturation of the lemon's colors; I can't imagine its beauty would come
through under the conditions described at MoMA. Again, Paul? How do the
colors compare?

But more, the film apparently consists of a single take in which an
offscreen light moves around the lemon (at least, that seems to be how
it was filmed), first illuminating it head on as shown, then from the
side so that part is bright and part is dark
(http://www.fredcamper.com/T/Lemon2a.jpg ), and finally from the rear,
most certainly suggesting via the light changes the effects on planets
and moons of planetary rotation, something that I thought of the first
time I saw it.

I found it incredibly depressing that an academic supposedly sympathetic
to avant-garde film would choose to write, even indirectly, of a film
he'd never seen. And I know that Frampton, who craved acceptance and
respectability, especially academic respectability, would have been
really depressed too, were he to have read the article, which appeared
well after his death. It also seemed sadly typical of academia that what
is at least a pretty good journal would print such an article, with no
corrections or apologies forthcoming. Professors all over the world
presumably read it, none being interested enough to actually have a look
at "Lemon." Writing and reading papers takes precedence over viewing
films, I guess.

Shortly after I read this article I had the occasion to meet Taylor; a
colleague of his invited me to give a talk to her class at Purchase, and
he wanted to have lunch with us in order to meet me. I gathered he's a
really nice guy, but I never really found out for sure, because I
started the conversation, rather uncollegially, by asking if he'd seen
"Lemon," and I still recall the sheepish expression on his face as he
admitted that he hadn't.

I later heard second-hand Taylor's own not inaccurate description of
this lunch, which was something like this: "I had always wanted to meet
the well-known critic Fred Camper, but when I finally got to have lunch
with him, all he wanted to do was attack one of my articles."

Fred Camper