Mirror & Lemon

What one normally thinks of in film, in the mainstream certainly, tends to adhere to a strict definition of narrative, often with specifically defined genre conventions. However, mainstream Hollywood tends to overlook the full creative potential of film -- a rich and diverse playground that, arguably, remains the domain of the artist, rather than the production studio.

Even everyday objects can be transformed by in the window of that the camera provides -- and sometimes, that window itself can be transformed. Mirror (Robert Morris, 1969) is a perfect example of this. The film was created with a technique no more complicated than moving a large mirror in front of a stationary camera. However, a strange sort of motion is created by the changing scene in the mirror as it is moved back and forth, and farther away from the camera. The "real" scenery becomes a sort of matte to the bouncing image in the mirror. The mirror becomes something reminiscent of a magic portal onto a parallel world, where things move left when one's sensibilities insist they should be moving right.

Lemon (Hollis Frampton, 1969) uses the motion of the film medium in an altogether more subtle way. The camera and its subject (and namesake) remain stationary while a light source is moved very slowly around the environment. It takes a minute or so to realize what is happening, because the visible shape and texture of the lemon changes very slowly as the light strikes it from an evolving series of angles. The overall effect is akin to watching a still life painting that actually does change, albeit ponderously.