(nostalgia)

For this week's blog post, analyze an aspect of Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) by reflecting on the film through the prism of Sontag's On Photography. Answer one of the following questions:

-- Does (nostalgia) prove or disprove Sontag's point that "Photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectible objects, as they are when served up in books"? (5) If so, or if not, why? Explain using specific examples from the film.

-- Sontag writes of photography and its relation to surrealism: "The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated. . . . The Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past . . ." (53-54). Which photographs in (nostalgia) most strongly attest to the surrealist tendency of photography, and why? In what way is the film possibly surrealistic itself?

-- In (nostalgia), which narrational dialogues and photographic images exemplify Sontag's theory that "Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an event. There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized"? (18-19) What further points about interpretation, knowledge, and image production does Frampton make in the unusual and witty manner through which he demonstrates this theory?