Artificial Light (1969)

Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking drinking wine laughing smoking informally The individual portraitshots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lapdissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections That chasm is intellectual as well as formal Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis his films all of them take the shape of logical formulae P Adams Sitney Film Culture Reader