For Georgia O'Keeffe1976

"...one of several films that Frampton planned to go into a 'portrait gallery' somewhere toward the end of MAGELLAN. He finished only two other films for this section–YELLOW SPRINGS (1972) and QUATERNION (1976), portraits of Paul Sharits and James Rosenquist respectively. As self-reflexive as the rest of MAGELLAN, these films acknowledge and explore debts that the films of the cycle owe to other artists. O'KEEFE consists of a series of static shots of a skycraper at night, recalling her 1925 painting 'Radiator Building, Night,' which emphasizes the structure's checkered pattern of lights. Like painting and still photography, each Frampton shot is static, but since each has a different pattern of lights than the one before, cinema's time dimension is also affirmed, thereby distinguishing it from painting and photographs. (Apparently slight variations within recurring identical shots or series of shots is the format of many Frampton films.) To avoid even the 'apparent motion' of cutting from one pattern of lights to another, frampton has spliced twenty-four frames of blue leader between shots. The homage to O'Keeffe, and the film's study of the relations among painting-photography-film, is even more complex than appears since O'Keeffe was living with pioneer photographer Alfred Stieglitz when she painted 'Radiator Building, Night.' If his work in part inspired this painting (it is more 'mythic' than documentary), it inspired in turn his thirties photographs of skyscrapers–taken from the apartment near the top of the Shelton where she painted 'Radiator Building, Night."–Brian Henderson