Straits of Magellan: “Drafts and Fragments”

A sampling of forty-nine fragments from Frampton’s catalogue of ‘actualities’, the films from STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: “DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS” are all silent and unedited. Several invoke, directly, the work of the Lumieres, as in Frampton’s reworking of DEMOLITION D’UN MUR (1895) in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumieres’ wall. He makes reference to his own work and plays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that includes a series of appropriated ‘lenses’ ( a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of ‘screens’ a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).