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The film (nostalgia) (1971) by photographer and filmmaker Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) is a powerful document of cultural memory that articulates and demonstrates vital issues of memory, such as the use of autobiographical film, to explicate identity formation and the intricate relationship of photography and film to absence, memory and meaning. To begin, however, I will discuss the historical associations of nostalgia in order to differentiate it from its siblings homesickness and melancholy.
“Originally defined in the seventeenth century in terms of a set of physical
symptoms associated with acute homesickness”—nostos (home), algos (pain nostalgia’s contemporary association is as an emotional disorder, acknowledges
John Frow (1997:79-80). Rubenstein describes nostalgia as “an absence that
continues to occupy a palpable emotional space” and argues that “the felt ab-
sence of a person or place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a
presence that may come to possess an individual” (Rubenstein 2001:5). Perhaps
it is unsurprising that nostalgia is historically associated with the “open wound”
of Sigmund Freud’s melancholia, the neurosis of failed mourning.
The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection,
cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all
activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in
self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of pun-
ishment. (Freud 1984 [1917]:252)
Rubenstein’s description qualifies the “painful awareness” of nostalgia as mel-
ancholic while simultaneously describing nostalgia as a response to “universal
inevitability of separation and loss” and “the existential condition of adulthood”
(Rubenstein 2001:4-5). As opposed to the spatial or geographical separation of homesickness, nostalgia according to Rubenstein reflects a temporal dilemma.
One can never truly return to original home of childhood, since it exists mostly as a
place in the imagination. Although the meaning of nostalgia itself has changed over
time, essentially it has come to signify not simply the loss of one’s childhood home but the loss of childhood itself. (Rubenstein 2001:4-5).
[....]
Frampton’s interest is in creation (of photographs, indi- vidual identity, social meaning) and death (of representation, memory, self). In accordance with Frampton’s approach to photography as a process rather than a predatory act is the artist’s fascination with the natural, and at times social, birth and death of things. This is most obvious in the fourth and tenth images, which depict different objects in the process of deterioration. The narratives corresponding to these images are vital to understanding Frampton’s curiosity about decay.
The fourth image is the only surviving photograph of a series made of a cabinetmaker’s shop window over the course of two years (ironically, Frampton destroyed the others). At the time of exposure/development, the six photographs disappoint him; the voice-over explains, “each time, I found some reason to feel dissatisfied. The negative was too flat, or too harsh; or the framing was too tight” (Frampton 1972:106). When comparing the prints, a natural progression of de- cay is evident: “I was astonished! In the midst of my concern for the flaws in my method, the window itself had changed, from season to season, far more than my photographs had! I had thought my subject changeless, and my own sensibility pliable. But I was wrong about that” (Frampton 1972:106). The documentation of decay’s progression otherwise unnoticed by the daily human eye marks the beginning of Frampton’s fascination.
The image of rotting spaghetti provides an experiment in decay, the result, according to the voice-over, of “a painter friend [who] asked me to make a pho- tographic document of spaghetti, an image that he wanted to incorporate into a work of his own” (Frampton 1972:109). Jenkins notes that Rosenquist uses Frampton’s photograph “Spaghetti and Grass, 1965, where the strands from Frampton’s image form the upper half of the lithograph” (Jenkins 1984:21). Frampton documents the spaghetti’s demise by photographing it every day. [T]his was the eighteenth such photograph. The spaghetti has dried without rotting. The sauce is a kind of pink varnish on the yellow strings. The entirety is covered in attractive mature colonies of mold in three colors: black, green and white. I continued the series until no further change appeared to be taking place: about two months al- together. The spaghetti was never entirely consumed, but the mold eventually disap- peared. (Frampton 1972:109)
