User Reviews

"Surface Tension" is an almost 50-year-old experimental movie written and directed by American filmmaker Hollis Frampton and it is among his earlier works. The film runs for 9.5 minutes and be divided into 3 parts. First one is a man talking without us hearing him, second is a man talking without us seeing him (we see a group of people in a park) and last part is a fish and we hear nothing. I must say the visual side here was fairly uninteresting, but the audio was even worse, pretty annoying the constant phone ringing. Is this movie art? I personally would disagree, but I am not too big on experimental films anyway. Still, even from that genre, I have seen many movies superior to this one here. I found it a really weak work. I hope Frampton's other stuff is better. Not recommended.

In "Surface Tension", experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton makes a film in which sound is not connected to sight, a recurring theme in his body of work. Divided into three parts, each part has no connection with the next and the sound does not contain any relevance with the picture in any way either. Instead of demonstrating a simple concept through basic visuals as in his earliest works, Frampton in this case is purely experimental: there is no hidden story or morality attached to the action. We accept what happens and nothing more.

The three parts of "Surface Tension" are all very random in imagery and in sound even more so. According to Frampton, the first two were intended to be passages of time and space; that is just about all the analysis that can be applied to the film. The first segment is a replayed shot in which, while the ringing of a telephone is heard constantly, a man messes with the dials on some sort of radio (it looks nothing like a telephone) before moving hyper-actively in fast motion. The second is a fast motion tour of a big city, with an incomprehensible narration in German accompanying it. The dizzying array of images in this part make it a visual thrill. Finally, the last bit is a simple shot of a goldfish in the tide (really in a fishtank) with a series of random texts playing out onscreen. In this segment, there is no sound but the scene is effective in how the fish is swept with powerful and overwhelming force into the waves.

Even though I am a fan of experimental shorts, this still puzzled me. It's not meant to make sense, yet I still find myself wondering what the point of the randomness in this film was. In the earliest surrealist works, one at least sees recurring themes that create a wonderful sense of mystery, but nothing in this film creates any such thing and everything is completely unrelated in visual aspect, with no recurrences--set aside the waves at the beginning and end. It's art, folks, just accept it for what it is. I have, and I find it very interesting.

Very beautiful film expressing the relationship of several visual motifs to sound. The other reviewers exclaiming that the film is "trying too hard to be avant garde" need to understand that this film is from 1968...it was the avant garde. The other films you see that seem like this one have been influenced by films like this by Frampton and his contemporaries. The pixilation is skillfully done and brings the eye to a delightful frenzy towards the middle of the second story, and the calm grey with the orange goldfish of the last story. I thought it was interesting that the first story had one subject and a static background with the clocks indicating a passage of time and that the last story had words flashing instead, almost an incoherent message. Meanwhile the verbal supply in the middle was from the audio. Very interesting film. Would recommend to fans of experimental film...

This is an attempt at an artsy type film, not really much point to the film. definitely not something to watch more then once. almost agonizing to watch even the first time. many scenes with time lapse photography, with really no point. Movie starts off with five minutes of a phone ringing with time laps of a guy fiddling with a digital clock. then jumps to more time laps photos of city streets with someone speaking in German I think.

Again no real sense to any flow to this at all. then flips to a goldfish swimming in the waves on a beach, with text describing scenes you might expect from a movie, again, with no real point to it at all. Can't really say much about this, other then don't go out of your way to see it.