FRAMES OF REFERENCE (2008) is a startlingly kinetic, cinematically passionate and deceptively intelligent new clip montage from the pseudonymous blogger “Jonathan Lapper,” whose Cinema Styles we are proud to feature on our own blog roll of recommended movie sites.

The Movie Morlocks had a chance to pin down the shadowy Mr. Lapper for a few questions by way of presenting FRAMES OF REFERENCE to our regular readers.

RHS:  Tell me what the movies mean to you.

JL:  There are two things that have consumed my life from day one:  Rhythm and images.  I started drawing and painting when I was very young and discovered around the same time that I had a knack for rhythm, being able to keep up with complex drum fills despite being barely able to walk.  As a result, I immediately gravitated to combinations of sound and image, or, if you will, the movies.  Long before MTV I constantly put images to music in my mind.  Any song I heard became a movie in my head. 

RHS:  When I hear music, I think and don’t move, which makes me the worst dancer.  On two different social occasions, I’ve had a woman dance across a floor to me only to slam into the glass door of my distraction.  Really, I hear a good patch of music and I’m like The Golem, immoveable, slack-jawed. 

JL:  To this day I can listen to the same piece of music over and over for hours until I have formed the perfect movie scene for it in my mind.  Even if I’m not watching a movie, it’s almost guaranteed there’s one playing in my mind.  It can be a scene I’ve devised, a collection of clips or a favorite musical image combination from a favorite film.  So that’s what movies were and are to me.  They’re the physical manifestation of what goes on in my mind 24 hours a day.

RHS:  Which brings us to FRAMES OF REFERENCE.

JL:  I have about 3 or 4 hundred montage clips in my head devised to music from multiple sources.  FRAMES OF REFERENCE is just the first one that I did online.  The first montage clip I ever did was back in 1981 when I got two VCRs,  rented a bunch of war films and put battle scenes together to Aram Khachaturian’s Adagio for the Gayane Ballet Suite.  It’s still a favorite montage of mine, very quiet and horrific all at once. 

RHS: Had you first heard that in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY?

JL:   I first heard it in 2001 then went out and bought the whole suite.  The Sabre Dance is quite jarring when you come to it thinking only of the adagio.  Especially when upon hearing it at the age of 10 all you can think is, “Hey this is that music they use in Looney Toons!”  My favorite moment from that old montage was the scene of the soldier being machine gunned on the open square in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY just as the attack begins and his body contorts and twists on the ground.  It was quite beautiful to view with nothing but the strings of the adagio behind it.  I don’t think I’ve ever made a montage that used sound or voices from the films themselves.  It’s always just the music over the images as it is with FRAMES OF REFERENCE. 

RHS:  You’ve made me an instant fan of Oliver Nelson, whose composition Complex City you use as the soundtrack for FRAMES… I confess, to my shame, I’d not heard of Nelson before… despite the fact that he did score a couple of movies… DEATH OF A GUNFIRE and SKULLDUGGERY among them.  Of course, now I have to go back and see all those again.

JL: I’ve been a fan of Oliver Nelson for a couple of decades now and there’s not a piece of music he’s done that hasn’t made me want to immediately put images to it.  But for my first online montage I wanted the music to contain as many changes as possible so I settled on Complex City, an extraordinary piece of music with multiple rhythm and tempo shifts.  For a couple of months I listened to it every chance I got and just kept imagining what clips would go where until by the time I sat down to actually start making it I’d say I had at least 90 percent of it already mapped out and memorized.

RHS:  How long did it take you to put this project together?

JL: If you count the hours spent listening to Complex City and imagining what scenes would go where then putting it together took months.  If you actually just count the time I spent at the computer then just a few hours and at least 75 percent of that time was spent loading up DVDs and extracting the clips.  So the time I spent actually putting the clips together was on the light end. 

RHS:  Just a few hours – that’s extrordinary.  My fellow Morlocks would be amazed to hear that, given how long it takes us to put a simple blog post together.  But I think you’re right… too much of modern living is eaten up by loading the media.

JL:  I had a few clips I started out with that I used for beat cues. For instance, I took THE FRENCH CONNECTION chase,  the hand slap clips from AU HASARD BALTHAZAR and the Jack Lemmon turn of head in SOME LIKE IT HOT and immediately put them where their respective beats were so I could use those as section dividers.  Then I broke it down into five sections and put the clips together.   I put it all together on the movie making software that came with the computer, a four year old computer that crashed constantly because of the amount of clips.  And headphones were a necessity as my daughter was usually behind me watching an animated funfest on the television at maximum volume… and asking me a question about something every five minutes – so actually, if you take kid interruptions out of the equation I probably could’ve put this together in 30 minutes. 

RHS:  What does she think of the finished product?

JL:  She hasn’t seen it, although interestingly she’s seen many of the movies used in it.  THE AWFUL TRUTH is one of her favorites.  Besides, she’d probably wonder why Margaret Rutherford isn’t in it and I wouldn’t have an explanation for her.  Although I did get the cat scene from MURDER AT THE GALLOP up on my blog with her in mind.  We’ve watched and laughed at that moment together maybe a hundred times.

A complete title listing for the motion pictures used in FRAMES OF REFERENCE appears here… but I urge everyone to enjoy the film first… watch it a few times and share it with friends and drink in the rush of imagery before reducing the experience to trivia.