(nostalgia)—the wounds of returning

by Scott MacDonald

It strikes me as historically unfortunate that the word nostalgia itself was resuscitated such a short time after I made that film. It seems to be equated with the German word Sehnsucht, which means “longing.” It is nothing of the sort. In Greek the word means “the wounds of returning….” When Ulysses comes home, nostalgia is the lumps he takes, not the tremulous pleasures he derives from being home again.” – Hollis Frampton, in A Critical Cinema (California, 1988): 60,

For those of us who have admired the American avant-garde cinema that emerged during the late 1960s, early 1970s (especially what P. Adams Sitney termed “structural film” and cinematic responses to it), Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) has remained a particularly admired work. 

(nostalgia) was shot in 16mm and completed one year after Zorns Lemma (1970), as the first part of a 7-part meta-film titled Hapax Legomena (1971-72)—the title is a reference to a word occurring only once in a document, a body of work, or even in a now-“dead” language, so that, lacking multiple contexts, one can never be sure of its meaning. 

Hapax Legomena is what might be called a deflected cine-autobiography, covering the period just after Frampton moved from New York City to central New York State and began commuting to Buffalo to teach at the University at Buffalo. In addition to being an introduction to the series of films, (nostalgia) seems a belated, semi-goodbye to Frampton’s early passion for still photography, once he had embraced filmmaking as his primary mode—though he would collaborate with Marion Faller on the photo series “Vegetable Locomotion” (1975), a spoof of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion photographs, and do other photographic work as well. Here is an example of Vegetable Locomotion, “Apple Advancing”:

During its 36-minute runtime, (nostalgia) presents a series of 13 photographs and spoken texts, organized so that we look at each photograph gradually burn to ash on a hotplate in a bit under 3 minutes (the length of a 100-foot roll of 16mm film), while we are hearing a description of the next photograph that we’ll see. The middle 11 photographs are Frampton’s; the first photograph may be Frampton’s (no information is available in the film about this image), and the concluding image is apparently from a newspaper. Michael Snow reads each of the Frampton texts that accompany the images. We hear an interchange between Snow and Frampton before the first image, of a photographic laboratory, appears—Snow is not directly identified as the speaker, though in the text that describes image 10, Frampton apologizes to Snow–an in-joke for many who know the films and writings of Frampton and Snow.

Beginning with the second image, (nostalgia) engages the audience simultaneously in three different time registers. We look at the photograph in the present as it gradually burns to ash and we try to remember, while we can, what the previous text has told us about the image, and as we listen to the voice-over describing the photograph-to-come, we cannot help but imagine what that next image might look like. (nostalgia) is an emblem of how we function, moment to moment, within the past-present-future.

I suspect that most of those who admire (nostalgia) and have taught it and written about it over the years have one particular version of the film in mind, and assume that the version they know is the version. But during recent years (I’m writing this in 2024-2025) two developments have troubled our, or at least my, assumption that we know the film. First, for many years, I taught a 16mm print of (nostalgia) that I rented from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City. As 16mm prints came to seem too valuable to show (one dreaded scratching a print), like others, I switched to DVD—though at times I also may have rented a 16mm print, just to keep the analog version available to programmers.

Two digitized versions of (nostalgia) are available. The first, released on DVD in 2009, is part of “American Film Treasures IV: Avant-Garde, 1947-1986,” produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF). In 2012, Criterion released “A Hollis Frampton Odyssey,” which includes (nostalgia), and 23 other films spanning Frampton’s 22-year career as a filmmaker (he died at 48); it’s available as DVD and Blu-ray. The Criterion version includes a booklet with essays by a range of Frampton scholars: Bruce Jenkins, Ken Eisenstein, Michael Zryd, Ed Halter, and preservationist Bill Brand.

A modification of my sense of (nostalgia) occurred when I happened to look at both the NFPF and Criterion versions of the film within a short space of time. In the NFPF version we see each new photograph and hear the beginning of Michael Snow’s reading of the Frampton text that accompanies the image at exactly the same moment: 

In the Criterion version, we see the new photograph some seconds after Snow’s reading of the text has begun:

My memory of the 16mm print of (nostalgia) that I rented for my classes coincides with the NFPF version. 

Also, in the two DVD versions of the film, the transitions between successive photographs are different. In the NFPF version a one-second moment of darkness and silence separates one photograph from the next and its accompanying text, while in the Criterion version, the narration begins before the new photograph is seen—indeed, while the image of the earlier photograph is still on-screen:

Seen here, this transition creates what could be a momentary confusion: does “This” mean this burned image?.And the following image is, of course, not Frampton as the text momentarily seems to suggest, but Carl Andre, the subject of the previous text. As (nostalgia) continues, the image/text arrangement ceases to be confusing.

When I revisited Rachel Moore’s description of (nostalgia) in her book, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia) [London: Afterall, 2006], I discovered an additional confusion. Early in the book, Moore says, “In twelve of the thirteen segments a photograph appears on the screen in silence for about twenty seconds, which is just enough time to begin to make sense of it” [p. 2]. Later, she describes the film’s organization this way:

Each sequence [in (nostalgia)] goes through three stages. In the first, which lasts about thirty seconds, we see a perfectly legible photograph and we hear nothing. In the second, the photograph burns to the sound of a narration for a minute or so. The third part is silent and lasts almost as long as the narration lasted [p. 22]. 

Either way, this seems a different version from either the NFPF or the Criterion version of the film or the 16mm print I remember. Moore believes she saw two different versions of the film at MoMA at private screenings arranged with Nathan Silver [email to author, 4/18/24]. (nostalgia) is not listed in the MoMA catalog for the now-defunct, Circulating Film Program. 

When I contacted Tom Day, then the current director of the New York Filmmaker’s Coop, he was kind enough to make phone recordings of the opening moments of each Coop print. In one print, the narration begins the moment the image of a photographic darkroom appears on-screen. In the other, the narration begins eighteen seconds after we see the photograph. Here’s a link to the two recordings:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NihqaS0TVhNwXbEZUzOVkRAgQM6YP2Jb

Perhaps the two versions Moore remembers seeing were the two Coop versions, borrowed by Nathan Silver.

In April, 2024, I heard about what seemed to be a joke version of (nostalgia) that had been posted on YouTube. In this version, each of the photographs is accompanied by the text that describes it. The poster’s explanation: “Noticed the audio in Hollis Frampton’s classic Nostalgia was really really out of sync so I just fixed it up.” Apparently, this version provoked angry responses and it was soon taken down, along with the responses, though the following disclaimers are still available:

*disclaimer* this video syncs Michael Snow’s narration to be describing the photos as they appear—the original video has these descriptions offset by 1 photo. this video was originally posted without a disclaimer as a silly little prank for silly little structuralist nerds. It is not an accurate version of the video and shouldn’t be considered as an authentic Hollis Frampton.

*disclaimer 2* I’m not sorry but incompetent professors are unable to distinguish between this video and the original and I feel bad for their students.

Ironically, seeing the joke version can function as a form of research; the simultaneity of image and description allows us to comprehend not only specific details, but Frampton’s playful wit, much of which is obscured by the triad of temporal engagements during a correct screening of the film. For example, here is the ninth photo accompanied by Frampton’s description.

Of course, the image continues for some time after the 56-second narration ends. How much of Frampton’s description of this image is remembered during a normal screening of the film is hard to know—and this was especially the case when the only access to (nostalgia) was via 16mm prints, which usually were rented, projected once, and quickly returned to the distributor.

Further, though the joke version transforms (nostalgia), Frampton himself did a gallery installation of the images and texts, where image and description were seen together. This installation is documented, under the title “The Nostalgia Portfolio,” in Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations, the catalog, edited by Bruce Jenkins and Susan Crane, and published by MIT Press for a Frampton retrospective that opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (September 29-November 25, 1984), then traveled to the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, and the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Texas. 

In the end, at least for now, we are faced with the instability of a cinematic text and of an experience that many of us remember and some of us will continue to introduce to others. Of course, (nostalgia) feels different now than it did when Frampton was alive and present for 16mm screenings (he lived, not far from me, in Eaton, New York). These days, most of those who see the film, see it on one or another DVD version—since 16mm is no longer available in many institutions. When I do project a 16mm print of (nostalgia), my students hear the projector. For them, its sound seems a vestige of an earlier generation and something of a novelty; they often ask to visit the projection booth to witness the projector in operation. 

A more expansive limitation in our access to (nostalgia) has been offered over the years by filmmaker/programmer/historian Fred Camper, who has long believed that (nostalgia) is best seen when shown together with the other six Hapax Legomena films—only the first three of which are available on the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray (the Film-makers’ Coop distributes all seven in 16mm). Certainly, the experience of (nostalgia) reverberates in interesting ways with the diverse experiences of Poetic Justice (part 2), Critical Mass (part 3), Travelling Matte (part 4), Ordinary Matter (part 5), Remote Control (part 6), and Special Effects (part 7).

In December, 2024, I wrote to Camper to ask him if he remained committed to his belief that ideally (nostalgia) should be seen only as part of Hapax Legomena. He replied immediately:

There was a period in the 1970s when I found myself very annoyed by the overuse of the first three [parts of Hapax Legomena], but especially (nostalgia), in classrooms. The same rather obvious, almost mechanical points were made about those three again and again. Around this time, the whole of Hapax Legomena was finished, and I was able to see it twice, shown without a break, at Anthology Film Archives. Suddenly it became something else, something much greater, something that I even found, at the end, emotionally moving….

What was revealed, at least to me, by seeing the whole of Hapax Legomena in one sitting is that it is not simply an exploration of the paradoxes of cinematic representation, but an emotional and spiritual autobiography, from photography through language and a script, and a film melodrama, and video…to, ultimately, the mysterious power of framing in the illusionistic imagery of Magellan, the Frampton project that followed. Suddenly the last part of Hapax, Special Effects, becomes key to the seven, a meditation on the act of composing an image in which the smallest of changes can alter everything.

I could not resist telling Frampton on the phone something close to, “I much prefer the seven parts of Hapax Legomena seen together in a single projection, to seeing them projected separately.” There was a brief silence, then a reply I thought was spoken with sadness: “That makes two of us.” I was not very surprised [edited email to author, 12/26/24].

Still another useful context for (nostalgia) was supplied by Bill Brand (Frampton’s long-time friend and, since his passing, his preservationist) in the booklet that accompanies the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray). Brand explains that,

the goal of preservation is to guarantee the permanence of a work of art in its original form, but changes in technology and habits of cultural reception inevitably turn film preservation into an act of translation and interpretation…. 

For instance, in several sections of (nostalgia), we can see a prominent white scratch. Because the damage was in the emulsion, it was not reparable using film-to-film preservation techniques. While it might be possible to “fix” the scratch using digital techniques, should we consider it a defect or an integral part of the film? Since Frampton chose to use the footage despite the scratch, and since no version of the film has ever existed without it, we decided we would be wrong to erase it.

Indeed, while that scratch must originally have been a wound for Frampton and remains a wound for us each time we see or project (nostalgia), he must have learned to live with it, as we have.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that when I interviewed Frampton during the years 1976-1978 for October and for what would become the introductory interview in A Critical Cinema (California, 1988), he made clear that the memories he presents in the (nostalgia) texts are at best reasonable fabrications of events that had occurred at various points during the 1960s: “In my film there is a remastering of a certain number of lumps I took during those years as a still photographer in New York.” When I asked about his choice to have Michael Snow read the reminiscences, he responded, “The film is not about me. So, having fictionalized everything else, it seemed reasonable to fictionalize the physical organ of speech.”

On January 1, 1971, Frampton appeared at the Carnegie Museum of Art and read the text of (nostalgia) for the audience. I do not know whether the the read texts accompanied the images described or were arranged as they are in the finished film. But to hear Frampton’s reading, go to “Carnegie Museum of Art archive”, then, when you see the list of options, click on “Lecture and Press Conference with Independent Filmmaker Hollis Frampton, 1/21/1971”. Next, click on “Fv 001 002 005 B Access”. Frampton’s reading begins after he is introduced and introduces himself. Thanks to Ken Eisenstein who alerted me to this site.

In other words, a half century after Frampton released (nostalgia), those of us for whom the film was revelation and challenge, and remains a treasured memory, can barely recall—indeed, cannot precisely reconstruct, any more than Frampton could in 1971, our original experiences. And, of course, given the tranformations of the mediascape over recent decades, it can be no surprise that the NFPF version of (nostalgia) is currently available on YouTube, divided into four  numbered units: images 1-4, on 1/4; images 5,6,7, on 2/4; images 8-11, on 3/4; and images 12, 13, on 4/4. 

In the end, we may suffer our own wounds in returning to the film, but with the pleasure of knowing that for those who see (nostalgia) for the first time, it remains—in whatever format they experience it—both revelation and challenge. How can we not be grateful that the film has in fact survived, is alive, like us, struggling to stay relevant in a constantly evolving media-saturated world. A cause not for mourning but for cine-celebration!