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San Francisco Cinematheque’s 2025 exhibitions commence with a peculiarly caffeinated coupling of two still life narrative experiments—Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (Hapax Legomena II, 1972) and James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ This Action Lies (2018): Two films exploring the mechanical gaze of the camera, the paradoxes of written and spoken language presented in cinema space, entropic passages of time as embodied in coffee cups, each film rife with digressive humor, philosophy, romance, mystery and intrigue. Please come prepared to ponder the etymology of Dunkin’ Donuts. And a lot lot more.

Annette Michelson on Poetic Justice: In Poetic Justice, Frampton presents us with a “scenario” of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are “projected” in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale […]. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table.… and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins: This Action Lies is a movie about the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives of an object that may not exist in a room that cannot exist, while at the mercy of a mistrustful monologue. In other words, a defense of cinema.

Program opens with Dorothy Wiley’s graceful domestic meditation Coffee (1977).