Experimental Film Analysis: Nostalgia

I have chosen to look at Nostalgia by Hollis Frampton, as I associate it with the form of subjective personal view, a form that I am basing my experimental film on. It could be argued as a strictly formalist piece but I think it falls neatly under both. Subjective personal view is a presentation of a story, action, memory or place through the filmmaker’s personal association with the subject. In Nostalgia, a photograph is laid over a flame that slowly ignites and begins to burn the photo. A narrator tells a story about the photo, or rather a photo, as the narrator’s monologue does not match the description of the photo on screen. The photo comes into frame after its matching narration ‘…thus forces us to weigh everything we see and hear in its own terms…’ (Bordwell and Thompson).  I feel that symbolism is created out of the use of non-sync narration, representing the idea that the narrator’s memories of each photo are left behind in the past and that they disappear with the burning of the picture on the next take. It also creates a representation of what we think the picture will look like and it may or may not conform to that expectation.