Tuesday 16 May 2006, 19.00

Hollis Frampton, USA 1971, 36’

American artist and writer Hollis Frampton's film overturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artist’s transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs that he has taken and selected from his past, along with one found photograph. A calm voice-over tells a story about each image, but it’s about the next image that the audience will see, not the one shown. Confounding comprehension still further, the narration begins and ends during the photograph’s combustion so that smoke and ashes busy your eye while you are trying to make sense of the image and the narration, trying to remember the story to fit the next image, trying to remember the image to fit the story you are hearing.

(nostalgia) is a formal masterpiece, long overlooked and under-studied. It emerges from a body of film work that is rarely screened, because the prints damaged and difficult to locate. Frampton’s work is held dear in artist filmmaking and film theory circles, but it has never taken its rightful place at the heart of modern art theory and practice.

Following the screening, Rachel Moore presents a brief talk about the film. In spring 2006 Afterall Journal launches its new publishing initiative, Afterall Books, with a new series of publications that focus on important single works of art. Frampton’s (nostalgia) is the subject of one of these, an illustrated study by Moore.

Rachel Moore is author of Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Duke University Press, 2000) and lecturer in International Media, Goldsmiths, University of London. Hollis Frampton, an influential artist and respected writer, was born in Wooster, Ohio in March 1936 and died of lung cancer in Buffalo, New York, 30 March 1984.

Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) by Rachel Moore is an Afterall Book distributed by the MIT Press. Afterall Books was established in 2005 at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
Free, no bookings taken