Hollis Frampton

This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features the voice of artist Michael Snow. Frampton would place a tape deck at the front of a room, press play, and walk to the back to run a 16mm projector. Presented here is the audio portion of the piece, recreated with images designed to replicate Frampton’s visuals.

An icon of the American avant-garde, Hollis Frampton made rigorous, audacious, brainy, and downright thrilling films, leaving behind a body of work that remains unparalleled. In the 1960s, having already been a poet and a photographer, Frampton became fascinated with the possibilities of 16 mm filmmaking. In such radically playful and visually and sonically arresting works as Surface Tension, Zorns Lemma, (nostalgia), Critical Mass, and the enormous, unfinished Magellan cycle (cut short by his death at age forty-eight), Frampton repurposes cinema itself, making it into something by turns literary, mathematical, sculptural, and simply beautiful—and always captivating. This collection of works by the essential artist—the first release of its kind—includes twenty-four films, dating from 1966 to 1979.

A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Joyce Wieland: “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”. 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 shoot each other with cameras.

Joyce Wieland: “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”. 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 shoot each other with cameras.

Short film by Hollis Frampton

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.

A film of multiple superimpositions, utilizing the images of Solariumagelani (Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice) (1974) overlaid with the hexagonal shapes that recur throughout Frampton's Magellan cycle.

"...Frampton travels to the purported birthplace of the Eisensteinian model of cinema, the fairground, with its 'montage of attractions'...ambulating wide-angled portrait of the fair, its throng of participants, its array of attractions (Belgian Waffles, Walk Away Sundaes, Flying Bobs, the Toboggan, a Hall of Health). Interpolated within this walking tour are nine optically reversed textual passages which are briefly flashed on-screen, framed by a repeated image of a ride appropriately known as 'The Scrambler.'"–Bruce Jenkins

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.

Hollis Frampton alludes to origins and creation as he cuts between a garden featuring a bride and groom and an 1902 film entitled "A Little Piece of String."

Short film by Hollis Frampton

"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

"Strategy and imagery combat and aid each other in pairs. QUATERNION...a spatial figure of monumental attractions...interference...an undulating gyre. Hollis superimposes a fragmenting Muybridge-like grid of Cartesian elements (details of the fire ecscape outside the studio) against shots of rooftops superimposed in perfect scale with the billboard-like segments of an automobile, enlarged flower, and a spoon...panels of the 20' x 20' mural for the New York World's Fair in James Rosenquist's Broome Street studio–New York, mid-1960s."–Patrick Clancy

"Filmed in large part during H.F.'s lecture-screening tour in the bay area: visit(s) to the Musee Mechanique, Land's End, the Cliff House. The San Francisco fog is proclaimed, as also are the cypress trees that line parts of our local beach. A visit to the Brakhage Colorado residence provided images of chickens/roosters."–Gail Camhi

The understandable fascination with Frampton's intellect can blind one to the frequent down-home dimension of his imagery. Here, in a most rigorously formal, even mathematical procession, we see frame clusters of light blue sky, green grass, and red (filter red) leaves; then frame clusters of the backs of dairy cows; and finally frame clusters of portions of a shiny vehicle (we can see people, objects in bulbous reflection). A trip to the New York State Fair filtered through a most rarified formal film."–Scott MacDonald

A short film by Hollis Frampton.

An analysis of film’s persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema’s flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus.

An experimental short by Hollis Frampton who films the female form during various activities.

Magellan is an unfinished cycle of films by Hollis Frampton, to be shown over 371 days (the Magellan Calendar). STRAITS OF MAGELLAN was one of three phases of the calendar, and Pans are one-minute films interspersed throughout this phase. Comprised of Pan 0, Pan 1 (both from 1974), Pan 2 (1970), Pan 3 (1972), Pan 4, Pan 697, Pan 698, Pan 699 (all from 1974) and Pan 700 (1969).

The operations that dislocate a film like Summer Solstice–I hope irreparably–from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy farm document, or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure–the intrigue, possibly–of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching.

Shot at a steel mill, Winter Solstice is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal — all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space.

Otherwise known as Magellan's Toys #1. Hollis Frampton's "Noctiluca" was a film designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle, the filmmaker's unfinished magnum opus work. 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.

A sampling of forty-nine fragments from Frampton's catalogue of 'actualities', the films from STRAITS OF MAGELLAN; DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS, are all silent and unedited. Several invoke, directly, the work of the Lumieres, as in Frampton's reworking of DEMOLITION D'UN MUR (1895) in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumieres' wall. He makes reference to his own work and plays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that includes a series of appropriated 'lenses' ( a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of 'screens' a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).

Filmed in a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, MN… Frampton utilizes a shooting strategy that flattens and pictorializes a palpable space of action that includes not only cattle (now seen hanging from huge meathooks), but even on occasion, figures.

A series of ghost-like vehicles drive by in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

A little boy celebrates his frog catch in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

The camera pans across a field of flowers at extreme speeds in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

A butchered cow is decapitated in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

A series of papers flutter in the wind in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

Clouds roll by in a static haze in this Hollis Frampton short film.

Rain falls and reflects the light in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

A pendulum swings by until it comes to a complete stop in this Hollis Frampton short film.

We are taken on a journey through a field of corn in this short film by Hollis Frampton.

Avant-garde short

"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

Experimental short

"A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)... visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language." (H.F.)

Frampton on Apparatus Sum: "A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a roomful of cadavers."

"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

Poetic Justice 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.

“The frame itself, which divides what is present to consciousness from what is absolutely elsewhere, is tempered here by the breath, tremor, heartbeat of the perceiver. People this given space, if you will, with images of your own devising.” – HF

“A ‘baroque’ summary of film’s historic internal conflicts, chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space.” – HF

"In PUBLIC DOMAIN...(Frampton) recapitulates cinema's infancy in a series of direct quotes from such notable primitive works as RECORD OF A SNEEZE (FRED OTT'S SNEEZE) and SANDOW FLEXING HIS MUSCLES, two 1894 Edison kinetoscopic shorts, as well as literal pieces of cinematic juvenilia (child wading at the beach, another throwing a tantrum at home, three women merrily blowing bubble pipes, and the finale, a melodramatic weighing of a newborn attended by an anxious father, doctor, and nurse)–all readily retrievable/quotable fragments from our finite federal version of the 'infinite film,' the paper print collection at the Library of Congress."–Bruce Jenkins

“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” – Stan Brakhage

A man and a woman have been living together for six months. After disappearing for two days, the man returns and acts as if nothing has happened, refusing to say where he was.

In which the off-screen voice of Michael Snow narrates a series of Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate.

Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structuralist film by Hollis Frampton. It is named after Zorn's lemma (also known as the Kuratowski–Zorn lemma), a proposition of set theory formulated by mathematician Max Zorn in 1935. Zorns Lemma is prefaced with a reading from an early grammar textbook. The remainder of the film, largely silent, shows the viewer an evolving 24-part "alphabet" (where i & j and u & v are interchanged) which is cycled through, replaced and expanded upon. The film's conclusion shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow as several voices read passages from On Light, or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste.

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, Film Culture Reader

A short film by Hollis Frampton.

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.

"Two repetitive, banal rhythmic acts - as it were from the observe and reverse of a phenakistiscope disk - factored and expanded into a cinema filmstrip. Note: Prince Ruperts Drops are not a confection or a nose candy, but a physical demonstration of extreme internal stresses in equilibrium." - HF

While working at a photo lab, Frampton found that the waste at both ends of the rolls of processed film—where chemicals worked on the emulsion through clips used to attach the film to the machine—produced images far too interesting to be discarded. For Palindrome, Frampton selected images which he described as “tending towards the biomorphic,” resembling abstract surrealist painting. However, the rigid palindromic structure that Frampton imposes on the images—a motorized sequence based on “twelve variations on each of forty congruent phrases”—deviates from the subjective aesthetic of the expressive, demonstrating Frampton’s interest in the “generative power” of films composed by rules and principles.

By stripping the sound from a pre-existing instructional film, Frampton conjures, with an economy of means, the everyday movements then being explored by the Judson Dance Theater. "I bought this film in a Canal Street junk shop for $1.00 and found myself in complete agreement with it. The ostensible pretext is the humane and practical discipline of making a vegetable garden (hence the title, borrowed from Hesiod). The gardeners are masters of their art, so that their work blossoms into overarching metaphor." —HF.

Upward shot from the ground perspective of a silo.

“For Black and White Film, Huot created his own photographic imagery for the first time. After a few moments of darkness, a young woman (Sheila Raj) lowers a covering of some kind, slowly revealing her naked body. She reaches outside the circle of light, which illuminates only her silvery form, scoops up dark paint, and, beginning with her feet, gradually paints her entire body. When she has become invisible except for the faint sheen of the paint, she drops her arms, looks straight ahead, and the film fades to total darkness. The serenity of the film, which is structurally reflected by Huot’s presentation of the action from a single position in a single take, its sensuality, and the aura of ritual it creates (Raj always moves in a formal way and, except when she needs to look for the paint, looks modestly down) make Black and White Film a quietly haunting work.”—Scott MacDonald, “The Films of Robert Huot: 1967 to 1972”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer 1980.

A film in three parts: a man talking while a telephone rings, a walking tour of New York, and a goldfish swimming.

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell's classic theory about the behavior of gas molecules is represented on-screen by a man performing a series of Canadian air force exercises.

"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in imitation of three historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work." -HF

"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

Wavelength" ("Longitud de onda"), es un viaje a través de una habitación con ventanales, un deslizamiento a través del tiempo cinematográfico (distintos tiempos, luces, texturas), un viaje que incluye una muerte y finaliza en una imagen inmóvil: una foto del mar. El deslizamiento es físico (óptico) y metafísico, y la nave es aquí un zoom virtual hacia delante (en realidad es fragmentario y no exacto) y un sonido progresivamente agudo, hasta el silencio final del mar quieto.

"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

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.

Frampton on Information: "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."

An experimental short film by Hollis Frampton of contrasting colours.