Lemon

Lemon (1969)

Light begins to illuminate the small, nipple-like end of a lemon on the right edge of the frame and gradually spreads until the entire lemon is clearly visible. Then the light recedes across the frame.

Date of release
1969-11-30
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (29)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Hollis Frampton

Interesting facts

Lemon is a 1969 American experimental short film directed by Hollis Frampton. It shows a lemon under slowly changing lighting conditions.

Production

Frampton spent an hour and a half selecting a suitable lemon. He wanted one that would be the "most breastlike, most splendidly citroid." A confused produce manager watched what he was doing, and Frampton ended up purchasing half a dozen lemons.

Frampton shot the film using a Bolex camera. To keep the light source at a fixed distance, he tethered it to a taut wire. He filmed at a higher speed, manually moving the light. Between each take, he had to wind the camera and move the light back slightly. Five dissolves were needed to join the shots into what otherwise resembles a single continuous take.

Lemon is dedicated to artist Robert Huot. Frampton had discussed James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses with Huot and told him about a statistical study performed on the text by noted linguist George Zipf. He said an unusually large number of hapax legomena appeared in it, such as the word lemon appearing in a mention of lemon plait (a slight inaccuracy, as Joyce's novel contains the word 'lemon' dozens of times, but only mentions 'lemon plait' once at…

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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