Frampton’s Lemon: A Demonstration of Potential

Some considerations on a film and its subject.

It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

–Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”

First, it is in near-darkness. Then, a light comes up and shines on it. It, the lemon, lying on its side. It takes up most of the screen, but it’s not quite in the center of it. The western flank is cut off by the hard edge of the frame, just barely, and a modest ocean of negative space lies to the east. The surface it rests on is also, just barely, hidden from us. The light comes up and shines on it, shines such that eddies of luminous white stand on its bumpy yellow surface, stand especially around its knobby, awkward terminus, like a bulbous nipple, or an old tree stump half-rotted back into the earth. Across this surface the light comes up and, slowly, begins to recede, drawing dark shadow behind it like a curtain falling, in defiance of gravity, up across the stage. This process does not happen all at once: there are fades, wherein it is as if the lemon blurs, as one image of itself is superimposed across the other, an image which is not quite identical, not quite in perfect alignment with the last, yet which is close enough to such that you’ll miss it if you aren’t paying attention. And perhaps you are not. In any case, the light, in time, completes its retreat, and night falls once again. There is darkness, and then this night is broken by another light, colder than the first, shining on the blank surface behind the lemon, throwing it into silhouette. Its shape, in simple contour, is not more perfect than in full visibility. At the end, by way of credits, is something that looks more like a corporate logo than an artist’s signature: white on black, the letters “HF”, encased in a perfect square.

This accounts for, more or less, all 7 minutes of Lemon (1969), one of Hollis Frampton’s earliest films, and one of his greatest. It is a film which reminds you, in a very fundamental way, so fundamental you are embarrassed to realize you'd forgotten, of what “film” is, of what its potential is – namely, that of capturing the specific nature of things. The lemon in this film is not an ideal or an approximation – there is no model from which it is derived, no reference to which it point. It is not a symbol or a memory of something lost. Contrary to the entire history of pre-photographic art, of every fruit in every still life ever painted, the lemon in Lemon represents only itself. This is, in some sense, generally true of the photographic as a category, of course, but this basic indexical capacity is usually one layer of signification buried beneath many others, one which can only be uncovered and perceived with conscious effort. Looking at most photographs, watching most movies, we have to remember that what we are seeing is the reproduction of something real (assuming it even is). In Lemon, though, there are none of the usual distractions: every element leads back to simply the lemon and the light upon it, and the shadow. The film is silent, and there’s nothing else to see – and thus what is there becomes suddenly, shockingly visible. You see that it is not a lemon but this lemon, and only this lemon, and that the way the light falls across it, spreading and receding like the tide, is not the way it would fall across any other lemon, just this one, which is unique in the way all complex organisms are, and that what you are seeing is thus absolutely specific and unrepeatable – you see that the film could not have been made with any other lemon, for it would have a slightly different shape, and the light would not fall on it quite the same, and thus everything would be changed. Now that it has, though, this absolute specificity becomes, as film, endlessly reproducible and repeatable. Thus the film makes clear the basic, radical capacity of the camera arts: to collapse the specific into the eternal, and the eternal into the specific. And it demonstrates, too, the truth of the long 20th century’s great aesthetic insight: that the world is no less worthy of looking at than the art object. There is real beauty in how light can come across a lemon, and much to discover in its irregular form.

This is only half of the film’s achievement, though – the half which could be considered inherent in its creation, that which it accomplishes simply by having been made. But the film exists in the world, too. If you take a look at the Letterboxd page for Lemon (work with me here), you will notice two things: 1) that it’s been logged over a thousand more times than any other Frampton film, including Zorns Lemma (1970), certainly his most “canonical” work, and 2) that its rating distribution is notably more even than any other Frampton film, to the point of having over a hundred half-star ratings (in comparison to just over two hundred five stars). Keeping in mind that Letterboxd’s primary demographic is college undergrads who are currently claiming “cinephile” as part of their identity, what you can deduce from this is that Lemon is still regularly being shown, at least academically (probably as part of some horribly compressed survey course module on “the avant-garde”), and not only that, but shown to those who don’t already know everything it has to say – which is to say, those on whom it could have a real impact, be it one of irritation or insight. This matters because how a film moves through history is part of its meaning – not just in terms of “reception” (a mostly tedious subject), but simply in terms of being seen or not seen. This is especially true for something like Lemon, which takes as its subject the specific and the eternal. If it had been forgotten, consigned to some dark, dusty archive to quietly await perdition, it would not be nearly as powerful, or as moving. It is a film which is only truly effective if it continues to be shown, if this lemon, and the light that fell on it, continues to be reproduced, again and again, in times ever more distant and estranged from its point of origin. Ultimately, Lemon only really “works” if history has a place for it, because Lemon is, in a very emphatic way, about its place in history. That it continues to provoke bemusement among incurious teenagers proves that, on these terms, it’s a success.

It didn’t have to be. When Frampton made the film he had already been an active figure in the New York art scene for some time, but his legacy was hardly assured. New York then, as now, was full of capable artists who are remembered only by historians and niche collectors, if at all. There was no way for Frampton or anyone else to be sure that he would be something more than that – in essence, Lemon is a gamble. It’s a work by a young man that resembles that of an old man, in that it is oriented towards not only the present, but eternity as well, and expects the same of its maker – a work which, within its humble dimensions, encompasses his life in totality, and seeks to move forward beyond it. This is a very brave, very profound thing. That Frampton almost certainly was not thinking in those terms when he made it is beside the point – whether by chance or fate, he became the author the text needed, and that is what matters.

At the end of the film, on the silhouetted shape of the lemon, a dedication appears, in small, neat type, to Robert Hout, a Minimalist painter and friend of Frampton’s who bought a farm upstate in 1969, and left New York City forever. An antiwar activist, he had grown disgusted with the complacency of the world he lived in – and perhaps there is a bit of that disgust in Frampton’s film, too. At the very least, there is a desire to reestablish basic principles, to correct accrued distortions about what is real and what is not. The lemon in Lemon may have been eaten after filming, may have been discarded, may have simply rotted away on a shelf somewhere. Despite this, it still exists, in the form of 7 minutes of light and color, and its display of stubborn, banal specificity ennobles all over again not just the medium of film, but the whole practice of art-making. Were it sculpted of solid gold, it would not be of greater value.