Hollis Frampton
Poetic Justice
Rochester, USA: Visual Studies Workshop, 1973
[unpaginated], 13.3 × 21.3 cm., softcover
Edition of 150 signed and unnumbered copies
Hapax Legomena is a seven-part film cycle by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who considers the series to be "a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities." 'Hapax Legomena' translates to "things said one time."
Poetic Justice (1972) is the second in the series, following Nostalgia (1971), and followed by Critical Mass, Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Remote Control and Special Effects.
The film is a continuous static shot of a stack of papers, on a table next to a plant and a cup of coffee. Page after page is placed on top of each other, forming a script that tells a surreal story.
In an interview Film Culture magazine, Frampton said that the idea of turning the film into a bookwork came from Nathan and Joan Lyons. Lyons said:
When | first saw Hollis Frampton’s films, | was mesmerized by the clarity and brilliance with which he set about his project of deconstructing the language of film. Isn’t this what we were doing with the book in the 1970s as well? | sought and received permission to make a book of Poetic Justice. Like book pages, each shot in this film was given equal time. There is only one image, a tableau of a table with a coffee cup and a cactus bookending a film script which delineates 240 separate shots.”
"This book swims upstream to the place where it was spawned. Twenty years ago when | disbelieved that it would ever be given to me to make films, and when | was a lowercase surrealist, and when | believed that film-making started, like making love by telephone, with a script... wrote film scripts. Later, it came time to make a work in seven parts, of which Poetic Justice is the uncomfortable (it doesn’t move) second, and to recapitulate some of the history of film art as though it were my own life to recollect.
Such stereoscopy is not impossible. Ken Jacobs has given us a film in which simultaneous tridimensional spaces confound our various eyes: perfectly impossible, wholly realized. Earlier, a poet achieved a double exposure of Ulysses imprisoned in a horned flame, together with certain propositions of Richard of St. Victor—although there obtains by now other (and, for us, perhaps ampler) precedent for intercourse among modalities of vision and metalanguages of the seen.
That any book should share significant qualities with any film surprises me, penetrates to an obscure flaw among rejections crucial enough at one time. Now | suspect that unquestioning acceptance or unquestioning dismissal of the narrative propensities of the mind, lie to right and left of a major channel along which energy has leaked from film art. This leakage can be dealt with. If it is customary to say that film is young among the arts, it is more responsible to notice that film is the first of the arts that has its roots in consciousness as we know it."
— Hollis Frampton, afterword
