| Lemon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Hollis Frampton |
| Distributed by | The Film-Makers' Cooperative |
Release date |
|
Running time | 7 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Silent |
Lemon is a 1969 American experimental short film directed by Hollis Frampton. It shows a lemon under slowly changing lighting conditions.
Lemon shows a single lemon in a fixed position, with lighting that changes over the course of the film. At the beginning of the film, the yellow surface appears against a black background, with one end protruding on the right. As the light becomes brighter, more of the lemon becomes visible. The left side of the lemon becomes covered in shadow until only the outline of the right side of the lemon can be seen. After the image briefly fades to black, a back light appears. The lemon becomes a dark silhouette against a bluish background. The film ends with a dedication. [1]
Frampton spent an hour and a half selecting a suitable lemon. He wanted one that would be the "most breastlike, most splendidly citroid." A confused produce manager watched what he was doing, and Frampton ended up purchasing half a dozen lemons. [2]
Frampton shot the film using a Bolex camera. To keep the light source at a fixed distance, he tethered it to a taut wire. He filmed at a higher speed, manually moving the light. Between each take, he had to wind the camera and move the light back slightly. Five dissolves were needed to join the shots into what otherwise resembles a single continuous take. [2]
Lemon is dedicated to artist Robert Huot. Frampton had discussed James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses with Huot and told him about a statistical study performed on the text. He said an unusually large number of hapax legomena appeared in it, such as the word lemon appearing in a mention of lemon plait. Huot proposed that Joyce had begun with the set of words that were used only once and then added language surrounding them. Frampton considered Lemon "a film that points toward painting", so he included a prominent dedication to Huot, remembering Huot's explanation as a painter's conception of working in a different medium. [2]
Frampton was financially successful with Lemon, in part because of the low cost to produce the film. [3] In a review for the Chicago Reader , Fred Camper called the film "elegant and humorous", comparing the lighting effects to lunar phases. [4] It has become one of Frampton's most famous films. [5] Lemon was released for home media in 2012, as part of the Criterion Collection's A Hollis Frampton Odyssey on Blu-ray and DVD. [6]
British artist Simon Martin has made reference to the film in his work. His 2010 Untitled, shown at the British Art Show, recreates Lemon as a digital animation. [7] Martin's "Lemon 03 Generations (Turn It Around version)" used a projection of Lemon, reprocessed digitally to deliberately compromise the image quality. [8] American game designer Evan Meaney adapted Lemon as the 2015 art game /le.mon: A remediation game, developed in Unity and WebGL. [9]
Peter Kenneth Frampton is an English-American guitarist, singer and songwriter who rose to prominence as a member of the rock bands the Herd and Humble Pie. Later in his career Frampton found significant success as a solo artist. He has released several albums, including his breakthrough album, the live recording Frampton Comes Alive! (1976), which spawned several hit singles and has earned 8× Platinum by the RIAA in the United States. He has also worked with various other acts such as Ringo Starr, the Who's John Entwistle, David Bowie, and both Matt Cameron and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam and Joe Bonamassa.
Cinematography is the art of motion picture photography.
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Sight and Sound is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well-known decennial Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.
Nostalgia, styled (nostalgia), is a 1971 American experimental film by artist Hollis Frampton. It is part of his Hapax Legomena series.
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Hollis William Frampton, Jr. was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer, theoretician, and pioneer of digital art. He was best known for his innovative and non-linear structural films that defined the movement, including Lemon (1969), Zorns Lemma (1970), and Hapax Legomena (1971–1972), as well as his anthology book, Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980 (1983).
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Hapax Legomena is a seven-part film cycle by American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. The complete cycle premiered in November 1972.
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes is a 1971 American film by Stan Brakhage. Its title is based on the literal translation of the term autopsy. The film documented the highly graphic autopsy procedures used by forensic pathologists, such as the removal of organs and the embalming process.
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Minimalist cinema is related to the art and philosophy of minimalism.
