KU Cinema and Lothringen present Lectures: Nathaniel Dorsky, Hollis Frampton, Robert Smithson, a two-day program on cinema and the lecture.
We repeatedly fail to define what these works are, and it is from this failure that we begin to consider how they exist as works. On October 30, 1968, at Hunter College in New York, Hollis Frampton presented A Lecture. Its title could hardly be simpler, yet the work unfolds in a way that makes it difficult to call it a lecture in any conventional sense. With no film in the projector, its white light alone is cast onto the screen, while Michael Snow’s pre-recorded voice fills the space. Frampton does not explain cinema. Reduced to the projector, light, and voice, the work appears simple, yet this simplicity reveals the deeper and more complex conditions of cinema. The work remains suspended between lecture and film, performance and playback.
Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque is a lecture given in 1972 at the School of Architecture at the University of Utah. Smithson advances a sequence of 35mm color slides taken during his 1969 trip to Mexico and speaks about a hotel that appears at once ruinous and unfinished. At the time, the work was clearly presented in the form of a lecture. Yet after entering museum collections, it gradually came to be regarded as a fixed work of art. As Ann Reynolds has noted, presenting Hotel Palenque involves differing conceptions of “what the thing is.” Faced with a work that cannot readily be defined as a lecture, a document, an installation, or material derived from these forms, we begin to recognize a familiar structure in the relation between words and images.
Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema is an essay on cinema developed from a lecture presented on March 30, 2001, at Princeton University’s Conference on Religion and Cinema. The lecture was followed by a screening of Dorsky’s films Variations, Alaya, and Arbor Vitae. On May 28, 2026, the Korean edition of Devotional Cinema will be published by Mediabus in the Okulo series. Marking this publication, the program presents the Dorsky films that followed the original lecture, together with a lecture by Yoo Un-seong. As Yoo writes, rather than citing his own films as examples, Dorsky speaks about films by Rossellini, Dreyer, and Ozu, constructing “an intense theory of cinema that most rigorously and lucidly defends Dorsky’s own films.” The relation between the films Dorsky invokes and Dorsky’s own films resonates with this program’s attempt to discover sensory affinities without resolving their ambiguity.
(Park Kyujae, Il-hwan)
Program 1: Film Screening – Saturday, May 30 at 1:00 PM
- Alaya (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1987) – 28 min, 16mm, 18 fps
- Variations (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1998) – 24 min, 16mm, 18 fps
- Arbor Vitae (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2000) – 28 min, 16mm, 18 fps
Program 2: Film Screening and Live Performance – Saturday, May 30 at 3:00 PM
- (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971) – 36 min, DCP
- A Lecture (after Hollis Frampton) – 24 min, live performance with a 16mm projector, red cellophane, and a pipe cleaner
performed by Park Kyujae and Il-hwan
Program 3: Lecture – Saturday, May 30 at 5:00 PM
- On Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque
Lecture by Ann Reynolds
Program 4: Film Screening – Sunday, May 31 at 3:00 PM
- Alaya (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1987) – 28 min, 16mm, 18 fps
- Variations (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1998) – 24 min, 16mm, 18 fps
- Arbor Vitae (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2000) – 28 min, 16mm, 18 fps
Program 5: Lecture – Sunday, May 31 at 5:00 PM
- The Magic of Things Themselves: Devotional Cinema and the Films of Nathaniel Dorsky
Lecture by Yoo Un-seong
Programmed by Park Kyujae and Il-hwan
Presented in collaboration with Ann Reynolds (UT Austin) and Yoo Un-seong (Okulo)
Additional assistance: Jang Chul-woong
With the support of The Book Society / Mediabus, CAU Center for Cinema and Media Studies, Space Cell, and EXiS – Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul
