Happy birthday to me: Hollis Frampton Day *

*(restored/expanded)

 

‘Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia). In the image, Frampton sits against a neutral backdrop, looking to his right, as if intently scrutinizing something just outside the frame. His shoulders press forward, suggesting that his unseen hands are resting crossed in his lap, and he sports a neat dark jacket and tie, their conservatism offset by a beatniky beard and hair that would have been considered longish in the 1950s, combed back into a Victorian wave. “As you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time, presumably for having survived to such ripeness and wisdom, since it was my twenty-third birthday,” the narrator says in (nostalgia). “I focused the camera, sat on a stool in front of it, and made the exposures by squeezing a rubber bulb with my right foot.”

‘When he took this photo, Frampton was working as an assistant in a commercial photography studio in New York, where he had moved the previous year, and was sharing an apartment with sculptor Carl Andre, who had been his high school classmate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (as had painter Frank Stella, with whom they would share studio space). Due to his dispute over the necessity of a required history course, Frampton had failed to graduate from Andover, thus forfeiting a scholarship to Harvard and instead attending Western Reserve College in Cleveland. While there, he struck up a correspondence with Ezra Pound, who was then a mental patient at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Frampton—who was writing poetry at the time—left Cleveland to move near Pound, visiting him daily in the hospital, while the older poet continued to compose The Cantos, his sprawling epic, dense with reference and allusion, which would remain unfinished at his demise. Pound’s high modernism would serve as a touchstone for Frampton, as would the parallel modernisms of Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges, and James Joyce. Ironically, Frampton, too, would embark upon an ambitious, large-scale project—the proposed thirty-six-hour film cycle Magellan—that would be cut short by his death from cancer in 1984, at age forty-eight.

‘Another oft reproduced image of Frampton is entitled Portrait of Hollis Frampton by Marion Faller, Directed by H. F. It was taken in 1975 by Faller, the photographer with whom Frampton lived during the last thirteen years of his life. The picture shows him staring, eyes wide and pupils contracted, almost into the lens of the camera, his hands raised beside his head, palms outward. In the darkness, a horizontal slit of light draws a line across his eyes and onto the middle of both of his hands. His hair is wilder than at age twenty-three—the light beam illuminates shaggy bits jutting out from his temples—and his beard is fuller, now flecked with white. The setup cannily alludes to the mechanics of both photography and cinema, of light projected and recorded, but in its alien strangeness resembles a promotional still from a science-fiction movie. It almost appears as if the light is not so much being thrown on him as projected outward from his eyes and hands. In the earlier self-portrait, Frampton seems relatively staid, as if looking toward the past, trying to emulate an early twentieth-century poise. But here, at age thirty-nine, he stares as if into a vision, ready to walk forward into the unknown, ecstatic.

‘In the time between these two photographs, Frampton had established himself as one of the foremost members of the American avant-garde, part of a new generation of artists who came to fruition in the late 1960s, dramatically shifting the terms of both experimental film and the intellectual thinking on cinema as a whole. By the end of his career, he had completed close to one hundred films (including the individual one-minute Pans for Magellan) and numerous photographic series; helped establish the pioneering Digital Arts Laboratory at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1977; published Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video—Texts 1968–1980, his influential collection of theoretical essays and other writings that had originally run in Artforum, October, and elsewhere; and been honored with retrospectives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At a time when many of his filmmaking colleagues still kept their distance from newer electronic media, he not only embraced and wrote about video but also delved into xerography and computer programming.

‘In standard histories of experimental cinema, Frampton’s work is usually considered part of “structural film,” a category invented by P. Adams Sitney in a 1969 essay that would later be revised into a chapter of his landmark 1974 study Visionary Film. Sitney coined the term to describe what he saw as a new tendency in the American avant-garde, typified by the films of Frampton as well as those of Michael Snow, George Landow, Tony Conrad, and others. “Theirs is a cinema of structure,” Sitney wrote, “in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film”—a sharp divergence from the work of an older generation of filmmakers, including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger, who, in his view, had progressed over time toward a greater internal complexity of form. He compared structural film to minimalism in the visual arts and serial composition in music, contemporaneous movements that likewise stressed formal reduction and repetition. Frampton, however, rejected Sitney’s periodization, denouncing “that incorrigible tendency to label, to make movements, [which] always has the same effect, and that effect is to render the work invisible.”

‘Nevertheless, Frampton did agree that a new sensibility was afoot. Describing his own development, he recalled that “there was something called the [Film-Makers’] Cinematheque in New York, which became a kind of hangout. I met other people who were trying to make films: Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr after a while, although he was somewhat younger. Later on, Paul Sharits, who was at the time living in Baltimore.” These are all figures whose work Sitney classified under structural filmmaking, but Frampton saw their shared project as a more expansive one. “There existed at least for a time, and that time lasted for some years in New York City, a kind of constant contact between us. One might almost—almost—venture to call it a sense of being united in some way, probably by the conviction that there should be good films. Preferably, films so good they hadn’t been made yet. That the intellectual space open to film had not entirely been preempted.”

‘Regardless of Frampton’s distaste for labels, one can productively think about his films in terms of a simplification of elements in favor of an overall, predetermined shape. This is particularly so in his earliest surviving works, from Information (1966) to Zorns Lemma (1970). In this phase of his filmmaking, Frampton was interested in taking apart cinema by reducing it to its most basic, constitutive parts—sound, image, movement, editing—and then using these elements to construct films whose unfolding takes on the quality of a mathematical formula or puzzle. Later in his career, he would describe his concerns during this formative period as the “rationalization of the history of film art. Resynthesis of the film tradition: ‘making film over as it should have been’” and the “establishment of progressively more complex a priori schemes to generate the various parameters of filmmaking.” His play with the possible relationships between sound and image in works like Maxwell’s Demon (1968), Surface Tension (1968), and Carrots & Peas (1969) would culminate in the abecedarian structure of Zorns Lemma. The films’ titles alone convey his interest in importing concepts from the sciences into art, though never in a straightforward way; he once said, “I’m a spectator of mathematics like others are spectators of soccer or pornography.” His goal was a more epistemological one. “Eventually,” he would later write, “we may come to visualize an intellectual space in which the systems of words and images will both, as [filmmaker, poet, and founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives] Jonas Mekas once said of semiology, ‘seem like half of something,’ a universe in which image and word, each resolving the contradictions inherent in the other, will constitute the system of consciousness.”

‘To speak of Frampton’s films as merely structural riddles or philosophical proposals, however, fails to take into account their pleasurable and poetic nature. The gamelike qualities of his films prove playful rather than didactic and always retain a residue of enigma. And he is more of a storyteller than the structural label would suggest. His films are told with an erudite wit, an often stark beauty, and deep emotional resonance. This last quality is one that sets him apart from many of his “structural” fellow travelers and is most apparent in his only completed film cycle, Hapax Legomena (1971–72), a seven-part sequence including three of his best-known works, (nostalgia), Poetic Justice (1972), and Critical Mass (1971). Throughout the cycle, Frampton continually reveals intricate relationships between time and memory, word and image. He called the project “an oblique autobiography, seen in stereoscopic focus with the phylogeny of film art as I have tried to recapitulate it during my own fitful development as a filmmaker.” This aspect is most explicit in (nostalgia) but is also evident, in a more buried way, in Critical Mass, which creates hypnotic rhythms from footage of a woman and a man engaged in a heated argument—completed when Frampton was working through the tumultuous end of a six-year marriage.

‘The “phylogeny of film art” that Frampton mentions relates to a further concept underpinning his work as a whole, what he called a “metahistory” of cinema, by which he meant the creation of a specific body of films that would serve as an instructive metaphor for the whole history of film. “The history of cinema consists precisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatsoever,” he wrote. “The metahistorian of cinema, on the other hand, is occupied with inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent, wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art. Such works may not exist, and then it is his duty to make them.” His unfinished Magellan project would have been his fullest realization of this concept. Planned around the conceit of Ferdinand Magellan’s global circumnavigation, it was to comprise a liturgical calendar of more than eight hundred films, with Lumière-inspired miniatures on most days and longer works on equinoxes, solstices, and other special dates. Within this solar epic, Frampton envisioned numerous “subsections and epicycles,” completing a macrocosmic engine reminiscent of an astrolabe’s nested gears or a computer program’s subroutines—the latter suggested by Frampton’s dot-matrix-printed schedule from 1978, “CLNDR version 1.2.0,” with each day numbered like a line of code.

‘As Magellan’s algorithmic aspects illustrate, Frampton was concerned not only with cinema’s history but its future as well. In numerous writings, he conjectured that the technology of film had already reached its point of obsolescence, pinpointing this moment at the invention of radar, rather than the more obvious rise of television. The machine age apparatus created by the Lumières and Edison would someday be seen as merely an early phase of an as-yet-unnamed technology of moving-image-making that he would variously term “the camera arts” or “film and its successors” or “photograph-film-video-computer.” And this system was, in turn, an outgrowth of much older forms, like painting and music. He suggested that cinema would endure past its death, albeit transmuted, through this larger trajectory.

‘Or to put it another way, as Frampton did in his notes on Gloria! (1979), a work dedicated to his grandmother: “The last time I saw my grandmother, she said to me: ‘We just barely learn how to live, and then we’re ready to die.’” The film, however, depicts a story based on the ballad “Finnegan’s Wake,” wherein a dead body rises from its casket to dance at its own funeral. Surely, Frampton would have found wry amusement in this collection of his work, which replicates his films via encrypted lines of code and releases them back into the world as digital ghosts.’ — Ed Halter

 

____
Stills

 

_____
Further

Hollis Frampton Website
Hollis Frampton @ IMDb
A Hollis Frampton Odyssey @ The Criterion Collection
Hollis Frampton’s Lemon Analysis— The Nature of Film and Vision
Hollis Frampton ou le hors-champ du cinéma : le projet Magellan
A Hollis Frampton Odyssey reviewed @ Slant
Exploded View | Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass
Pattern Recognition: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
Video: Hollis Frampton interviewed
He’s Got Rhythm: ‘A Hollis Frampton Odyssey’
A Keyboard Mind: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem
The look of the thing: Hollis Frampton’s photography
Letters of Note: For Love and Honor
A Riddle in Temporality: Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia
History and Ambivalence in Hollis Frampton’s Magellan
How Should Artists Be Paid?: Hollis Frampton’s Letter to MoMA and the Price Artists Pay for Autonomy
Hollis frampton UNE CONFÉRENCE
Hollis Frampton Revival
ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON
KERRY TRIBE RESTAGES HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S CRITICAL MASS
A Pentagram for Conjuring Hollis Frampton
hollis frampton | VISCER-ebr-AL – Objectively Speaking

 

____
Extras

A documentary on Hollis Frampton made in 1981.

Screening Room with Hollis Frampton – PREVIEW

Hollis Frampton at Chatham College 1971

Michael Snow on Hollis Frampton and Public Speaking

Hollis Frampton Panel

 

_______
A Lecture
by Hollis Frampton

 

Please turn out the lights.

As long as we’re going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark.

We have all been here before. By the time we are eighteen years old, say the statisticians, we have been here five hundred times.

No, not in this very room, but in this generic darkness, the only place left in our culture intended entirely for concentrated exercise of one, or at most two, of our senses.

We are, shall we say, comfortably seated. We may remove our shoes, if that will help us to remove our bodies. Failing that, the management permits us small oral distractions. The oral distractions concession is in the lobby.

So we are suspended in a null space, bringing with us a certain habit of the affections. We have come to do work that we enjoy. We have come to watch this.

The projector is turned on.

So and so many kilowatts of energy, spread over a few square yards of featureless white screen in the shape of a carefully standardized rectangle, three units high by four units wide.

The performance is flawless. The performer is a precision machine. It sits behind us, out of sight usually. Its range of action may be limited, but within that range it is, like an animal, infallible.

It reads, so to speak, from a score that is both the notation and the substance of the piece.

It can and does repeat the performance, endlessly, with utter exactitude.

Our rectangle of white light is eternal. Only we come and go; we say: This is where I came in. The rectangle was here before we came, and it will be here after we have gone.

So it seems that a film is, first, a confined space, at which you and I, we, a great many people, are staring.

It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less.

A red filter is placed before the lens at the word “red.”

If we were seeing a film that is red, if it were only a film of the color red, would we not be seeing more?

No.

A red film would subtract green and blue from the white light of our rectangle.

So if we do not like this particular film, we should not say: There is not enough here, I want to see more. We should say: There is too much here, I want to see less.

The red filter is withdrawn.

Our white rectangle is not “nothing at all.” In fact, it is, in the end, all we have. That is one of the limits of the art of film.

So if we want to see what we call more, which is actually less, we must devise ways of subtracting, of removing, one thing and another, more or less, from our white rectangle.

The rectangle is generated by our performer, the projector, so whatever we devise must fit into it.

Then the art of making films consists in devising things to put into our projector.

The simplest thing to devise, although perhaps not the easiest, is nothing at all, which fits conveniently into the machine.

Such is the film we are now watching. It was devised several years ago by the Japanese filmmaker Takehisa Kosugi.

Such films offer certain economic advantages to the filmmaker.

But aside from that, we must agree that this one is, from an aesthetic point of view, incomparably superior to a large proportion of all films that have ever been made.

But we have decided that we want to see less than this.

Very well.

A hand blocks all light from the screen.

We can hold a hand before the lens. This warms the hand while we deliberate on how much less we want to see.

Not so much less, we decide, that we are deprived of our rectangle, a shape as familiar and nourishing to us as that of a spoon.

The hand is withdrawn.

Let us say that we desire to modulate the general information with which the projector bombards our screen. Perhaps this will do.

A pipe cleaner is inserted into the projector’s gate.

That’s better.

It may not absorb our whole attention for long, but we still have our rectangle, and we can always leave where we came in.

The pipe cleaner is withdrawn.

Already we have devised four things to put into our projector.

We have made four films.

It seems that a film is anything that may be put in a projector that will modulate the emerging beam of light.

For the sake of variety in our modulations, for the sake of more precise control of what and how much we remove from our rectangle, however, we most often use a specifically devised material called: film.

Film is a narrow transparent ribbon of any length you please, uniformly perforated with small holes along its edges so that it may be handily transported by sprocket wheels. At one time, it was sensitive to light.

Now, preserving a faithful record of where that light was, and was not, it modulates our light beam, subtracts from it, makes a vacancy, a hole, that looks to us like, say, Lana Turner.

Furthermore, that vacancy is doing something: it seems to be moving.

But if we take our ribbon of film and examine it, we find that it consists of a long row of small pictures, which do not move at all.

We are told that the explanation is simple: all explanations are.

The projector accelerates the small still pictures into movement. The single pictures, or frames, are invisible to our failing sense of sight, and nothing that happens on any one of them will strike our eye.

And this is true, so long as all the frames are essentially similar. But if we punch a hole in only one frame of our film, we will surely see it.

And if we put together many dissimilar frames, we will just as surely see all of them separately. Or at least we can learn to see them.

We learned long ago to see our rectangle, to hold all of it in focus simultaneously. If films consist of consecutive frames, we can learn to see them also.

Sight itself is learned. A newborn baby not only sees poorly—it sees upside down.

At any rate, in some of our frames we found, as we thought, Lana Turner. Of course, she was but a fleeting shadow—but we had hold of something. She was what the film was about.

Perhaps we can agree that the film was about her because she appeared oftener than anything else.

Certainly a film must be about whatever appears most often in it.

Suppose Lana Turner is not always on the screen.

Suppose further that we take an instrument and scratch the ribbon of film along its whole length.

Then the scratch is more often visible than Miss Turner, and the film is about the scratch.

Now suppose that we project all films. What are they about, in their great numbers?

At one time and another, we shall have seen, as we think, very many things.

But only one thing has always been in the projector.

Film.

That is what we have seen.

Then that is what all films are about.

If we find that hard to accept, we should recall what we once believed about mathematics.

We believed it was about the apples or peaches owned by George and Harry.

But having accepted that much, we find it easier to understand what a filmmaker does.

He makes films.

Now, we remember that a film is a ribbon of physical material, wound up in a roll: a row of small unmoving pictures.

He makes the ribbon by joining large and small bits of film together.

It may seem like pitiless and dull work to us, but he enjoys it, this splicing of small bits of anonymous stuff.

Where is the romance of moviemaking? The exotic locations? The stars?

The film artist is an absolute imperialist over his ribbon of pictures. But films are made out of footage, not out of the world at large.

Again: Film, we say, is supposed to be a powerful means of communication. We use it to influence the minds and hearts of men.

But the artist in film goes on building his ribbon of pictures, which is at least something he understands a little about.

The pioneer brain surgeon Harvey Cushing asked his apprentices: Why had they taken up medicine?

To help the sick.

But don’t you enjoy cutting flesh and bone? he asked them. I cannot teach men who don’t enjoy their work.

But if films are made of footage, we must use the camera. What about the romance of the camera?

And the film artist replies: A camera is a machine for making footage. It provides me with a third eye, of sorts, an acutely penetrating extension of my vision.

But it is also operated with my hands, with my body, and keeps them busy, so that I amputate one faculty in heightening another.

Anyway, I needn’t really make my own footage. One of the chief virtues in so doing is that it keeps me out of my own films.

We wonder whether this interferes with his search for self-expression.

If we dared ask, he would probably reply that self-expression interests him very little.

He is more interested in reconstructing the fundamental conditions and limits of his art.

After all, he would say, self-expression was only an issue for a very brief time in history, in the arts or anywhere else. And that time is about over.

Now, finally, we must realize that the man who wrote the text we are hearing read has more than a passing acquaintance and sympathy with the filmmaker we have been questioning.

For the sake of precision and repeatability, he has substituted a tape recorder for his personal presence—a mechanical performer as infallible as the projector behind us.

And to exemplify his conviction that nothing in art is as expendable as the artist, he has arranged to have his text recorded by another filmmaker, Mr. Michael Snow, whose voice we are hearing now.

If filmmakers seldom appear in their own films, there is ancient precedence of appearing in one another’s works. D. W. Griffith appeared in a work of Porter’s. Fritz Lang appeared in a film of Godard’s. And this is not the first time Mr. Snow and the present writer have reciprocated.

Since the speaker is also a filmmaker, he is fully equipped to talk about the only activity the writer is willing to discuss at present.

There is still time for us to watch our rectangle awhile.

Perhaps its sheer presence has as much to tell us as any particular thing we might find inside it.

We can invent ways of our own to change it.

But this is where we came in.

Please turn on the lights.

 

_________
28 of Hollis Frampton’s 51 films

_____________
A and B in Ontario (1984)
‘“Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of ’67. We were staying at a friend’s house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other – and we did.” – Joyce Wieland A & B in Ontario was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton’s death, the film was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties) shoot each other with cameras.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

_____________
Magellan Cycle (1977 – 1980)
‘Had it been completed, Hollis Frampton’s 369-day-long megamovie Magellan could have been the ultimate structuralist monument. Planned around the conceit of Ferdinand Magellan’s global circumnavigation, Magellan was to comprise a liturgical calendar of approximately 1,000 films, with Lumière-inspired miniatures of just a few minutes screening on most days, and longer works on equinoxes, solstices, and other special dates. Within this solar epic, Frampton envisioned numerous “subsections and epicycles,” completing a macrocosmic engine reminiscent of an astrolabe’s nested gears or a computer program’s subroutines—the latter suggested by Frampton’s dot-matrix-printed schedule created in 1978, “CLNDR version 1.2.0,” each day numbered like a line of code. Like his project’s namesake, Frampton died before reaching his goal, completing only eight out of the proposed 36 hours of film. But these fragments evoke the whole.’ — Village Voice

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_____________
Gloria! (1979)
‘In GLORIA! Frampton juxtaposes nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary forms through the interfacing of a work of early cinema with a videographic display of textual material. These two formal components (the film and the texts) in turn relate to a nineteenth-century figure, Frampton’s maternal grandmother, and to a twentieth-century one, her grandson (filmmaker Frampton himself). In attempting to recapture their relationship, GLORIA! becomes a somewhat comic, often touching meditation on death, on memory and on the power of image, music and text to resurrect the past.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

_____________
Not the First Time (1976)
‘This film is composed of different and relatively commonplace subjects, but each image is a super-imposition (‘double exposure’) of two similar shots of the same subject, almost in the same position. The effect is amazing: one’s gaze at the image becomes a double gaze, as the two images were made at different times and with slightly different framing. The viewer is engaged in a process of double-vision that returns him to image and subject in a manner more complex, more self-aware, and more temporal than the way most of us view photographs.’ — Fred Camper

the entire film

 

_____________
Autumnal Equinox (1974)
‘Autumnal Equinox (1974) was shot inside a meat-packing plant, and shot using 30 mm film that contained bovine jelly – further pushing the boundaries of experimental film.’ — collaged

the entire film

 

_____________
Pan (0 – 4) (697 – 700) (1974)
‘Frampton planned for a whopping 720 of these one-minute “Panopticons” to be shown throughout the project. Perhaps something like visual palate cleansers.’ — Martin Teller

Pan (0 – 1)

Pan 2

Pan 3

 

___________
Winter Solstice (1974)
‘An experimental short by Hollis Frampton who films a couple and their dog as they walk farther away into the woods.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

____________
Noctiluca (Magellan’s Toys: #1) (1974)
‘Noctiluca is a three and one-half minute film designed to be shown on the second day of the MAGELLAN cycle. The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines by night, i.e., the moon, and the film indeed consists of a bright sphere, sometimes white, sometimes tinted, sometimes single, sometimes doubled and overlapped. This suggests to me the nocturnal navigation that Magellan had to rely upon in his first-ever trip around the world. (The second day of the cycle seems to be an inventory of the knowledge, machines, and arms that Magellan–and latterday voyagers like Frampton–had at the outset of his journey.) The film also refers of course to Stan Brakhage’s much longer, and monumental, 1973 film TEXT OF LIGHT, which studied the prismatic reflections occasioned by sunlight passing through a glass ashtray. Frampton’s film is, characteristically, more controlled and economical than Brakhage’s, but no less beautiful.’ — Brian Henderson

the entire film

 

_________
Less (1973)
‘Near the end of 1973, Frampton realized that he had not finished a single film over the course of a year. He promptly conceived and executed LESS, a doubly punning work in which a minimalist Frampton generates a twenty-four frame (one-second) loop of the incremental blacking out of a nude image by photographer Les Krims.’ — Bruce Jenkins

the entire film

 

____________
Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice (1972)
‘Frampton’s films expose, dismantle, and reorganize the structure of the medium while opening onto numerous branches of knowledge, including natural history, poetry, and linguistic theory. Poetic Justice, the second film in Framptons seven-part series Hapax Lagomena (1971–72), presents the viewer with an ordinary domestic scene: a stack of papers, a cup of coffee, and a potted cactus on a table. The sheets of paper compose a script that provides handwritten, frame-by-frame instructions for a film that unfolds only in the mind of the viewer; with the revelation of each page, the viewer is called upon to mine his or her own inventory of images. The desire to construct a linear narrative is countered by a series of spatial and temporal incongruities that collapse the distinction between filmic space and the physical realm of the viewer.’ — MoMA

the entire film

 

_____________
Poetic Justice (1972)
‘Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice cleverly and humorously calls attention to the nature of film itself and its vanity. Essentially, Poetic Justice is a film about what “film” really is. By choosing to depict a “movie” through its screenplay, Hollis Frampton raises the question of representation and the word–image relationship—a topic also extensively explored in Zorns Lemma.’ — Films Lie

the entire film

 

_____________
Apparatus Sum (1972)
‘A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a roomful of cadavers.’ — HF

the entire film

 

____________
Tiger Balm (1972)
‘After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard… and consecutive matters.’ — HF

the entire film

 

_____________
Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia (1971)
‘”In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton’s comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience.’ — Bill Simon

the entire film

 

_____________
Critical Mass (1971)
‘As a work of art I think (Critical Mass) is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!… It is one of the most delicate and clear statements – human relationships and the difficulties of them that I have ever seen. It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.’ — Stan Brakhage

the entire film

 

_____________
Zorns Lemma (1970)
‘Originally starting as a series of photographs, the non-narrative film Zorns Lemma is structured around a 24-letter Latin alphabet. It remains, along with Michael Snow’s Wavelength and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, one of the best known examples of structural filmmaking. The opening section of Zorns Lemma is 5 minutes long. In it a woman reads an abecedary of 24 couplets from The Bay State Primer, an eighteenth century book designed to teach children the alphabet. The film is entirely black during this section. A letter A stamped on tin foil, the first of 24 such letters shown at the beginning of the second section. The film’s main section is silent and lasts 45 minutes, broken into 2,700 one-second units. It shows the viewer an evolving 24-part “alphabet”. The section begins by presenting each letter typed on a sheet of tin foil. The alphabet is initially composed of words that appear on street signs, photographed in Manhattan. As the film continues to cycle through the alphabet, individual letters are slowly substituted with images. The first four substitutions—fire (x), waves (z), smoke (q), and reeds (y)–depict the four classical elements. The film’s conclusion lasts 10 minutes. It shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow. During this scene, six women’s voices alternate in reading the words of a passage from On Light, or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste. The voices read at a rate of one word per second.’ — collaged

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Artificial Light (1969)
‘Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait-shots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lap-dissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon… There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. That chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis; his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formulae.’ — P. Adams Sitney

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Carrots & Peas (1969)
‘On the bigger scale, Carrots and Peas is yet another investigation by Frampton of the building elements of cinema. It reflects the structural and post-structural linguistic trends of reduction of the whole into parts. In art, Cubism started by reducing the 3-dimension spatiality to a flat 2-dimension surface, and reducing the larger whole of an object to its building geometry forms. Then Bauhaus took geometry a step further into abstraction and reduction, before abstract expressionism and late minimalist art abolished the “bigger picture” in favor of fragmentation to the building blocks of art—color and simple lines.’ — Films Lie

the entire film

 

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Lemon (1969)
‘Lemon, ostensibly a one-shot film, representing a radical pairing down of materials and methods: It is silent, static and unedited. This arrestingly spare portrait of a seeming “Superstar Fruit” begins in darkness, as gradually, a Lemon comes into sight. This film shows how Important Lighting can be.’ — TENRAG

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Palindrome (1969)
‘The menacing latin palindrome ‘In Girvm Imvs Nocte Et Consvmimvr Igni’ (By night we go (down) into a gyre/and we are consumed by fire) serves as epigraph to this animated film. Anima is imparted to 12 variations on each of 40 congruent phrases, metamorphosed from the chemically mutilated flesh of color film itself.’ –– collaged

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Surface Tension (1968)
‘Surface Tension, as the name suggests, concerns itself with the way objects move on a surface with a varying degree of “film.” Scientifically speaking, the greater the amount of film the more difficult it is for an object to move. In Hampton’s film this is not the case, in fact, it is how he alters the film that allows the material to move in an either slower or faster rate. It is only the sound that seems to move at a consistent pace, but that, arguably, has nothing to do with film and exists on its own plane of experience. Frampton even went so far as to claim that the film was about three separate notions of space, one being comedic, one scientific and a third being something in between. With this in mind it helps explain the three segments of the film, one involving a man talking whilst standing next to a clock. With the sound removed, we are left perplexed over the man’s discussion that is faster than normal and only have the incessant ringing of a phone as comfort. The second section, the scientific portion of the film, follows a camera fast forwarded through the streets as incomprehensible German is dubbed over. We are only able to pull worlds like “chocolat” from the man’s dialogue, which is juxtaposed with incredibly murky water. The final section is of a fish in an aquarium on the beach. The rate of the film is normal this time as we watch the ebb and flow of the tide consume the tank, but never take the fish. Simultaneously words appear on the screen that have no coherent meaning, but appear to refer to the film as a whole in some manner. Neither comedic nor serious, this portion of the film is clearly the hybrid of the previous portions, yet it is always affected by what Frampton has done to intervene with the film stock. Ultimately, the film is book-ended by crashing tides, perhaps suggesting that no amount of intervention can stop surface tension, when the force is greater than the film trying to interfere. A deeply profound commentary on the entire state of filmmaking, particularly considering it is a question film theorist haves struggled over for almost a century. What Frampton does with Surface tension, is definitively answer that question, or at least provide a philosophical positing so grand that to overcome it would be to some extent inconceivable.’ — Cinemalacrum

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Snowblind (1968)
‘Homage to Michael Snow’s environmental sculpture ‘Blind.’ The film proposes analogies, in imitation of 3 historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work.” — Hollis Frampton

the entire film

 

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Maxwell’s Demon (1968)
‘Homage to the physicist, James Clerk-Maxwell, father of thermodynamics and analytic color theory, whom I have admired. His famous Demon, mythic and microscopic as Spirochaeta pallida, is a perfectly imaginary being who deals entirely in pure energy.’ — The Film-makers Coop

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States (1967)
‘No, not the United etc. but the conditions, forms in which things exist. Somewhat abstracted, a solid, a liquid and a gas: salt, milk and smoke: falling, pouring and rising are the stars of this classical film. Sheets, streaks and wisps, the protagonists are all white (light). The background, zero place, is black (no light). Silence. The ongoing film reveals the ephemera compartmented in a pattern of temporal proportions in which lengths of salt sheet activity are gradually overtaken by liquid streaks which are in turn overtaken by smoke drifts. But another solid is the sliceable, arrangeable film material itself: the intercutting and the logic of the arrangement introduces something diamond-like, sculptural to the natures presented. There is a profoundly satisfying unity of ends and means that is both ‘natural’ (the way the protagonists behave) and ‘artificial’ (the artist’s structure). The sum is cultured, beautiful.’ — Michael Snow

the entire film

 

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Heterodyne (1967)
‘I began to make it when I had no money for raw stock and only several rolls of colored leader but nevertheless (had) the need to make or work on a film.’ — HF

the entire film

 

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Manual of Arms (1966)
‘In this “fourteen-part drill for the camera,” Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activities.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Process Red (1966)
‘The Criterion booklet emphasized the uniformity of hands (holding coffee cups, ashing cigerettes “hand held shots”), saturated with the “color of revolution”. But more immediately to me the timing seemed Brakhage-level perfect in its rhythmic immutability. A series of angular swipes, successively worked to compliment the process of memory. Very propulsive and worth an immediate re-watch.’ — Tedcoolguy7

the entire film

 

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Information (1966)
‘Hypothetical ‘first film’ for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonable principles, given: 1) camera; 2) rawstock; 3) a single bare lightbulb. I admit to having made a number of splices.’ — HF

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. I have a tradition that every year on my birthday I give myself a post-shaped gift that, hopefully, works as a gift to you out there too. In previous years I’ve done a post featuring my favorite songs by my favorite band/artist Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard, a post with my all-time favorite songs in general, a special Robert Bresson Day, and this year I’ve made a post focused on my other all-time favorite filmmaker and a great hero of mine, Hollis Frampton. Here’s hoping you’ll give me the gift of looking through it and, best case scenario, enjoying it yourselves. Thanks a lot! ** Gex, Hi, G! Thank you. Just a bunch of film work and then a cozy dinner with a few pals. No big, A-ok. I hope my b’day brings you good luck! xo ** Kettering, Hi, Kettering. There’s kind of no early or late here, or at least not by the time I open the comments. Sure, you can use my email. Feel free. Thank you so much about Zac’s and my films. I’m so happy to hear that. We’re really excited, and I think ‘Room Temperature’ is going to be amazing, I really do. Or we’ll certainly aim hard for amazingness anyway. Thank you, thank you!!! ** CAUTIVOS, Thanks, I do aim for non-disppointing-ness. I like lots of female singers. Off the top of my head my big faves include Nina Simone, Souxsie Sioux, Cat Power, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lucinda Williams, Jun Togawa, … lots really. I like jazz, sure. No surprise that I mostly like the more experimental wing. It’s my birthday, yes, for better or worse. Howdy! ** Kirk, Hi, Kirk. Welcome! I’ve never read that Vidal. I should, right? I love your anecdote from it. Thank you! What’s up with you? ** Misanthrope, Lack of sleep can access new aspects of you. Maybe that mistake makes your copy valuable? Shit like that happens. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you, buddy. The interview went really well, and we’ve hired him. Whew! Now if he can only get our budget to work, it’ll be amazing. Fingers still crossed. Mashed potatoes are definitely way up there on the food chain, I agree. I might try to eat some for my birthday. It’s been a long time since I smelled a wet dog, but I think I remember it being kind of a good smell, no? Love putting my aging process into reverse, G. ** l@rst, Happy to spread the good word. Oh, man, so sorry about the death. I hope she’s dealing with it okay, or, well, as okay as possible. Excellent about the Grind thing. Sounds itchy in the good way. Rock on, sir. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Happy you liked it and can relate via your work. That Sebadoh song is so fucking great. I just listened it full blast two days ago. Have a good 24 hours+. ** David Ehrenstein, Good call! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, B! ‘Squashed tomatoes in stew’? Wow, I’ll eat that. I’ll try to max out my special day. Maybe you can figure out a way to do that too. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hey! Good to see you! It has been too long. Awesome that the post’s timing functioned as an inspiring welcome mat type of thing. Yeah, the google murder sucked, but I’m managing to put all the broken pieces back together here very gradually, and fuck them, etc. I’m inferring from what you wrote that your creative mojo is on the rise again, yes? Hope so. Swansea: I’ve never been there but I’ve always thought that name promised beauty of some sort. Hope to see you again soon. Take care in any case. ** Steve Erickson, No, never taken it. Given that my dreams that I remember are always nightmares, I think I’ll stick to the not remembering. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Margo Price’s new album STRAYS @ Slant Magazine here. I did not know that about a new NP single with Bejar on board. That’s intriguing to say the least. I’ll snatch it. Thanks for the alert. Ha ha. ** Minet, Thank you, thank you! I’ve been going through your visual work, and it’s super incredible. I’m really blown away. I’m already full on addicted and making beelines back into the folder multiple times daily. Amazing. Deep bow. Of course your good thought about my stuff in return means really a lot. Comrades! Very rainy here too. ‘Porcile’ is my favourite Pasolini and not just because my hero Pierre Clementi is in it. Salerno is a very smart guy. I love Kawabata, yes. I love everything I’ve read by him, and I think my favorite is ‘Snow Country’. Um, Dustan didn’t translate ‘My Loose Thread’. That’s weird. He published a book of mine with this press he ran for a while. I only met him once, and he was really weird and kind of a big prima donna. I’ve been living here for … I’m not sure, 15 years maybe? The French are great! I mean, that’s a ridiculous generalisation, obviously, but I find people here to be really cool pretty much to a one. And friendly enough. Not as friendly as people in LA, but enough. Paris is weird
‘cos it’s technically big, but, when you live here, it feels like a small town almost. You can pretty much walk almost anywhere. I hope you get to come back, ideally not during one of our rare but, yes, awful heatwaves. ** Loser, Hi! Yes, thank you for sending your work. I love it. Want to see more. Fluff can be totally genius. And your seriousness as an artist is clear and I second that aspect. And I wouldn’t say your work is fluff anyway. Maybe it has a fluffy beauty, but I feel the depths too. It’s great! No, I was touched to think your Dennis might have anything to do with me, Dennis. And he does. I’m honored. Well, I hope somehow that whatever good vibes my birthday radiates will reach way over to you. ** Bzzt, Hey, Quinn! Wow, it’s been a while. It’s cool to see you! Thanks for the HBD. I’m good, just kind of totally locked into getting the film ready to shoot. It’s very consuming. I’m traveling to LA a lot because we’re shooting there. Going there again this weekend. I think I’m too busy to feel inspired or not right now, but I am working on some fiction at least. I’m glad to hear you’re writing. Joblessness is at least a boon for that. Being a sunny Capricorn, yes, I too feel utterly confident that life will keep you aloft and enthroned. It’s really nice to get to hear how you’re doing. Take care until soon, I hope. ** Caesar, Hi, C. Glad you liked it. Zac and I did shoot a lot of video on your Argentina/Antarctica trip, hm. Maybe someday. Yes, he’s the Zac of my gif novels. He’s their proprietor. I’ve read just a little Ocampo and loved it. I’ll read more. I love Cortazar. I used to live close to his Paris apartment. I do know and like Puig, Rulfo, Sabato, and Saramago. The others I will investigate, thank you! I’m due for a big book shopping trip. Sadly, I think it is hard to make a living as journalist no matter where you are. I used to, but that was before the internet ate everything. Keep at it. It’s an amazing medium. I’m honored and pleasured by our exchange of words too! I don’t know when ‘Jerk’ goes VOD. Hm, I’ll ask. Hopefully soon. Have as close to a perfect day as possible. ** Bill, Me too. I kind of got to a palimpsest thing with ‘The Marbled Swarm’, or got the closest so far at least. I’ll get all over Enriquez, thank you. That does sound entertaining: your dream. I wish mine were more imaginative. There’s just like high tension thrillers, which is not my favorite genre. ** Robert, Thank you, and happy my birthday to you. My plate this week is packed with work. Urgh. Great that you got your novel going again. Where are you in it? Thank you about the post. It was a hard thing to try to finesse, so that’s great to hear. ** Joseph Earp, Hi! And now it’s my birthday right here where I live. Torres … I don’t think I know her work, unless I’m spacing. I’ll listen to that song you linked to and then use it as an adventure’s starting gate. Thanks a lot! Cool, I’ll go see your new uploaded paintings. They definitely deserve being on gallery walls. I’ve never been to Sydney. I’ve been to Melbourne and Tasmania, but that’s it for Australia so far. It sounds complicated and not un-NYC-like in a way. I’m looking forward to ‘Cattle’. I hope to read (or start reading) it on my very long upcoming plane flight. Interesting that you work at a film production company, So, yeah ,I’m sure you know the difficulties involved. We hooked up with a new Line Producer last night, and we’ll see if he can work magic with our very tight budget. I do really like the film ‘The Swimmer’, yes. And I agree that Lancaster is always a joy to watch in pretty much anything. Cool. I hope your day gives you something really special. ** Nick, Hi, Nick. Thanks re: my b’day. It just started but I think it’ll be pretty normal until I eat with some friends later. That’s fine though. I do like cakes. I certainly wouldn’t mind if one is placed in front of me before the day is over. We’ll see. Okay, that evening out does sound pretty exciting and, dare I say, very promising? It does seem like you should talk to him and that he certainly will not be sorry or feel weird if you do. Hot and sorta broken can be very dangerous and, well, amazing but yeah. I know the power of that combination very well. Feature like physical feature? Hm. I’ve never been hugely fond of my features. People do sometimes say I have nice eyes, so I guess I’ll pick them. They’re blue. I think that helps. In others? With guys, I’m a total sucker for long hair and skinniness, I don’t know why, but I am. Enjoy this day that happens to be my birthday bigly, okay? ** Sarah, Thank you so much, Sarah! <3 ** Jamie, Jamie, my pal! Thank you so much!!! Look forward to more of you! Slice of b’day cake with optional ice cream scoop love, me. ** Okay. Enjoy what my birthday has wrought upon the blog space if you possibly can. See you tomorrow.