is confronted with situations where what is retained (the just-past of the present
of experiencing consciousness) does not in fact coincide with the just-past of the
current image or set of photograms,–but ratherwith its just-to-come. Frampton’s
film literally forces its spectators to retain, and to do so repeatedly, what–at the
level of the image and soundtrack–remains still to come. In this way, it not only
destroys the temporal coincidence central to cinema’s“appalling ambition”to
mime the flux of consciousness, but also liberates adherent intentionality from
its subordination to the production of a fictional reality effect. In viewingCriti-
cal Mass, in short, we do not lend our adherent intentionality to the time of the
cinema, that is, to the time of images as the representational content of a fic-
tional or at least remembered experience. On the contrary, we place–or rather,
are compelled to place–our power to generate temporal adherence in the ser-
vice ofphotogrammaticflux, and learn through the startling disjunction between
our feeling of our own forward-moving continuity and our perception of a halt-
ing, stuttering narrative progress that this power stems not from the media
temporal object but from our own living embodiment of worldly“depresen-
cing”.
Notes
. Peter Lunenfeld,“Hollis Frampton: The Perfect Machine”inSnap to Grid(Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press,),-.
. Lev Manovich,The Language of New Media(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,),-
.
. Manovich,.
. I have criticized Manovich for this inNew Philosophy for New Media(Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press,), chap..
. Frampton,“For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses”inOn
the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, B. Jenkins
(ed.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,),.
. Ibid.,.
. Ibid.,.
. Ibid.,.
. “The infinite film contains an infinity of passages wherein no frame resembles any
other in the slightest degree, and a further infinity of passages wherein successive
frames are nearly identical as intelligence can make them”, ibid.,.
. Lunenfeld,.
. Gunning, presentation at the Roundtable on Cinema and Art History, SCMS, Los
Angeles, March,, as heard by the author. Se also Gunning’s article in the
present collection.
. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson,Film Art: An Introduction,th ed. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.,),.
68 Mark B.N. Hansen