one of which is cinema in its dominant, consciousness-miming form. The logic
of the Dedekind cut also informs Frampton’s critical media practice insofar as
this practice involves the introjection of photographic (micro-)temporality into
cinematic time. Accordingly, if theMagellanproject comprises the larger con-
text for Frampton’s theorization of the infinite film, his media practice finds its
primal scene somewhat earlier in his career as filmmaker, namely inCritical
Mass, thefilm made directly in the wake of–and as I shall suggest in
response to–his second most critically acclaimed film,(nostalgia). Indeed, if
(nostalgia)marks Frampton’s conversion from (still) photographer to filmmaker,
as has been suggested by more than one of Frampton’s commentators,Critical
Massmay mark his further conversion from filmmaker to media modulator.
Critical Mass, in other words, inaugurates Frampton’s own anticipation of
new media art practice as part of what I termed, at the beginning of this article,
experimental film’s aspiration to the condition of new media.
While(nostalgia)andCritical Massboth address the elective affinity linking
photography and memory, they could not differ more in how they do so nor in
their respective visions of what is at stake in this affinity. Most striking in this
regard is their divergence of temporal scale: whereas(nostalgia)embraces the
temporal flux of mainstream cinema (fps) in order to highlight, and perhaps
also to question, the power of photography to recall and to mourn the past,
Critical Massliterally introjects the static instantaneity of photography into
the cinematic flux.
(nostalgia)comprises thirteen sections (thirteen-foot reels of film), each of
which includes an image sequence featuring a photograph displayed on a stove
burner for aboutseconds before it begins to burn up and is accompanied by a
voice-over description that, as it becomes slowly apparent, does not correspond
to the presently depicted photograph, but to the very next one. The effect of the
asynchronous presentation of description and image is to activate the viewer’s
faculty of recollection such that the appearance of each image subsequent to the
first one revivifies the now past description, though not without imparting a
nagging feeling of lost detail and some sense of disjunction between sensory
modes of cognition.
By contrast,Critical Massdepicts a heated domestic argument between a
man and a woman standing in front of a blank white wall, and is edited to
produce visual and aural stuttering as well as progressively mounting desyn-
chronization of image and sound. While the editing algorithm varies across the
film’s duration, the most commonly used pattern is, as Frampton describes it
“two steps forward and one back”, a pattern he calls“phasing”;for example,
the line“It was a very spontaneous thing”is depicted as a series of back-and-
forth phases:“It was ... It was a ... was a very ... a very spont ... very spontaneous
... taneous thing.”
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 65