Short film review #1 Hollis Frampton's "Nostalgia"

Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia, is a playful examination of sound and vision, past and future, memory and temporality, perception and imagination. The movie consists of static shots of photographs burning on a stove with a voice-over narration explaining the photographs. The artistic “tension” of the movie is between the inconsistency of the images and the sound—the voice-over is one photograph ahead of the image on screen.

Thus, Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) creates a distorted temporality of inconsistency between sound and vision, past and present. Nevertheless, the timing difference between sound and vision remains consistent throughout the film, i.e. the sound always remains exactly one photograph ahead of the image, and the voice-over pauses overlap with the images of the burned photograph. This consistency creates a false sense of rhythm and precision, a dynamic feeling that may hide the discrepancies between sound and image at first. For Hollis Frampton, Nostalgia is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images.

Having viewed several excerpts from Frampton's other short films, including Poetic Justice (1972) and Zorn's Lemma (1970), it is clear that the structure and elements are typical of his style, however, the structure of Nostalgia is even more minimalist, and development in the pattern is largely unidentifiable.  

In a similar fashion, at the end of the film, the voice-over refers to the visual senses as he is inviting the audience to observe a photograph (which, because of the sound-image distortion does not appear on screen): “Here it is. Look at it. Do you see what I see?”

Thus, sound and vision provide a sort of thematic framework for Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia. A second opposition in Nostalgia is between the stillness of the photographs and the moving temporality of the film itself.