Quantification of "Natural Features"

Hollis Frampton's premise that "a film must be about whatever appears most often in it" is a deceptively simple premise, and I must confess I was skeptical at first as to whether the technique would truly prove insightful. Having applied this method to my evaluation of Gunvor Nelson's Natural Features, it occurred to me that the most prominent element of the film was the repeated image of expanding blotches of dark or light stains.

The way the stains appeared suddenly and spread at accelerated rates reminds me of the sort of visual distortions I'd experienced in migraines I'd suffer. When I was in grade school I suffered a moderate frequency of such migraines. In my case, the migraines consisted of flashing, spreading areas of indistinct light, colors becoming too bright for me to focus squarely on things in my field of vision. I found the imagery of the faces "bleeding" off into areas of expanding shadow over light to remind me very strongly of this.

The other elements of the film seemed to build on that. The audio was jarring and inconsistent, sometimes too quiet and sometimes too loud. With the sort of migraines I suffered, sound was also a problem during the episodes. The strange overlapping of images and outlines seemed to feed my hypothesis; visual disruptions like those caused by migraines to recognize faces where there are only vague, resembling shapes.