The Lecture

The Lecture is a loosely narrative film. The film begins in a junkyard wasteland of scrap metal and automobiles, where a man walks through the rubble. The same man is seen throughout the film in several locations, including a park, and walking barefoot down a street with a group of people. In the park scene, he is with a woman, and they engage in light horseplay.; This film was made after viewing some of Gregory Markopoulous’s work. Gregory, Byron’s professor at the time, utilized flashes of single frames based on the rhythms of Greek poetic structures. Gregory’s film structure had an impact on Byron and he attempted a similar structure in The Lecture. This is Byron’s first film using edits of very short clusters of frames. Not yet familiar with the A and B roll technique, he simulated a dissolve by cutting sequences of two, then four, then eight, then sixteen frames of an incoming scene against frame sequences of the out-going scene. The man in this film was Byron’s roommate at the time, Donald Flood, and Byron’s friend Julie Azuma. Byron notes that the sound track is a tape recording of him reading a nonsense lecture in a drone voice. The print presented here, however, is silent.