Artificial Light (Hollis Frampton, 1969) (Patreon)

One of Frampton's simplest films, it's also probably the one that most clearly exemplifies what the supposed project of "structural film" is all about. In it, Frampton takes a completely negligible passage of film -- some friends of his shooting the shit in a painting studio, with the individual shots edited together with somewhat sloppy lap dissolves -- and subjects it to twenty different permutations, each shown one after the other with no hint of narrative development or accumulative build. A straightforward, WYSIWYG effort, Artificial Light is simply a demonstration of various ways that a single image set can be manipulated for some distinct formal effect.

In the first passage, Frampton shows the film upside down and backwards, so it is really only through the repetitions and alterations that we get to know the content of the work. Unlike, say, Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom the Piper's Son, which presents its source material au naturel and then subjects it to manipulation, Artificial Light asks us to look "through" the various formalist barriers in order to see what the film is. In so doing, we notice a few key moments -- close-ups of people smiling and laughing, one bearded gentleman giving the bras d'honneur to Frampton's camera -- but mostly we discover that the stuff going on at the surface of the filmstrip is a lot more interesting than the ostensible content.

P. Adams Sitney listed all twenty of the permutations, and it may be useful to read his list before watching Artificial Light (or at least watch it, read the list, then watch it again). It's obvious that Frampton's formal gestures are hardly exhaustive. He could have easily figured out another twenty things to do to the film. But the point is, Artificial Light is a serialist experiment, treating a passage of film as a basic unit of information on which to elaborate. Sitney compares this to twelve-tone music, where the composer establishes a row of all the notes and then composes by generating permutations based on that tone-row. But we could also compare Artificial Light to jazz, where the original film is a theme that permits Frampton to riff, producing twenty variations.

Artificial Light (along with Sitney's analysis) can be found here.