Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema 9780231554169

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HOLLIS FRAMPTON

FILM AND CULTURE

FILM AND CULTURE A series of Columbia University Press Edited by John Belton For a complete list of titles, see page 307.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON NAVIGATING THE INFINITE CINEMA

michael zryd

CO LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York, Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zryd, Michael, author. Title: Hollis Frampton : navigating the infinite cinema / Michael Zryd. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Series: Film and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022040559 (print) | LCCN 2022040560 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231201568 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231201575 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554169 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Frampton, Hollis, 1936–1984—Criticism and interpretation. | Experimental films—United States—History and criticism. | Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.F726 Z79 2023 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.F726 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/6110973—dc23/eng/20221208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040559 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040560

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee Cover image: Three film frames from Hollis Frampton, Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments, 1974, courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives. Image prepared by Emily Davis.

FO R T E SS

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: From the Chemistry of Cobalt to the Chemistry of Dirt 1 1.

A Brief Introduction to Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

2.

An Introduction to Magellan

3.

Metahistory and the Archive: “Historical Necessity” and Tradition 72

4.

Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything

5.

Archaeology: Millennial Allegories of Art, Representation, and Politics in the Camera Arts 140

6.

The Constellation

47

176

Conclusion: Virtual Future Metahistory Notes 231 Bibliography 281 Index 293

25

218

103

Acknowledgments

T

his book has been over thirty years in the making and involved many people and institutions that have supported me; it is truly a collaborative project. My first engagement with Hollis Frampton’s work came during my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto in the late 1980s. I saw his films at the Innis College Film Society (with Jim Shedden, Kathryn Mackay, Lisa Godfrey, David Morris, and Paul Della Penna, among others) and read his essays for the first time in Bart Testa’s film theory class. During my graduate studies at New York University, I was fortunate to encounter new perspectives on Frampton’s work in classes with Paul Arthur, Tom Gunning, Allen S. Weiss, and especially Annette Michelson (whose course on the Filmmaker as Theorist was particularly formative). I am grateful to Tom for many generative conversations about Frampton (and other topics) over the years. My thanks to many NYU Cinema Studies classmates whose diverse research interests and intellectual formations pushed me to consider new approaches to experimental and independent cinema, among them Alexandra Keller, Nicola Galombik, Noa Steimatsky, Lucia Bozzola, Manohla Dargis, Julia Erhart, Michael Gillespie, Roy Grundmann, Alex Juhasz, Alisa Lebow, Paula Massood, Ken Rogers, Art Simon, Malcolm Turvey, and Harry Wade. Grad student internships at Anthology Film Archives (working with Robert Haller, its estimable director of Special Collections) and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (with Leslie Trumbull) gave me precious understanding of the passions and contradictions of experimental film institutions and culture—and the remarkable people who sustain them—in addition to access to unique documents related to Frampton’s work. Robert Haller invited me to co-program a retrospective of Frampton’s films for the International Experimental Film Congress in Toronto in 1989, for which

xAcknowledgments

we prepared a then-comprehensive bibliography. Curating further retrospectives provided thought-provoking occasions to present Frampton’s work with extraordinary colleagues who provided programming assistance and conversation about Frampton’s work at these screenings: Hapax Legomena at Cinematheque Ontario (2008, Andrea Picard) and the Pacific Film Archive (2015, Susan Oxtoby), and the Magellan cycle at Anthology Film Archives, New York (1996, 2003, Wendy Dorsett, Andrew Lampert, John Klacsmann); London National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007, Mark Webber); and ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, Germany (2007, Steina, Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel, Antonia Marten, and Thomas Thiel). Meeting Luke Fowler after a ZKM screening was a special treat matched only by the pleasures of subsequently watching Fowler’s smart and delicately playful films. I appreciated the invitation to assist the Criterion Collection with the production of the A Hollis Frampton Odyssey Blu-ray/DVD collection, working with Bill Brand, Ken Eisenstein, Ed Halter, and Bruce Jenkins; many thanks to Abby Lustgarten, Liz Helfgott, and Kim Hendrickson at Criterion for their deeply collaborative approach. Research for this book has taken place at most of the major institutions that hold Frampton’s work in its archives and collections: Anthology Film Archives (Robert Haller, John Klacsmann, Andrew Lampert, John Mhiripiri, Wendy Dorsett); Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center (Ron Magliozzi, Charles Silver) and Archives (Miriam Gianni, Michelle Harvey); Harvard Film Archive (Haden Guest, Rebecca Meyers, Spruill Harder, Liz Coffey, Ann-Marie Costa); Albright-Knox Art Gallery G. Robert Strauss Jr. Memorial Library (Gabriela Zoller and Susana Tejada); Burchfield-Penney Art Center (Nancy Weekly); Carnegie Museum of Art Archives, Time-Based Media Project (Katherine Barbera and Emily Davis); CEPA (Sean Donaher); Dean Brownrout Modern Contemporary; Film-Makers’ Cooperative (M. M. Serra, Josh Guilford); Millennium Film Workshop (Howard Guttenplan); Pacific Film Archive (Susan Oxtoby, Nancy Goldman, Jason Sanders); San Francisco Cinematheque (Steve Polta, Caroline Savage); School of the Art Institute Library; and Walker Art Center (Jill Vetter). University archives provided access to information on Frampton’s career as student and teacher: Case Western Reserve University Archive; Cooper Union Library (Carol Salomon, Thomas Micchelli); Hunter College; School of Visual Arts, New York (Beth Kleber); and SUNY Buffalo University Archives. Further research was conducted at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art (Stefanie SchulteStratus, Uli Ziemons); British Artists Film and Video Study Collection (Steven

Acknowledgmentsxi

Ball); British Film Institute; Getty Research Institute (Virginia Mokslaveskas and Kathleen Salomon, with funding from a Getty Research Institute Library Research Grant); and LUX (Ben Cook, Mike Sperlinger). Funding for this research has generously been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through its Standard Research Grant program and SSHRC institutional Conference Travel, Exchange, and Small Grants programs at York University. At York, the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design has supported this research through Minor Research/Creation, Junior Research, and Ad hoc Travel grants. Special thanks to Dean Philip Silver and Dean Sarah Bay-Cheng for their support. I am grateful for York University Faculty Association Travel Grants and a Research Development Fellowship for research leave. To paraphrase my colleague Haidee Wasson, I do not take for granted the existence of high-quality, accessible public universities in Canada and arm’s-length funding for humanities research through SSHRC. Colleagues, students, and staff at York University have provided invaluable support and patience for this research over many years. Several students worked as graduate assistants (Spencer Everhart, Natalie Greenberg, Jon Montes, Lisa Para, Erin Ryan, Abby Suissa, Erica Thorpe, Sarah Voisin), none more ably than Nicholas Balaisis, David Han, Aimée Mitchell, Yvonne Ng, and especially Scott Puccio. Conversations with Sarah Choi, Yi Cui, Jon Davies, Clint Enns (whose expertise in mathematics and Frampton has guided me through several shoals), Chris Gehman, Eli Horwatt, Cameron Moneo, and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes have been profoundly helpful. Faculty colleagues have gone above and beyond in their support, including those who take on the perilous and (usually) thankless job of department chair: Barbara Evans, Caitlin Fisher, Brenda Longfellow, John McCullough, and especially Sharon Hayashi, who provided the oasis of an “administrators’ writing day” that allowed us to take time for research and writing in busy times. Manfred Becker has been the best fellow graduate program director and a supportive friend along with graduate program assistant extraordinaire, Kuowei Lee. During a sabbatical leave from York, the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College granted me Affiliated Scholar status and access to the Mudd Library and Computing Center; thanks to Grace An and student researchers Ethan Cowan and James Rowell. I am also grateful to colleagues at my first fulltime academic appointment at the University of Western Ontario, especially Alison Conway, Patrick Deane, Michael Groden, Marty and Kinny Kreiswirth, Christie Milliken, Angela Stukator, and Bryce Traister.

xiiAcknowledgments

I have benefited from feedback and smart questions provided at conferences where preliminary research was presented, including several Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Film Studies Association of Canada annual conferences. Special thanks to Robin Curtis for the invitation to present on Hapax Legomena for the “Animating Abstraction: A Topography” symposium at Heinrich-HeineUniversität Düsseldorf, a visit that permitted me to sound out reactions to Frampton’s work outside the North American context. I am grateful that my conversations with Robin and Hannes Klug have continued over many years. My sense of the constellation was broadened by a visit to the Konstellation research group at Warburg Haus in Hamburg in 2008; my thanks to Thomas Wild for the generous invitation and for rich conversations on Stéphane Mallarmé and the constellation. Presentations at the “Future Histories of the Moving Image” conference in Sunderland, UK, and the “Visible Evidence” conference in Stockholm provided frameworks for thinking through future possibilities for material in the Frampton archive. A College Art Association panel in 2020 with Anne Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, Giles Fielke, Bruce Jenkins, and Lisa Zaher was a special occasion for a deep dive into elements of Frampton’s oeuvre that were new to me. Opportunities to present research and show Frampton films at universities and screening series have always been invigorating and expanded critical contexts for this work—and makes me grateful to the organizers who invited me and did the work to made them happen: Colgate University (Yi Cui); Concordia University’s ARTHEMIS (Advanced Research Team on History and Epistemology of Moving Image Studies) research group (Martin Lefebvre, Catherine Russell, Eric Prince); Harvard University (Lindsey Lodhie, Haidee Wasson); Ontario College of Art and Design University’s (OCADU) Propriomedia Colloquium Series in Media Studies and Research (Selmin Kara); Queen’s University (Gary Kibbins); Universität der Künste Berlin (Anette Haas); and University at Buffalo, Department of Media Study (Scott Puccio, Ekrem Seder); in addition to Kino Arsenal (Berlin, Stefanie Schulte-Stratus); Kunstverein Hamburg; San Francisco Cinematheque (Steve Polta); and White Light Cinema, Chicago (Patrick Friel). A keynote at the Film Studies Association of Canada Graduate Student Colloquium at Concordia enabled me to share Frampton’s “A Lecture” with an engaged audience (thanks to Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera, Sophie Cook, Rachel Webb Jekanowski, and Masha Salazkina). Two major conferences devoted to Frampton’s work were energizing events that collected established and emerging scholars and artists inspired by his work:

Acknowledgmentsxiii

“Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton,” organized by Keith Sanborn, P. Adams Sitney, and Su Friedrich at Princeton University in 2004, and “Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton,” organized by Tom Gunning, Bruce Jenkins, and Matt Hauske at the University of Chicago in 2010. I learned much from reading and conversing with Thomas Beard, Luca Caminati, Fred Camper, Ian Christie, Patrick Clancy, Tony Conrad, Bruce Elder, Kathy Elder, Simon Field, Lucy Fischer, Su Friedrich, Brian Frye, Peter Gidal, Barry Goldensohn, Ed Halter, Adam Hart, Sarah Keller, Mark Hansen, Barbara Lattanzi, Peter Lunenfeld, Alice Lyons, Laura Marks, Jeff Menne, Daniel Morgan, Yvonne Rainer, Andrew Ritchey, Rebecca Sheehan, Michael Snow, Steina, Matt Teichman, Malcolm Turvey, Andy Ulrich, Woody Vasulka, Kenneth White, and Soyoung Yoon. Early versions of this research have been published in “History and Ambivalence in Hollis Frampton’s Magellan,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 119–42; “Experimental Film as Useless Cinema,” in Useful Cinema, edited by Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, 315–36 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); “Hollis Frampton’s Magellan,” in Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers: 1973– 1990, ed. Woody Vasulka and Peter Wiebel, 220–23 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and “Magellan,” a text in the booklet accompanying A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (New York: Criterion Collection, 2012). Jock Reynolds, through Andrea Keller, gave me my first opportunity to publish on Frampton in “Hollis Frampton: The Secret World of Frank Stella,” in Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years: A Selective Catalogue, 373–74 (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1996). I am grateful to Malcolm Turvey and Kenneth White for the opportunity to edit a collection of previously published critical writing in Hollis Frampton for MIT Press’s October Files series. I am a slow writer and many people have provided supportive spaces for writing, with access to coffee and quiet: Amy Takahashi, Sara Takahashi, and the staff at Capital Espresso, Morning Brew, and the Rhino. My research has benefited from the accountability structures and rich feedback from several writing groups: Sharon Hayashi, Nic Sammond, Michael Prokopow, and participants in Book Farm in Mount Forest, Ontario: Janine Marchessault, Phil Hoffman, Brenda Austin-Smith, Susan Lord, Scott MacKenzie, and Christine Ramsay. Deep thanks to Cannon Schmitt for sharing his expansive sense of literary and visual history. The manuscript was completed during a residency at Hewnoaks Artist Colony with World Records magazine organized by Jason Fox, with Josh Guilford, Pooja Ranjan, Brett Story, Tess Takahashi, and Genevieve Yue.

xivAcknowledgments

Columbia University Press has been unfailingly supportive and impeccably professional in the editing and production of this book. My thanks to John Belton, editor of the Film and Culture series, for his enthusiastic interest in the project and for excellent early advice on sharpening its focus. Philip Leventhal has that most precious of resources in an editor, patience, tested over several years. I am grateful to Monique Briones, Jill R. Hughes, Marisa Lastres, and the rest of the team at CUP for their assistance in bringing this book to the world. Special thanks to Cam Moneo for such thoughtful work on the proofs and index. There is a small but dedicated group of Frampton scholars who, over several decades, have constituted the best community of scholars I can ever imagine encountering, including Lindsey Lodhie, Scott MacDonald, Rachel Moore, Scott Nygren, Michelle Puetz, Melissa Ragona, Keith Sanborn, P. Adams Sitney, Bart Testa, Maureen Turim, Michael Walsh, and Federico Windhausen. Gerald O’Grady was the most humble towering figure I’ve met, encouraging Frampton research everywhere he went. Annette Michelson gave Frampton early opportunities to publish his writings in Artforum and October while shepherding Frampton’s first collection of writings, Circles of Confusion, for Visual Studies Workshop Press, as well as several special issues of critical writing on his work in October. Bill Brand is Frampton’s archivist, sharing documents and expertise and leading several film preservation and restoration efforts. In their stewardship of the Frampton estate, photographer Marion Faller (Frampton’s widow), and, subsequent upon her death, her son Will Faller have been deeply supportive of research and publishing on Frampton. Finally, a small group of immensely generous circle of people have shared research documents, photos, ideas, biographical details, and comradeship, for which I am forever grateful: Anna Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, Giles Fielke, Bruce Jenkins, and Lisa Zaher. Close friends have provided not only intellectual but emotional support, including Theo and Eileen Dombrowski, Brian Wall and Wendy Stewart, Iona Frost, Barbara Crow and Michael Longford, Michele Pierson, James Cahill and Mufridah Nolan, and Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland. I am grateful for the wisdom and patience of my psychotherapist, Barry Olshen, also a poet and literary scholar, who not only appreciated the weight of the work but also knew when to challenge me to make the amorphous “project” into a concrete book. Finally, this book is dedicated to my partner and my love, Tess Takahashi, who has suffered every word and revision while providing inspiration and ideas at every turn.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON

Introduction From the Chemistry of Cobalt to the Chemistry of Dirt

W

ithin the field of North American experimental film there are few figures as central as Hollis Frampton. A prolific filmmaker and frequent lecturer on the filmmaker circuit in the United States from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Frampton also wrote for Artforum and October magazines, where he was one of the few experimental filmmakers represented in these two most prominent English-language visual arts publications of the period. Yet Frampton’s renown stems largely from a set of films made in the early 1970s, especially Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971). The project to which he devoted the last decade of his life, the massive but never completed film project, Magellan (1972–) is relatively unknown, a gap even more striking since most of his theoretical writings were developed during its production. This volume frames Magellan as a culminating conceptual project investigating the nature of cinema. I take Frampton’s films, writings, and his adjunct work in the “camera arts” and computing as a whole to begin to outline this conceptual project and the artistic, theoretical, and epistemological contributions of this work to our understanding of the nature, history, potential, and implications of cinema—writ very large. Fundamentally, Magellan is about cinema, whose definition and scope continue to expand past the mainstream canon. Frampton asks, What encompasses the cinematic, and how does the cinematic encompass our world? If the digital is now the dominant epistemological metaphor of our time, then for most of the twentieth century, it was cinema, a legacy Frampton explores, critiques, and extends by considering film as a persistent form of moving image and sound practice and a way of knowing the world; as a figure of human subjectivity that dialectically

2Introduction

plays off image and language; and, in its simulacral force, as an embodiment of the contradictions of totality and system. As an artist and cultural thinker, Frampton navigated multiple media and a wide range of aesthetic discourses, which marks him as an instructive and prescient figure for our own early twenty-first-century aesthetic and cultural journeys, in which we enjoy enhanced and immediate access to the history of art and culture through the internet and observe the crossing of traditional artistic boundaries through digital coordinates of language/code, image, and sound. A pioneering digital artist who anticipated collaborative do-it-yourself open-source programming through the Digital Arts Lab at SUNY Buffalo, he could also translate Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German and studied Sanskrit, Russian, and Chinese. He came to film as an adult, releasing his first film at age thirty after experimenting with poetry, painting, sculpture, and eventually photography.1 Over his filmmaking career, he maintained an active photographic practice, especially in serial photography and related image arts like early xerography and video. An autodidact who officially never completed high school (Phillips Academy) nor university (Western Reserve University), he became full professor at SUNY Buffalo in Gerald O’Grady’s groundbreaking Center for Media Study.2 His encyclopedic knowledge and interests spanned millennia of art and culture— including global cultures outside American and European traditions—in multiple and intersecting art and cultural forms. As both artist and writer, Frampton brought a reflexive historical sensibility that he called “metahistory” to bear on all of his endeavors—even as he was, inevitably, a man of his times. His concept of “the infinite cinema,” a polymorphous capturing of “all the appearances of the world,” including their underlying aesthetic energies, echoes powerfully with the present explosion of the moving image in the art world and in culture more broadly.3 The “infinite cinema” was Frampton’s own phrase, an expansive concept in which cinema includes all images as well as all image technologies and their infrastructures. Frampton’s range and erudition make him an intimidating subject of study. Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema is an attempt, inevitably partial, to comprehend Frampton’s work in two senses of the word—to understand its complexities and encompass its sheer magnitude—and in turn relate the lessons of his artistic career to our current cultural moment. Cancer cut short his career at age forty-eight when the ambition of his artistic and intellectual work was at its peak. In this book, I work backward from the locus of Frampton’s filmmaking and

Introduction3

writing in the last decade and a half of his life, focusing on the Magellan project as the culmination of his earlier work. Influenced by his first (and later disavowed) artistic father, Ezra Pound, Frampton understood that every object carries the process of its own construction and making. By examining the history and process of Magellan’s construction, this book articulates, from the inside, the ambition and parameters of the unfinished project while simultaneously reflecting on some of the tensions that led to Magellan’s difficulty, especially between the universal and the historical. Frampton’s writings are crucial texts; they encompass theory, criticism, and history and take the form of essays, lectures, interviews, and letters, also including what Annette Michelson identified as Frampton’s distinctive genre: the “fabula” as “poetic fiction, as frame for theoretical articulation.”4 In this volume, Frampton’s fabula are given equal weight as his films, as dense, playful, and puzzle-like as his cinematic production. Frampton belongs to a long tradition in experimental film of the filmmaker as theorist and was well versed in this tradition through his knowledge of figures like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, and Stan Brakhage. He was part of a generation of filmmakers and artists for whom writing was an important supplement to their investigations of the medium, among them Tony Conrad, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, Yvonne Rainer, Lis Rhodes, and Paul Sharits, and later figures like Abigail Child, Bruce Elder, Marjorie Keller, Keith Sanborn, and Hito Steyerl. Frampton, alongside his fellow artists, was steeped in the New York art world, engaged in the modernist project of analyzing the basic conditions of the medium. He was highly conscious of the hegemony of painting and sculpture in the art world and was part of the effort to legitimate film as a modernist art form that might be legible to the New York art world. Frampton’s writings were theoretical in nature—of a highly playful and erudite style—but they also had an undercurrent of activism, defending the place of what he called the “camera arts” (to take up the term that Bruce Jenkins seized upon as the title for Frampton’s collected writings) in serious art criticism.5 Whether telling stories, using mathematical equations, writing theory, experimenting with electronic arts, or making films and photographs, Frampton explored the parameters of cinema, whose definition and scope he defined capaciously. “ ‘I always thought,’ he said, ‘that film was elastic, eclectic, polymorphousperverse.’ ”6 Like many of his generation of experimental filmmakers, Frampton was immersed in the medium specificity of film; indeed, more than his colleagues, he was intimately familiar with the optics and chemistry of the medium through

4Introduction

his apprenticeship in photography and having worked in a color film lab through most of the 1960s. Yet Frampton saw film as part of a larger continuum that included video, digital arts, xerography, and other camera arts and was thus outside the fervent rhetoric of film purists in the experimental film world. Jenkins highlights a phrase in Frampton’s lecture notes: “Find a word or phrase for ‘photomedia’ imagery,” and Frampton’s compound term “photo-film-video-computer” is a prophetic chronological concatenation realized in twenty-first-century digital convergence.7 I contend that we can better understand the nature, history, and potential of cinema—and its implications for art and our contemporary digital culture—through Frampton’s oeuvre. My book necessarily provides a biographical sketch of Hollis Frampton as I argue that Frampton’s own articulation of his aspirations and preoccupations, including those broached in his early films and major canonical work like Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia), culminate in the ambitions of Magellan. His idea for a project based on the Magellan metaphor goes back at least to 1964 (an elaborate sculptural installation); he developed the film project in the early 1970s, releasing the last film in 1980. I am mindful that this focus on the work of a single artist runs the risk of installing a “great man” narrative as part of art history’s tendency to uncritically celebrate modernist masters. An adjacent dilemma for this book is that it bears the burden of being the first published survey of Frampton’s work, attempting to outline a sense of its aesthetic intentions and parameters, in part articulated in his own writings and work. While I certainly value his work—and Frampton’s healthy ego meant he wasn’t shy about his own sense of its importance— the metahistorical framework of my approach undercuts the temptation of any “great man” history. The multiple and constellated modes of Frampton’s art and thought are both symptomatic of and helpful in illuminating the political, cultural, and aesthetic tensions within the larger context of the historical period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Today, in a parallel moment of technological, ideological, and aesthetic flux, Frampton’s thinking about the extended parameters of “infinite cinema” traces a map of both the past and future of cinematic possibility—a metahistory that amounts to a complete redescription of the world. Subtle shifts in Frampton’s film and thought during this period reflect his working through some of the key problematics of modernism. The fact that Frampton titles his magnum opus after the Western explorer whose expedition was the first to circle the globe refers us to cinema’s connection to the larger historical context of modernity and colonialism, a geopolitical expansion that exercised and articulated art, culture, and thought in both material and

Introduction5

representational modes of global domination. Frampton’s own thinking about Western epistemology and politics evolved in relation to the intersections of history, visual representation, epistemology, and politics that function as the cargo—or, better, baggage—of what he called the “Magellan metaphor”: “first circumnavigator of the world . . . circumambulating the whole of human experience.”8 On one level, the Magellan metaphor lets Frampton yoke the modernist project of radical investigation of art and medium to the larger historical and epistemological traditions of Enlightenment thought. On another level, as the modernist project’s purism, austerity, and hidden histories of power emerge, the project gestures toward (though never resolves) the deeper problems of the Enlightenment tradition, especially its political legacies of capitalism and colonialism, with their totalizing logics. I chart in Frampton’s writings and films during the Magellan project his ongoing engagement with global contexts of culture and art, including anthropology, linguistics, and mathematics, engagements that call into question his earlier fealty to the problematic father figures of modernism. Like Ferdinand Magellan, Hollis Frampton did not complete his expedition’s journey. (Magellan was killed in the Philippines and Frampton died in 1984.) Navigating the Infinite Cinema, like Magellan itself, seeks to explore the contributions but also the contradictions and limitations of Frampton’s wildly ambitious project of exploring the aesthetic, epistemological, and historical principles of cinema as a way of making meaning, then and now.

MAGELLAN AS SELF- IRONIC EPIC In a late 1970s document, “Career Summary,” Frampton provides a précis of his “current practical work and theoretical studies”: Isolate and rehearse problems related to a massive, serial work-in-progress, the film-cycle Magellan, which involves, in addition to a lexicon of procedures and tropes classically proper to cinema, work in video and optical image-synthesis and manipulation; electronic synthesis and modification of sound; and the generation of certain graphic and auditory elements by digital computer. This work must occupy the center of my creative attention for some time.9

Frampton understates the case: Magellan, begun in 1972, consumed the last decade of his career and is the tantalizing unfinished center of his late work. In grant

6Introduction

proposals, he understood the project to be “hopelessly ambitious”: to produce a work of art, a “metahistory” of film that could also serve as a “model for human consciousness.”10 Metahistory stresses our speculative understanding of the epistemological aspirations that motivate cultural and artistic activity; if, Frampton reasoned, the history of art could be understood as human beings’ attempts to make sense of the world through aesthetic form, then Magellan as a metacatalogue of “the infinite cinema” would chart this history, functioning as an epistemological model for the conscious human universe, for how we know the world. Frampton conceived of “an art of cinema that might encode thought as compactly as the human genetic substance encodes our entire physical body.”11 Like a proto– Human Genome Project for the art of film, Magellan starts with the historical flesh of cinema (and other arts) and extracts a conceptual substructure that can then function as a blueprint for cinema’s future. This starts with the presumption that art, more than other areas of human endeavor, is privileged as a mode of understanding human consciousness, although mathematics and science were allied fields that made frequent appearances in his films and writings. Yet Frampton recognized the contradictions inherent in these utopian goals, and there is a tension in Magellan between its rigorous modernist investigation of the essential conditions of the film medium and a playful and self-ironic willingness to complicate its formal purity with the complexity and disorder of the historical world. Magellan, like much of Frampton’s work, is both minimalist and encyclopedic. Frampton used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world to index the project’s aspirations to global aesthetic, historiographic, and conceptual challenges to cinema and perception: The central conceit of the work derives from the voyage Ferdinand Magellan, first circumnavigator of the world, as detailed in the diary of his “passenger,” Antonio Pigafetta[,] and elsewhere. During his 5-year voyage, Magellan trespasses (alive and dead) upon every psycholinguistic “time-zone,” circumambulating the whole of human experience as a kind of somnambulist. He returns home, a carcass pickled in cloves, as an exquisite corpse.12

The key to the conceit is circumnavigation: the voyage’s global loop points to “circumambulating the whole of human experience,” visiting every “timezone,” an ambition of total (and perhaps totalizing) scope. Brian Henderson, in

Introduction7

“Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” notes two mistakes in this passage: first, that Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage was three rather than five years, and, second, that Magellan’s body was not recovered.13 For Henderson, Frampton’s mistakes are “portals of discovery” (in James Joyce’s formulation), creative misreadings that are symptomatic of latent wish fulfillment.14 The fact that Frampton was five years into making Magellan when he wrote the proposal explains for Henderson why Frampton made Magellan’s voyage five years, reflecting a shared hope that both Magellan and Frampton might complete their journeys. But I take the darkly ironic terms of Magellan’s (imaginary) return as resonant of Frampton’s ultimately ironic approach to the historical figure who names his film cycle. Ferdinand Magellan may have been an explorer, but he was also a trespasser, a “somnambulist,” a “carcass pickled in cloves” (a spice that drove much early colonial exploration and exploitation), and, finally, an “exquisite corpse,” in the Surrealist tradition of multiple artists building on cues from one another in order to incorporate randomness and unconscious drives into the collective production of an artwork. For Frampton, the “heroic” explorer—and filmmaker—remains subject to ironic, critical, historical, and unconscious frameworks of scrutiny. Frampton saw Magellan as a utopian art project in the tradition of Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But it is significant that the project’s namesake was a historical figure and not a figure from Greek mythology or Irish popular folklore.15 Frampton embeds his project in—just as cinema itself emerges from—a much larger historical context of modernity, which includes colonialism and other mechanisms of subjectivity that literally redrew parameters of representation and thought along global lines. Frampton framed the project, and indeed all of his work in the 1970s, as a contribution both to film’s place in artistic modernism and to the larger context of modernity understood as a sociopolitical rupture starting in the early modern period concurrent with the rise of science, technology, and capitalism—all topoi central to film—and to the material conditions of Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet in their circumnavigation of the world. If Magellan was a “metahistory” that put film into conversation with wider histories of the arts (including literature, visual art, music, and dance), then its links to deeper cultural histories, including the expedition’s implication in modernity, absorbed both its achievements (exploration of geographical, astronomical, and linguistic registers) and its horrors (colonial domination, racism, and exploitative capitalism). Magellan starts with an understanding of how the historical world is

8Introduction

structured by the ways that culture structures the image, the archive, the historical collection of “footage” that comprises history within the infinite cinema. The violence of colonialism continues today in deepening global economic and political inequities whose symptoms of racism, forced migration, and ecological disaster remain systemic and urgent. Meanwhile, we now understand the negative legacies of modernism in art history in terms of its historical exclusions on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, and other markers of identity that are other to the presumptive universal subject: the straight, white, and male artist, Frampton’s own primary identity markers (and, indeed, my own).16 I argue that Frampton and his work are both implicated in and critical of the history of modernity and modernism and that this ambivalence yields productive insights about his time and ours. Navigating the Infinite Cinema uses Frampton’s work as a productive locus for how the project’s ambitions and ambivalences are instructive of modernism’s legacies and limits. For P. Adams Sitney, “Frampton’s affinities were with the modernist canon: Along with Joyce, he frequently cited his alternative models, Beckett and Borges, virtually identifying modernism with irony.”17 That Frampton fundamentally had an ironic relation to modernism—and modernism’s internal irony—provides a critical lens and some distance from its worst excesses. But irony is ultimately a figure of implication. Irony’s structure of double voicing—articulating an assertion while simultaneously undercutting and questioning it—means that the ironist understands multiple perspectives. I argue that during the production of Magellan, Frampton increasingly articulated an ironic relation to modernism. He was inevitably symptomatic of the New York art scene of Artforum and October but also critically apart from this cultural milieu (which itself changed during this period). Frampton anticipates 1980s postmodern critiques of high modernism, essentialism, universalism, and monumentality even as the ambition of Magellan flirted with these tendencies. Frampton’s general thinking about Western epistemology and politics evolved as he thought through the implications of the Magellan metaphor. Henderson emphasizes that, like Magellan itself, Frampton’s voyage was neither linear nor teleological. Rather, the Magellan film cycle emphasized doublings, reversals, and reflexivity; like the second glance of the ironic perspective, “Non-linearity and palindromicity are built into the work’s very globalism; they operate in the Magellan metaphor itself, for to circumnavigate the world is to encounter the reversibility and inversion of all things.”18 Just as the last ship

Introduction9

from Magellan’s fleet limped into harbor, so Magellan, amid its ambition, checked its hubris.

VERSIONS OF MAGELLAN: ECHOES AND METHODS STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: a transparent slab or frieze about 40″ high and 120″ long, suspended between two opaque slabs the same size, and parallel to both of them. So that one sees one of the opaque ones always through the transparent slab, but impossible to see all three parts at same time, and impossible likewise to back off more than a yard from any of them. PiXrs on all 3.19

As early as 1964, Frampton conceived projects based on the Magellan metaphor: a set of sculptural installations he describes above in this letter to his friend Reno Odlin. It had multiple parts (including peepholes, projected images, and lenses), and one of its structuring principles was that it could never be seen as a whole (“impossible to see all three parts at same time, and impossible likewise to back off more than a yard from any of them”). There’s no “master shot” of this version of the project, just as comprehending the totality of Frampton’s multipart film project, or oeuvre generally, is impossible. What we are left with is a description, a contingent foothold, that is ultimately speculative. This installation version of Magellan would have incorporated images and projected light to set up a perceptual game to be played by the spectator. The realized portions of the film cycle invite a comparable level of play along with self-consciousness about the image and the work of the spectator. This early installation version is emblematic of the tensions in navigating the Magellan film cycle: although it was incomplete, the conceptual ambition it outlined is both fascinating and difficult to evaluate. A complicating feature is that its aspiration and parameters were expressed in words while the realization would have been visual, tangible, experiential. On the one hand, Frampton planned in 1964 for versions of the installations to be “kits” on the model of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934): “Both MAGELLANS to be rather kits along the lines of BRIDE / BOXES etc., that is, the pieces to be accompanied by their workingdrawings, macquettes, etc. CLOUDS in particular will need a substantial atlas

10Introduction

or installation manual.”20 Frampton shares the spirit of Duchamp’s “desire to ascribe primacy to the conceptual dimension of the artist’s work” to the point that, as Marie-Josée Jean puts it, “the idea in and of itself became a work.”21 On the other hand, in the written description of the sculptural installation (and the later film project), Frampton strongly emphasized the materiality of the components and was highly attentive to how viewers would have interacted with it. In Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, I too draw out the conceptual dimensions of Frampton’s work as expressed in his writings, seeing them as constitutive of his work more broadly, but I also explore my own experience of Magellan’s material parts, both films that were completed and some that exist only speculatively in production documents. My own explorations sometimes followed inlets that led nowhere; indeed, my working title for this book was “Navigating the Infinite Cinema: Up Shit Creek without a Paddle.” But just as many artists and scholars have been successful in their explorations; Frampton’s work continues to stimulate new generations. In the book’s conclusion, I point to a host of unfinished projects in Frampton’s production files as possible “installation manuals” for future artists and scholars, suggesting ways that both conceptual and material elements of Frampton’s late work reward further exploration. Like many of the artistic projects that Frampton describes in early letters, the 1964 installation plan was never realized. But it was also never abandoned. The Magellan film cycle, also never completed, was a tantalizing, shape-shifting figure in Frampton’s thought that grew out of the plans and speculations that he outlined in his writings, production notes, interviews, and conversations with fellow artists in the heady climate of the New York art scene. Many of the aesthetic and conceptual parameters of the cycle germinated in early stages of Frampton’s thought while he was experimenting with writing, painting, sculpture, and photography and before starting to take up film between 1962 and 1966, the year he released his first extant film, Manual of Arms. A basic premise of my study is that while there are many transformations and shifts in direction across Frampton’s career, there are also fundamental continuities, making it worthwhile to look back at these documents of origin to see the totality of the heterogeneity that encompasses Frampton’s art and thought. A consequent principle that guides my analysis is that Frampton’s oeuvre should be thought of as comprised of not only films but also his writings and other paratextual material. The titles, descriptions, and stories behind the films are often as important as the film text, and this book spends as much time on his

Introduction11

writings as his films. Analysis of Frampton’s work calls for an intertextual and intermedial approach, examining not only how the films intersect with one another but also how they intersect with his other artistic work—with the numerous artistic, scientific, and historical texts to which he makes allusion and through the multitude of contextual material that exists outside the films: published and unpublished writings, interviews, and film discussions; the many production notes deposited at Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and other collections; and the wider discourses of arts culture of the 1970s. I use the metaphor of navigating the infinite cinema to emphasize the process of historical reading and interacting with an incomplete artwork. Indeed, in this sense, Navigating the Infinite Cinema is also a case study in the difficulties of any enormous art project. If Frampton’s work needs to be approached both through his films and his words, this pairing is substantive to his view of how film and language are inextricably connected. In his 1981 essay “Film in the House of the Word,” he imagines a “celestial mechanics of the intellect [that] might picture a body called Language, and a body called Film, in symmetrical orbit about one another, in perpetual and dialectical motion.”22 The primacy of “Language” is not in question, but “Film,” and the realm of the cinematic, is a new force that realizes a new dialectical model of the intellect, a new celestial mechanics, for the twentieth century. Sitney also underlines the importance of language: “Frampton conceives of language not as a prison for restricting the perceptions but as a metacinematic tool for reorienting and enlarging the primary visual imagination. In this respect he is the heir of Marcel Duchamp.”23 Sitney invokes Duchamp to add a further dimension to the pairing of language and the image: Duchamp’s mode of gameplay. In his reading of “A Lecture” (1968), a performance piece that was incorporated into Frampton’s teaching at Hunter College, Sitney suggests that Frampton “approaches the central problems of film theory as if they were puzzles, not to be solved by a head-on encounter, but to be reformulated as intellectual exercises.” 24 Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema takes on these exercises, attempting to read an incomplete work that could not have been comprehended even had it been finished, circling around the puzzle of Magellan and other Frampton works in the spirit of play and experiment, circumnavigating a collection of its conceptual and material fragments. Like Duchamp, Frampton played games with language, simultaneously guiding and obscuring meaning, including even within his own accounts of his work.

12Introduction

In a 1980 interview, acknowledging Lindley Hanlon’s insightful reading of his film Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976), he said, “I had better start covering my tracks a little better,” underlining the modernist preference for indirection and perhaps a dash of obscurantism.25 He was, famously, a storyteller; poet Barry Goldensohn describes Frampton keeping him for an hour at the entrance to a Brooklyn subway station after a drunken evening, telling stories as the sun rose.26 He gave many interviews over his career, perhaps most definitively, his mid-1970s interview with Scott MacDonald.27 Frampton’s autobiography is, not surprisingly, a journey through the history of art, and his interviews and texts constitute his own Künstlerroman, recounting a journey that would get him to film after moving sequentially through several other art forms and mediums—poetry, painting, sculpture, and photography—compiling with each a seemingly encyclopedic understanding of their forms and history: My own development was slow. I was trained in languages and literature; I studied writing and art, but I was 30 before I had my hands on a movie camera. I needed to set aside the model of the narrative feature. There were still things you could do with movies. You could do modest work—a sonnet, not an epic poem. Because I was looking for a vocation in art, I was encouraged [by the example of Jean Cocteau]. I would get the resources to make short films. Being able to do it was a decisive experience for me. It has been a kind of relationship to creative activity that would absorb my entire range of interests—in language, literature, and art. There was a kind of eclecticism to it. I could relate to its world and continue to use all the skills I had learned.28

Film was synthetic of his “entire range of interests,” but once past the “model of the narrative feature,” it invited “modest” and “eclectic” approaches to which Frampton could relate. In this book, I often refer to Frampton’s own words, which runs the risk of privileging an inside perspective on his work, one that might perpetuate what Susan Krane, in her biographical sketch, calls the “apocryphal” element of Frampton’s autobiography. However, this is not a psychobiography—I cannot know Frampton’s thoughts; I can barely claim to know my own. Nonetheless, Frampton’s words, even his self-mythologizing formulations, create a network of meaning that, taken in historical context, provides insight into the conceptual

Introduction13

dimensions and cultural milieu of his work. Christa Noel Robbins defends attention to nonpublic texts in historical analysis: “It is easy to dismiss . . . private exchange as merely anecdotal and, as such, hardly worthy of the serious consideration of an art historical study. But in doing so, we overlook the value of what Jane Gallop in Anecdotal Theory calls the ‘occasional’ or ‘the event, the moment,’ the lived space wherein theory first takes form.”29 For Robbins, the way that someone’s personal history shapes their “sensibility” is important to comprehending “the discourses they shape, including our own.” 30 Frampton’s sensibility—and wit—is prominent in the unmistakable voice we hear in his dense and allusive essays, spirited interviews, and sometimes cranky answers to questions at film screenings. His words implicate as much as explicate his positions as a historical subject in film and art history. Digital tools have transformed scholarship on Frampton, allowing wider and deeper access to his own words and the encyclopedic range of allusions therein. Searchable digital copies of the many essays he wrote, interviews he granted, and transcripts of film introductions and Q&A sessions recorded (including his teaching seminars) comprise a massive archive, within which cross-references, contradictions, and refinements reveal a mixture of intellectual consistency, contradiction, and change during Frampton’s career. Internet resources put Frampton’s vast array of reference, its dense and multiple layers of intertextual allusion, at the reader’s fingertips.31 In many ways, the hyperlink as a mode of associative connection echoes how Frampton mobilizes epistemological exploration in his films. The logic of the hyperlink can lead to distracting research rabbit holes but also to playful and fascinating webs of association.32 We circumnavigate Frampton’s world as best we can through its oceans of films and texts. Like the historical Magellan, we are guided by forces beyond our control (currents, geography, winds) and attempt to map our location using systems of digital navigation of immense reach. I have unashamedly engaged with Wikipedia, whose combination of collective aggregation and idiosyncratic openness finds its physical correlate in Frampton’s voluminous research and production files, whose contents range from canonical essays on semiotics to a postcard collection of scientific oddities and “famous last words.” Frampton’s depth of knowledge was sometimes limited to that of the encyclopedic survey, but his wit and powers of poetic association dialectically produced new formulations that navigated a wide sea of cultural history.

14Introduction

FRAMPTON AND MODERNISM: COMPLEXITY, INCOMPLETION, AND THE CHEMISTRY OF DIRT A key through line of Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema seeks to understand Frampton’s complex and evolving relation to modernism, which is itself a shape-shifting, tentacled beast. For Frampton, modernism raised questions about the relationship between legibility and scale, the whole and its parts, the monument and the fragment, essential aesthetic forms and historical variation, and minimalist exclusion. One significant index of Frampton’s frame of reference is the list of artists he referenced in interviews and essays, many of whom likewise aspired to utopian projects that were massive undertakings of intricate complexity, often exploring extreme parameters, and driven by aspirations that are selfconsciously understood to exceed the likelihood (though not necessarily the possibility) of completion. The two filmmakers he most admired, Sergei Eisenstein and Stan Brakhage, wanted, respectively, to make a film of Karl Marx’s Capital and The Book of the Film, which Bruce Elder has described as “The Book of Consciousness.” 33 In the visual arts, the ambitious conceptual artworks of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark are concurrent with Magellan, and in interviews, Frampton alludes to Auguste Rodin’s never completed sculpture, The Gates of Death, as an intertext for his own film of the same name. Frampton often invoked Vladimir Tatlin’s project for the Monument to the Third International (conceived 1919–1920) as a context for Magellan, noting their shared calendrical structure, “set of modes of seeing,” and desire to feature “a number of different kinds of cultural shapes impinging upon each other and interfering with each other.”34 Frampton was attracted to the project’s conceptual ambition but understood the economic and social realities that impeded its completion: “The problem with the Monument to the Third International was the problem that art has always had in the vortex of power, mainly that there were more pressing needs. Trotsky, in this case, denounced the monument, saying that the poor must be fed. He was correct, the monument was not built.”35 Yet, even as Frampton agrees that social needs take priority, he goes on to point to the importance of utopian artworks that resonate not in their realization but in their aspiration: “There are other ways to build monuments. The ways to build them are to build them immaterially, in the mind, in ways that cost the culture little, in ways that, if they succeed, that is to say if they at once entrain and inform the culture within which they subsist, they may endure.”36 Magellan should be understood as part of a longer

Introduction15

history of utopian modern artworks that were either never built or are still under construction, speculative work across the arts whose parameters and ambition are sometimes self-ironically self-undermining.37 But Frampton’s primary models for massive utopian artworks are literary, further underlining the importance of language to his universe. Frampton refers to artists like Gustave Flaubert, who devoted the last decade of his life to the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet (1872–1881), and Stéphane Mallarmé, who left behind notes for a multimedia spectacle, usually called Le Livre (see chapter 6). Frampton admired the essays of Walter Benjamin, whose massive and unfinished Arcades Project (or Passagenwerk, 1927–1940) bears comparisons to Magellan.38 The work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose thematics of infinity and absurdity are realized in the utopian worlds imagined in his fabulae, was crucial for Frampton’s thought. Frampton’s first major literary influence was Ezra Pound, with whom he corresponded in 1957 before joining his circle of acolytes at St. Elizabeths Hospital in 1958. Pound’s epic The Cantos (1917–1969) was both a model and cautionary tale for Frampton, who, after his youthful infatuation with the iconic yet disgraced writer, later judged the unfinished poem a failure.39 Perhaps the closest model for Frampton’s drive toward modernist complexity is the oeuvre of James Joyce, the artist whom Frampton invokes more frequently than any other and whose late work was epic in scope and difficulty. As Scott MacDonald suggests, it is possible to sketch parallels between the two artists in their development.40 The early years of Frampton’s filmmaking yielded a series of short films akin to the short stories Joyce collected into Dubliners (1914). Zorns Lemma might be seen to parallel Joyce’s short novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), comprising an hour-long bildungsroman; the film’s three sections chart an elliptical coming of age from schoolboy language acquisition, through Frampton’s decade in New York, to his move to the countryside of upstate New York in 1970. Frampton’s major serial work, Hapax Legomena (1971–1972), and cyclical work, Magellan, might be seen to parallel Joyce’s two late works, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), the latter referred to by Joyce as “the book of Doublends Jined,” with a similarly cyclical nature.41 I am less concerned here with suggesting direct parallel connections than with positing that Frampton challenged himself to perpetuate Joyce’s search for increased complexity and scale through his career. For Joyce, this reached its apex in Finnegans Wake, a famously perplexing “novel” whose departures from conventional sentence structure, punctuation, and semantics makes it, conventionally, incomprehensible; for Frampton, the aspiration to

16Introduction

complexity and scale culminated in Magellan and his other theoretical and artistic pursuits in the 1970s and 1980s. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was also on Frampton’s mind as he was screening parts of Magellan as a work in progress: I realize that I somewhat take my life in my hands in showing little pieces of something [that] tend[s] to be unintelligible, confusing, misleading. . . . I’m not sure I let myself in for a very happy experience in doing so. Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, which was called Work in Progress for a long time, was lucky enough at least to finish it; other people have progressively let out riffs in very long jobs and have now finished them. I run some sort of risk about finishing this. . . . Some of it is clear, some of it is in fact made, . . . some of it is very shaky, some of it is blank, perhaps like maps of the world in Magellan’s time.42

One problem of complexity is the prospect of illegibility. Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia) are films that teach the spectator how to watch them, and repetition within their structures allows one, at least provisionally, to “get it.” In 1976 Ian Christie captured the difficulty of viewing films from Magellan when he said (sympathetically) of Magellan: At the Gates of Death (1976), “The structure of Gates of Death seems so eminently graspable—even though I never managed to grasp it.”43 Frampton responded to Christie that this effect was intentional: “I think it’s virtually impossible to retrieve or determine what shot goes where in any of the five or six films—or film segments—under discussion. At the same time, it becomes clearer all the time that there is some set of rules, some set of operating principles, at work ever more clearly and powerfully, hovering just beyond the point where they can be retrieved.”44 Frampton was highly conscious of the demands Magellan made on its spectator—he called them “utopian,” with all the impossibility of attainment the term connotes—but hoped that the work would coalesce when viewed in its entirety.45 His desire to elevate the complexity of his films, keeping their “operating principles . . . hovering just beyond the point where they can be retrieved,” is characteristic of his modernist embrace of indirection, ambiguity, and hermeneutic challenge. These questions of how a text becomes complete and what it requires to become comprehensible are central to Frampton’s project and point symptomatically to larger currents within an academic and artistic milieu in which the opacity of this kind of work was falling out of favor in the 1970s. It makes it more

Introduction17

understandable that a text as important as Magellan would have fallen under the radar of dominant critical currents in the 1970s and 1980s as questions driving critical discourse around modernism and film began to shift. But this is not to say that Frampton’s work has gone unconsidered. Just before his death, Frampton arranged for a collected volume of his writing, Circles of Confusion (1983), to be published by Visual Studies Press in Rochester, and a major exhibition of his photography and “other work” was mounted in 1984, along with a published catalogue, Recollections/Recreations, by the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery in Buffalo.46 These publications and the outpouring of sorrow at his early death in 1984 led to a spurt of critical writing on Frampton in the mid-1980s, including a special issue of October in 1985. But by the late 1980s and through the 1990s, interest in his work waned. In the last two decades, there has been a revival in attention to both his films and his writing, with several retrospectives of his films, including Magellan, mounted in New York, London, San Francisco, and elsewhere. His (nostalgia) was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry in 2003. In 2009 MIT Press published his complete writings, titled On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, and in 2012 the Criterion Collection selected Frampton as the second U.S. experimental film artist whose work they would release on Blu-ray/DVD after their highly successful By Brakhage collection (2010). Frampton’s influence on contemporary filmmakers and visual artists includes Ed Atkins, Luke Fowler, Su Friedrich, Jean-Luc Godard (who concludes Histoire(s) du cinéma [1998] with a quotation from Frampton’s “For a Metahistory of Film” [1971]), Peter Greenaway, Evan Meaney, Damian Moppett, and Kerry Tribe, among many others. Meanwhile, his theoretical and critical writings, which anticipate our intermedial moment wherein photographic cinema, animation, electronic arts, and digital media converge, were important in Lev Manovich’s influential formulation of “new media” and have been reprinted in innumerable contemporary anthologies of photography, film, and media culture.47 Even so, relatively few critics have tackled Magellan. Frampton, for one, noticed the absence of critical attention to his Magellan films but also understood it in terms that help us approach the conundrum that his corpus poses. In his interview with MacDonald, Frampton acknowledged that certain of the films have been written about and taught in classrooms but others have not. As a teacher himself, he understood that “it takes a fair degree of intrepidness to take on something opaque about which you may have confused feelings”:

18Introduction

What the hell are you going to do with Magellan? Of course, Magellan points at that problem because I’m making it point at that problem. I myself have the fondness that everybody has for things that are clear, for summary works, but it can’t all be like that. Indeed, most of it cannot be like that. To use a favorite example of mine, the summary work is like the fictions of chemistry. Inorganic chemistry purports to study such things as “cobalt.” Well, in a certain sense, yes, there is such a thing as cobalt, but it is a product of the laboratory. It’s a fiction. There is no such thing in nature as the chemistry of cobalt. There is dirt, but nobody wants to have anything to do with the chemistry of dirt because dirt is in fact genuinely complex. So you can teach Surface Tension or Zorns Lemma because they are like the chemistry of cobalt, but if you’re going to get involved with Magellan, then, of course, you’re up to your eyeballs in the chemistry of dirt.48

Frampton calls some of his early films “summary works,” whose unnatural clarity contrasts with the films of Magellan: summary works have the controlled chemistry of the laboratory, while his late films have the “genuinely complex” chemistry of dirt. Frampton insists that this shift is intentional, that he “points at that problem” of complexity, which raises obstacles to legibility and impedes the accessibility of the work. The metaphor of the “chemistry of dirt” is illuminating in many ways and embodies the task that Navigating the Infinite Cinema takes on in attempting to comprehend how Frampton’s cinematic endeavors culminate with Magellan and his writings in the 1970s and 1980s. Frampton’s investigation of this metaphor draws on a number of fields, from science, to art, to consciousness, as modes of engaging the complexity of the world. First, dirt as an object of study, is both complex and real, a crucial aspect of Frampton’s internal critique of modernist aesthetics; i.e., a shift away from an analytical interest in abstract principles of a medium (Greenbergian modernism is like the laboratory fiction of cobalt) to a more materialist analysis. Second, and extending from the first, the central contribution of film to modernist aesthetics is its photographic quality of resembling and indexing the world and putting matter into motion in time, dynamically mimicking the energy of consciousness (see chapter 1). Third, the recognition that the organization of knowledge is central to its intelligibility points to Frampton’s interest in encyclopedism and epistemological histories (see chapter 3). Fourth, his method borrows from science, a crucial element of Frampton’s artistic

Introduction19

temperament and reputation (see chapter 4). Fifth, the problem of legibility raises questions of making meaning, the passage from random phenomena to cognition through a system of reading, whether language or visual code (see chapter 6). The final horizon for Magellan and Frampton’s late work is failure. He worried that if he didn’t complete Magellan, he would have “blown” it.49 Through the mid1970s, Frampton often expressed anxiety about whether film had a sufficiently ordered tradition out of which he could create a metahistory (see chapter 2). He expressed a need to complete Magellan, given that the project “needed to establish its own context,” without which the entire project might be a failure.50 At a discussion in 1977 in San Francisco, he worried about the problem of making a large work like Magellan, which he explicitly compared in scale to epic works like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Pound’s Cantos, and Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, among many others: OK, Finnegans Wake, a bulky work, assumes the existence of literature. I cannot in the same sense assume the existence of film. . . . Film has not thus far achieved levels of organization that are in any means comparable with literature and especially I think it has not constituted itself as a mode of production on the one hand or a field of cultural potentialities on the other such that it can contain the large work. This is film outside of film, for the most part. So that I’m not interested nearly so much in performing a special task within film as I am of, not seeking, but redefining the boundaries of filmic discourse. So that my worries aren’t the same as they would be if I were, for instance, writing a 1000-page novel. I worry about other things, like, for instance, am I totally haywire? Seriously. Am I going to finish the goddam thing? You see, this is a serious problem. If you don’t finish an epic poem it is a more or less magnificent ruin. The Canterbury Tales . . . The Cantos . . . This I probably have got to finish or I have blown the whole thing, in my own mind, since it has the problem of establishing its own context.51

Frampton worries that film has insufficient history, if it is to be an art form that is commensurate with other traditional mediums, to contain an epic artwork, which shifts the problem of “establishing its context” directly onto his shoulders. In some remarks he delivered before a work-in-progress screening at Harvard in 1977, he invited the audience “to imagine from these fragments, what the whole work might have been like had the author been able to finish it.”52 In many ways,

20Introduction

we are like that early audience, imagining what the whole of Magellan would be like had Frampton been able to complete it. Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, in its attention to the conceptual components of Magellan and Frampton’s larger body of work more generally, attempts to redress this anxiety about the failure of the incomplete work. But I acknowledge the loss that the incompletion represents in terms of our fundamental experience of Magellan as an artwork. In his interview with Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, Frampton contrasts his conceptual plans for the work, what he calls its “scaffold,” with what he states is “the meaning of the work,” which “is in the process of making it.”53 The dilemma of attempting to comprehend the meaning of an incomplete work from its remains—within the Frampton archive, there is sometimes more scaffold than films to experience—is nonetheless mirrored in the meaning of the work itself: “[Magellan] is an essay—in this case, a particularly massive and inclusive one—about what meaning is or may be, or various things it is or may be in film (that is to say, in the mechanical joining of images together in space and time). An essay, if you like, on how the notion of meaning itself is constituted.”54 In the absence of the experience of seeing and hearing all the films, the meaning of the whole is necessarily reduced. Yet if Magellan is a “massive and inclusive” essay about how “meaning itself is constituted,” and if Frampton wishes the substance of that meaning to build from an experience of the work, then we might consider another kind of experience of the work deriving from what remains of the work: not only the extant films but also the production notes, writings, letters, interviews, and other fragments, in addition to how these relate to and extend his earlier films and writings. In this book, I attempt to continue Frampton’s work of “building the substance of that essay from within,” using as much of the scaffolding and “diagramming” as possible and accommodating their incompleteness as part of my process.55 Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, like Magellan itself, remains an “essay” in the French sense of essai—first, to “try” but, second, a “test.”

CHAPTER SUMMARIES As the first survey of Frampton’s work across his career, this book builds a portrait of the artist’s work largely from inside his own frames of reference to build a coherent outline of Frampton’s aesthetic and epistemological world writ large.

Introduction21

Working back from his most ambitious project, Magellan, I take seriously Frampton’s stated goals and largely adopt their focus on epistemological, historical, and formal concerns, drawing connections back to and through his earlier films and across his writings (including early letters and juvenilia). I often take Frampton’s bait and jump at his allusions to enter the wide referential universe toward which he gestures. But there are many other areas even within Frampton’s explicit frame of reference that remain unexplored in this book. For example, there is a fascinating current in Frampton’s work that engages the body and sexuality, to pick up the suggestive title of one of Frampton’s lectures, “Erotic Predicaments for Camera.”56 Maureen Turim has suggested a productive tension between the sensual and the conceptual throughout Frampton’s work that bears further research, especially given the lush textures and complex rhythms of many of the Magellan films.57 There is much more to be said about connections between Frampton’s work (both films and theory) and his contemporaneous context of avant-garde film, visual arts, dance, literature, and music, although I want to acknowledge how the scholarship of David James, Scott MacDonald, Melissa Ragona, P. Adams Sitney, Turim, and Federico Windhausen constitutes an already rich beginning.58 Deeper investigations of the theoretical implications of Frampton’s work have been undertaken in the excellent scholarship on individual films like (nostalgia), Poetic Justice (1972), and Zorns Lemma in the work of Rachel Moore, Matthew NobleOlson, Rebecca Sheehan, and Allen Weiss, among others.59 Frampton’s importance for subsequent digital theory and practice has been explored by Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, and Mark Hansen, while Jeff Menne, Keith Sanborn, and Andy Uhrich have researched the remains of Frampton’s digital experiments at SUNY Buffalo.60 Finally, scholars like Anne Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, Giles Fielke, Michelle Puetz, and Lisa Zaher have completed dissertations on Frampton’s work in the last decade, opening new directions of inquiry and connection.61 The associational methods I discuss above in relation to method are realized in the book’s chapters, which—after chapters 1 and 2 summarize Frampton’s preMagellan work and the Magellan project, respectively—are organized around metaphors and concepts that recur in Frampton’s films and thought: metahistory, encyclopedism, anthropology, and the constellation. Metaphor is a dynamic figure of indirection, allowing a relational exchange of energies across contexts, emphasizing the work of imagination. Frampton’s investigation of the nature of cinema moves into, through, and then away from the film “text” and seeks to understand the larger sweep of an “infinite cinema” as a conceptual apparatus performing a

22Introduction

set of tasks within culture and art that invite spectatorial and intellectual experience. In each chapter, I explore the copious intertextual connections between Frampton’s work and the artistic traditions he invokes, especially his sense of cinema in relation to its materiality and epistemology framed by culture and history. Where many modernist works seek to understand the nature of an art medium through a minimalist, back-to-basics approach, Frampton’s encyclopedic scope returns us to the complexity of reference and multiplicity. Chapter 1, “A Brief Introduction to Frampton’s Films before Magellan,” outlines Frampton’s career and films prior to Magellan. It then reads Hapax Legomena as a work that captures a central conceptual tension in all of Frampton’s work between a search for the “irreducible axioms” of cinema—which threaten essential or universal laws—and his complication of those axioms through dynamic historical change. Hapax Legomena engages with abstraction through dialectical trajectories of exfoliation and photographic plenitude rooted in indexical specificity. This tension is expressed in several ways in his films and writings as he engaged with new technologies and topics of inquiry during his career. Chapter 2, “An Introduction to Magellan,” first provides a detailed description of the Magellan project, including its multiple parts and the changes the project underwent from 1972 until 1980, when the last extant film was released. Second, the nine goals Frampton describes in his “Statement of Plans for Magellan” provide an overview of the conceptual parameters of his work before and during Magellan: metahistory, time, procedural parameters (serial music), language, autobiography, graphic and plastic elements, sound, electronic and digital computing tools, and film art as a model for human consciousness. Chapter 3, “Metahistory and the Archive: ‘Historical Necessity’ and Tradition,” takes as its point of departure Frampton’s essay “For a Metahistory of Film,” his “manifesto” for the Magellan project, and explores how his roots in literary modernism inflect his concept of metahistory. This concept enables Frampton’s research in early film and use of appropriation as an artistic strategy but also sets up an ambivalence to tradition that he works through in his gradual rejection of artistic fathers like Pound and Edward Weston. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the first film in the Magellan calendrical cycle, The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I, and its rich invocations of Borges, Duchamp, and Joyce through grand metaphors of the universe as film archive and the infinite cinema. Chapter  4, “Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything,” examines the epistemological tensions in encyclopedic forms between the summa and the

Introduction23

catalogue, contrasting top-down and bottom-up approaches to encyclopedic organization and to power, as expressed in variations of Frampton’s conception of Straits of Magellan over the 1970s. The play of structure and chaos that strategies like alphabetization invite in Public Domain (1972) stage a larger conflict between the power of language as the master code of culture and the moving image as “an arena of power commensurate with that of language.”62 Using Hugh Kenner and Borges, I look at how Frampton’s conception of cinema as the “Last Machine” puts Magellan in the context of modernity and the Enlightenment Encyclopédie. I conclude with his fabula “Mind over Matter,” reading it as an expression of ambivalence to the Enlightenment. The apparent openness of modern observation is troubled by its projection of oppressive epistemologies onto the cultures that moderns observed—and subjugated. I argue that Frampton inscribes himself within the legacy of colonialism, acknowledging his complicity in the modern project, in the conclusion of The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall VII (1980). Chapter  5, “Archaeology: Millennial Allegories of Art, Representation, and Politics in the Camera Arts,” extends Frampton’s concept of metahistory into anthropological contexts and archaeological timeframes through George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (1962). I explore a subcurrent of Frampton’s historical sense found in his use of fictions to articulate utopian (and sometimes deathly) visions of cultures devoted to images, especially in three texts: “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” (1972), “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” (1973), and a later essay, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” (1978). I extend these cultural frames to consider his sense of the intellectual, creative, and material labor involved in art via John Cage’s “social thought about art.”63 Frampton’s self-declared “theoretical Marxist leanings” also shift over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s in the context of the period’s dominant political modernism. Frampton tentatively engages a postmodern variation on modernism and the spectatorial labor involved in Magellan that acknowledges its utopian horizons and material limits. Chapter 6, “The Constellation,” speculates on Frampton’s unfinished films The Large Cloud of Magellan and The Small Cloud of Magellan through the figure of the constellation. Following an analysis of Frampton’s writing on this figure, especially its concatenation of language and the image, I follow a chain of intertextual allusions within language, science, and mathematics to outline a speculative constellation from Frampton’s production files on the Clouds of Magellan films. The chapter surveys connections between Frampton and Stéphane Mallarmé,

24Introduction

especially Un coup de dés, a poem that mobilizes the visual component of words on a page, and Mallarmé’s own unfinished utopian project, Le Livre. I take up the legacy of symbolism for Frampton and how the dynamism of the cinematographic image resolves tensions between aestheticism and mimesis in symbolist aesthetics, guided by Christophe Wall-Romana’s analysis of Mallarmé’s insight about cinema as déroulement. Gloria!, the last completed film of the Magellan cycle, exemplifies how the déroulement of language (here written on computer paper scrolls) links the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries through the materiality of poetry, film, and computer/electronic arts. In the conclusion, “Virtual Future Metahistory,” I suggest the possibilities invited by Frampton’s late interest in computing by examining how his legacy, cut short by his death, might be activated by scholars and artists exploring his notes for planned films in the Magellan project files. Frampton’s archive, a rich source for my own research, may inspire future virtual products of his art and thought. Frampton’s work in and through multiple media makes him a figure who anticipates our current moment, when the cinematic has become a larger umbrella form encompassing multiple visual art mediums and when the boundaries of the cinematic with the digital are in negotiation. The metaphors that Frampton explores in his work continue to have contemporary significance: metahistory as a reflexive historical sensibility; the nexus of language, visuality, and power; the dialectic of the local and the universal in global art and politics; the emergence of databases as matrices that organize the world; the temptation of the encyclopedia as a form that promises comprehensive scope but remains bound by limitations of perspective; the depth of the archive and the impossibility of containing the proliferation of texts and artifacts; the tension between cyclical and progressive senses of time; and the importance of dynamic process in art and consciousness. The constellation is perhaps the master metaphor for the ways human consciousness seeks to find order in a random universe and for the ways that Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema attempts to make critical meaning from Frampton’s films and writings.

chapter 1 A Brief Introduction to Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

B

ruce Jenkins formulated the most influential segmentation of Hollis Frampton’s film career in his essay “The Red and The Green,” dividing the films into an early period (1966–1969), a middle period (1970–1972), and a late period dominated by Magellan (1972–1980).1 The early films are the product of “a young man of letters seeking, in the mechanism of the moving image, another mode of writing,” while the films of Magellan are “the direct result of Frampton’s postmechanical, metahistorical model of filmmaking” engaging “the phosphorescent possibilities of an electronic mode of image and sound production.”2 In between, Zorns Lemma (1970) is a culmination of Frampton’s early work, most clearly integrating his twinned interest in language and the image, while his seven-part black-and-white serial film, Hapax Legomena (1971–1972), is for Jenkins a “monochromatic interlude” that “systematically recounts the discrete moments of his emergence as a filmmaker and, ultimately, proposes a new direction for filmic practice” as Frampton begins Magellan.3 The shifts from the loose experimentation of the early films, to the serial development of Hapax Legomena, to the grand conceptual parameters of Magellan signal a series of stylistic hard cuts, but there are important continuities throughout his film practice in the films’ attention to materiality, language, and the use of mathematical or musical forms of organization. In this chapter, I briefly outline Frampton’s career and films prior to Magellan before providing a reading of Hapax Legomena that explores through abstraction a central conceptual tension in all of Frampton’s work, a dialectic between essential axiomatics and historical cultural change. This tension is expressed in a number of ways in his films and writings as he worked with new technologies and topics of inquiry during his career.

26Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

Frampton engaged intensively with the materiality of film in his early period. While he did not release his first film until 1966, he had started experimenting with filmmaking in the early 1960s and lists four “lost” or “destroyed” films in his filmography.4 He completed fourteen films between 1966 and 1969, diving into film alongside other filmmakers in New York such as Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland, and especially investigating the mechanics of the frame and its physical manipulation, montage, camera movement, color, and components of the chemistry of film. These short films often use variations on a theme in series form. A film like Artificial Light (1969) features twenty variations on a repeated sequence of images “based on physical interventions and/or optical processing—‘a cookbook,’ as Frampton envisioned it, ‘of things to do to a piece of film.’ ”5 But even in the early films, language was never far away, whether in the alphabetical system of organization of Manual of Arms (1966) or the use of words and speech in Surface Tension (1968) and Carrots & Peas (1969). Even more prominent is the organization of series based on musical principles (e.g., Palindrome [1969)]) or mathematical structures (e.g., States [1967, revised 1970], whose editing is based on the Fibonacci sequence, aka “the golden ratio”). Despite this early productivity, Frampton was largely under the critical radar until an intense period of productivity and recognition between 1969 and 1972 solidified his position in avant-garde film.6 In 1969 Frampton was included in P. Adams Sitney’s highly influential Film Culture essay, “Structural Film,” and in 1970 Zorns Lemma was screened at the New York Film Festival—the first feature-length experimental film at this prestigious event. A number of published interviews and essays on his work soon followed, and Frampton began publishing his own writing in Artforum in 1971, putting him squarely on the critical map in both the film and art worlds. He was included in the first issue of October magazine in 1976 and published numerous texts there and in other arts publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite this profile, very little was written about Magellan during the mid- to late 1970s, with only a few critical essays on individual films in the cycle, especially Autumnal Equinox (1974) and Gloria! (1979); arguably, Frampton was more recognized for his writing than his filmmaking during this time.7 As I explore in the next chapter, this gap in critical recognition is partly due to the scale and complexity of the Magellan project and its status as a work in progress. Like many artists and filmmakers in this period, Frampton took advantage of the expansion of universities in the late 1960s and 1970s for employment and

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan27

support. From 1969 to 1973, he taught photography in the Department of Art at Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) with colleagues like Robert Barry, Marion Faller, E. C. Goossen, Robert Huot, and Robert Morris, but eventually resigned from a full-time position in 1972 over concerns about the prospects for film teaching.8 He also taught film history courses in New York at the School of Visual Arts (1970–1971, Department of Humanities) and the Cooper Union (1970–1973, Department of Art/Architecture History), where colleagues included Dore Ashton and Sol Lewitt. Frampton was hired as a founding faculty member at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Study in 1973, a revolutionary program where Gerald O’Grady gathered film, video, and media artists such as James Blue, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Steina, and Woody Vasulka. This fulltime academic appointment solidified his previously precarious financial status and his move, begun in 1970, away from New York City to join the vibrant artistic community in upstate New York. Frampton’s renown as a filmmaker lies largely with two films released within a year of each other: Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), the latter of which was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry in 2003 and is the subject of the only book dedicated to Frampton’s work, Rachel Moore’s Hollis Frampton (nostalgia), part of Afterall Books’ One Work series.9 Much critical attention has been devoted to these films in both art magazines and film scholarship, while some writing has appeared on two other films in Hapax Legomena: Critical Mass (1971) and Poetic Justice (1972). However, many interviews were published during Frampton’s life—he was an accessible and hyperarticulate interview subject—which created some critical context for his films. (In the next chapter, I take up the remainder of Frampton’s career during the period of Magellan’s making until his death [1972–1984]).

TRAJECTORIES OF ABSTRACTION IN HAPAX LEGOMENA In the second part of this chapter, I examine Frampton’s monumental experimental serial film, Hapax Legomena, in relation to what I argue is its dialectical engagement with abstraction. On the one hand, he described himself as “an artist of the modernist persuasion,” aligning himself with modernism’s effort to define and explore the limits and possibilities of the art of film.10 In certain texts,

28Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

he refers to “the fundamental conditions and limits” of film as a medium, its “irreducible axioms,” seemingly seeking film’s “essential” conditions.11 On the other hand, he elsewhere asserts the fundamental importance of history and changing cultural constructs to our understanding of art and society, especially through his concept of metahistory. Frampton captures this apparent contradiction between the essential and the historical when he says, “Axioms are eternal verities— subject, as we have begun to see, to change on very short notice.”12 A central argument of this study is that Frampton’s sense of modernism makes claim to both universal and historical epistemological frameworks and that these frameworks evolved as Frampton developed as an artist and theorist, shifting his views on modernism, culture, and history through the 1960s into the early 1980s. Hapax Legomena functions as a critical hinge of this evolution. Hapax Legomena charts two trajectories of serial movement. The first movement is seen and heard in its apparent reduction and exfoliation of the visual and aural fields as the seven-part serial unfolds from the first film, (nostalgia), through the last film, Special Effects (1972). The second movement is conceptual, through the serial work’s exploration of what constituted, for Frampton, film’s three irreducible “axiomatics”: the frame, photographic illusionism, and narrative sequence. Within this second movement, Frampton presents a productively dialectical sense of abstraction in film in the conflict between a reductive frame and Frampton’s sense of the expansive nature of photographic illusion. This dialectical approach to film’s axiomatic qualities enables a complex and ultimately nonreductive modernist analysis. Hapax Legomena takes us on a journey whose trajectories oscillate between abstraction and specificity, whose gestures are both reductive and expansive, simultaneously highly conceptual and rooted in the body, and move through dimensions of language and the image, silence and sound, depth and flatness, movement and stillness. Hapax Legomena engages a playful tension between specificity and generalization. The Latin term hapax legomena translates as “things said once,” denoting when a word appears only once in a work or oeuvre. The term points to singularities, which Frampton immediately complicates by using it as the title for a serial work in which there is repetition, difference, and development. Even the title itself is “said twice,” recycled from a poetry volume he had previously planned to write.13 Modernism is engaged in a radical practice, in the etymological sense of “radical”; i.e., relating to getting to the root of something. In this sense, modernism’s effort of definition and exploration is abstract, following a standard dictionary

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan29

definition of abstraction as “the process of formulating generalized ideas or concepts by extracting common qualities from specific examples.”14 Hapax Legomena embodies a dual movement in relation to abstraction in film, instantiating modernist axioms but immediately complicating them. Paul Arthur marks Hapax Legomena as the end of the heyday of structural film, a moment of late 1960s and early 1970s filmmaking aligned with art world minimalism.15 Arthur suggests that Hapax Legomena marks a capstone in 1972—and perhaps a point of exhaustion—for a period of high modernist investigation of film form. The term “structural film” was coined by P. Adams Sitney in 1969 and was hotly debated and rejected by many filmmakers, including Frampton.16 For all its limitations, Sitney’s term nonetheless effectively marked a new direction in experimental film practice that shifted emphasis away from film as expression (what Sitney called “psychodrama” and “lyrical film”) toward film as reflection upon the basic conditions of the medium.17 Wanda Bershen’s essay on Zorns Lemma in Artforum makes the case for how U.S. avant-garde film undergoes “a repudiation of psychology in favor of epistemology.” 18 Frampton himself marks a connection between these impulses in his 1975 essay “Notes on Composing in Film” when he says that the artist’s muse is now less a spiritual or even psychological source than the material nature of the art form speaking to and through the artist: “According to a new transposition of the ancient notion that the artist is nothing other than a conduit for energies that he [sic] incarnates in the things he makes, the Elsewhere whence those energies come is now imagined to be, in the largest sense, the ‘material’ of the art itself.”19 Frampton summarizes the consequences of this shift: “By implication, the work of the poet must be an investigation into the internal economics and dynamics of language; a theory of poetry, an enunciation of the axiomatics of language; and the poem, a demonstration consequent upon the self-interference of these axiomatics.” 20 Modernism impels analytical selfconsciousness of the process (“economics and dynamics”), theory, and actualization of an art form. Frampton’s use of the term “axiomatics” reflects his interest in mathematics, another discipline devoted both to abstraction and aesthetics, insofar as every mathematician seeks a proof that is not only correct but also elegant. One way to describe this version of modernism and its variant of abstraction is that it is reductive. A cartoon of this version of modernism prescribes that because paintings are flat, painting must therefore explore flatness. W. J. T. Mitchell glosses the importance of Clement Greenberg to this formulation when

30Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

he says that Greenberg “put this most eloquently when he declared that the abstract artist is ‘engrossed in the problems of his medium’ to the exclusion of every other consideration.”21 The reductive element of this version of modernism stems from its gestures of exclusion. As Mitchell puts it: Greenberg regarded representational modes of painting, whether genre, history, allegory, surrealism, portraiture, or landscape, as regrettable deviations from the true essence of painting, which is contained in the materiality of the medium itself. . . . The great accomplishments of abstract art were, for Greenberg, the “acceptance of the limitations of the medium of the specific art” and the renunciation of mixed media, hybrids, literary painting, and (above all) kitsch, with its sentimental and facile appeals to familiar subject matter.22

Even if Greenberg’s aesthetics were more complex, its polemical gestures had weight as the dominant articulation of painterly abstract modernism: its gestures of exclusion made it clear what modernist art was not. On one level, Hapax Legomena fits this reductive drive to medium specificity, stripping away reference from the image and isolating a minimal element of film: the frame. Compare the audiovisual components of the first film, (nostalgia), with the last, Special Effects. The film (nostalgia) features realistic long-take photographic imagery accompanied by voice-over, while Special Effects consists solely of an abstract white frame jittering in the black space of the projected image, accompanied by a minimal electronic synthesizer soundtrack. The trajectory over the seven films within Hapax Legomena seems to move toward abstraction in the sense that as general principles of film and vision are being articulated and instantiated, the referential, phenomenal world is concurrently exfoliated to reveal a core of formal, medium-specific principles. Yet if Hapax Legomena is concerned with Greenberg’s sense of “the medium of the specific art,” it simultaneously engages multiple mediums as it catalogues in encyclopedic fashion a sequence of different arts and media related to film: photography ((nostalgia)), narrative film in the form of the screenplay (Poetic Justice) and acted drama (Critical Mass), video (Travelling Matte [1971]), pixilation as a form of animation (Ordinary Matter [1972]), television (Remote Control [1972]), and graphic diagram (Special Effects). Hapax Legomena unquestionably engages in the work of modernist definition, but as each film emphasizes some fundamental characteristics of the particular medium being catalogued, it is simultaneously placed

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan31

under the umbrella of film. For Frampton, this was not a contradiction, as, in his words, “the whole history of art is no more than a massive footnote to the history of film.”23

HERESIARCHS AND WIT But Frampton as a modernist was also devoted to those he saw as modernism’s “heresiarchs”—patriarchs who commit heresies—figures like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and James Joyce, who fought the reductive side of modernism.24 In this spirit, Frampton sought to reinvigorate modernism with what he called “that thing, dogmatically adjured by visual modernism during its last days, that goes by the ancient name of wit.”25 Here, Frampton invokes not only the sense of wit as inventive intelligence but also the Old English definition of Wit pointing to “the mind as the seat of consciousness,” derived from the Germanic Witz, or Wissen, itself derived from the Sanskrit word veda, meaning “knowledge,” and the Latin videre, “to see.”26 Wit is ultimately about epistemology, vision, and consciousness. For Frampton, the “ambition [of film and video] is nothing less than the mimesis, incarnation, bodying forth of the movement of consciousness itself.”27 In undertaking modernist investigation, Frampton seeks conceptual clarity, not reductively to exclude and proscribe but rather to activate human imagination and play. He and the heresiarchs he admires are interested in the materiality of the art form but include the consciousness of the spectator in that basic materiality. Duchamp, Cage, and Joyce share a deep analytical and historical knowledge of visual art, music, and literature, respectively, and revolutionized each art by changing less the technique and content than the protocols and definitions of what might be considered visual art, music, and literature. All of these artists, including Frampton, employed minimalist gestures but also incorporated unexpected media adjuncts and hybrid forms that ultimately expanded each art form. Following Ezra Pound, Frampton outlines how the twin gestures of analysis and expansion allow for “new creation” and new “inventories of culture”: Since the learning, the understanding of an art consists in the recovery of its axiomatic substructure, we can begin to say that the “unlearning” that Pound cites as indispensable to new creation, consists in the excernment, castigation,

32Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

and transvaluation of that axiomatic substructure. . . . Indeed, at its most fecund, a drastically innovative work . . . forces us to revise the inventories of culture . . . to find out again for every single work of art, the manner in which it is intelligible.28

New creation relies on figuring out the axiomatics of an art form, which can then compel a revision of what Frampton calls “the inventories of culture”—that which may be understood as culture—in order for new creation to be “intelligible.” At its most radical, new creation in film may require a testing of boundaries to the extent that an experimental film may not seem intelligible as a film in the standard “inventory” of those things we call films. Certainly, the seven films that comprise Hapax Legomena are each sui generis and highly different from one another. But together, in sequence, they form a metaparadigm of film’s axiomatics and possibilities through the dialectical trajectory that propels the films’ complex sense of abstraction.

AXIOMS OF FILM: THE FRAME Frampton directly articulates what he considers the three basic principles or “axioms” of film in his essay “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative” (1972). If we recall the definition of abstraction as engaged in “extracting common properties from examples,” his method for extracting those principles is precisely the work of abstraction: “What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film? In other words, what stable patterns of energy limit the ‘shapes’ generated, in space and in time, by all the celluloid that has ever cascaded through the projector’s gate? Rigor demands that we admit only characteristics that are ‘totally redundant,’ that are to be found in all films.”29 The three “common properties” Frampton finds in all films are (1) the frame; (2) “the plausibility of the photographic illusion”; and (3) narrative, defined not as story but as the principle of the unity of a sequence.30 In the context of Greenberg’s sense of modernist painting, the first axiomatic— the frame—is familiar. Painters, like filmmakers, explore the material and conceptual limits of the frame insofar as, in Frampton’s words, it “partitions what is present to contemplation from what is absolutely elsewhere.”31 For Greenberg, the frame in painting must be invested in fighting the illusions of three-dimensional space in favor of the single plane of the painterly surface:

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan33

The picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas. . . . Realistic space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the plane surface. . . . As we gaze at a cubist painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death of three-dimensional pictorial space.32

Frames abound in the films of Hapax Legomena, and Frampton plays with the resonances, material and metaphorical, of a variety of literal and fictive frames that transform pictorial space. In the first film, (nostalgia), photographs are burned on a hotplate; they transmute, on the one hand, from flat, two-dimensional images into three-dimensional, curling burned paper and, on the other hand, from illusionistic three-dimensional photographic space to abstract charred material.33 The film is almost a literalization of Greenberg’s description of “the birth and death of three-dimensional pictorial space” as the “picture plane” and “the real and material plane” oscillate as each image burns. “Realistic space” indeed “cracks and splinters.”

1.1

Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

34Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

Poetic Justice, the second film, consists of 240 pages of a screenplay filmed on a desk with a cactus and a coffee cup in the background. The pages form a frame that dramatizes the complexity of the space of reading: words on a page seem dimensionless as language even as they remain, materially, graphic black marks in white space, two-dimensionally flat but three-dimensionally piling up on the surface of the desk. The screenplay often describes framed tableaux in windows (e.g., “outside the window are three red-haired women rolling dice”) and features numerous frames within frames (e.g., photographs of photographs, etc.) in its imaginary diegesis. The third film, Critical Mass, stages an improvised domestic dispute between a man and a woman, framed within a white space lit by a single light. It is as if the domestic narrative conflict implied in Poetic Justice (the film ends with a shot of a rubber glove/gauntlet thrown on the page) were being literalized in a limbo space.34 For Frampton, the conflict is heightened by the visual elements: high contrast and shadows create a reversal effect from “afterimaging on the cuts. . . . I feel that they are visual resonances, or echoes of diminishing strength, of the thrust of the thing, what it’s doing.”35 But the dominant formal technique is

1.2

Hollis Frampton, Poetic Justice, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan35

1.3

Hollis Frampton, Critical Mass, 1971. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

montage, staccato rhythms on both the image and the soundtrack generated through algorithmic patterns of editing (e.g., four frames forward, two frames back, etc.). In Simon Field’s description, “The sound-track has been edited and partially looped so that half phrases or so are broken, repeated, run on, are broken again: ‘I’m going to leave you’ becomes ‘I’m goin’ . . . going to lea . . . to leave you . . . eave you.’ ”36 Both image and sound in Critical Mass were recorded whole and then fragmented through editing; as narrative space is fractured and analyzed, the violence of the dispute is intensified by the editing patterns.37 Travelling Matte, the fourth film, and the one described by Frampton as the serial’s “pivot,” is on many levels most concerned with the frame.38 Using early video equipment provided by SUNY Binghamton, Frampton performs a single-take circular tour of the university campus, a landscape he describes as “immaculate penal modern, rising from a sea of mud.”39 Frampton tapes the tour through a tube formed by his hand cupped around the lens; he called the film “a metaphor for part of the human condition, which is being trapped in this little round bone room (the skull), and trying to see out.”40 Here again, there is a play between flat and deep space as the cave-like “bone room” and the deep space of the campus glimpsed through Frampton’s hand are each flattened and obscured by the lines and pixels of the low-resolution video image (kinescoped onto 16 mm film) and by the sometimes rapid motion of the camera. Frampton wrote about the similarities and differences between video and film in “The Withering Away of the State of the Art” (1974) in modernist terms, emphasizing that “the most notable trait of the whole text of modernism, throughout the arts, and in the sciences as well” is the “relentless search for self-definition.”41 In the early 1970s, video’s medium specificity was characterized by low resolution and the long take. When he

36Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

kinescoped the image, he wanted to emphasize the contrast in resolution between video and photographic film: So then I took the tape with me to [Antioch College] Ohio a few months later and re-recorded it, just put some hash into it, because I wanted to emphasize that graphicness that the TV image has. . . . It really is like a crude engraving, it’s not like the photographic image . . . because I felt that that rhymed with what was happening in the masked shape itself, which is also essentially graphic. And to try to emphasize the materiality of it.42

Video is graphic, like engraving, creating an extra remove between the world captured on tape and the image. The terms “photography,” “cinematography,” and “videography” all have “-graphy,” from the Greek graphia or writing, as their suffix: the inscription, or writing of light, into the still, moving, or electronic image, respectively. Even the kinescope process was indexed with a misaligned black margin on the side of the frame.43 Meanwhile, temporally, video differed from film in the early 1970s in that a videocassette could record a single take of roughly twenty-two minutes, whereas a standard one-hundred-foot roll of 16 mm film yielded a take of two minutes and forty-five seconds at standard sound speed of twenty-four frames per second (fps). Frampton further played with the contrast in media by designating Travelling Matte (along with Ordinary Matter and Remote Control) to be projected at 16 fps, so-called silent speed, under which a onehundred-foot roll of 16 mm film takes four minutes and ten seconds. This is a reminder that medium specificity, and the abstraction that modernism binds to it, is culturally and historically specific to the technology of a medium at any particular time—in this case, the magnetically recorded electronic image of the early 1970s.

1.4

Hollis Frampton, Travelling Matte, 1971. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan37

The fifth film, Ordinary Matter, seems most traditionally photographic, as Frampton shows us numerous landscapes, including the iconic spaces of Salisbury Cloister, Stonehenge, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and two personal spaces, the fields around his home in upstate New York and the cornfields of his native Ohio. But almost the entire film is pixilated, which creates rapid motion and single-frame transitions that in turn create both an illusion of hurtling through deep space and a simultaneous awareness of the singularity of each separate film frame.44 The single-frame-ness of film is highlighted in Ordinary Matter in addition to editing’s capacity to join fantastically separate referential spaces over a single cut/join in the filmstrip. Remote Control is shot in single-frame increments and thus extends and intensifies the pixilation technique of Ordinary Matter. Scott MacDonald contrasts Ordinary Matter as a camera-based film and Remote Control as an editing-based film: “If [Ordinary Matter] presents a generally unorganized gathering of film imagery which draws attention to the essential materiality of film, Remote Control show[s] a variety of ways in which a filmmaker can control a different passage of imagery at a time after it has been collected.”45 It has two kinds of frames. The first is the slightly oval frame of an early 1970s television set, from which Frampton is filming single frames of several broadcast television dramas. Frampton said of the video frame, “I don’t like the shape of the frame, it’s an amoeboid rectangle, it’s a rotten rectangle, oozing, bulging.”46 The second frame is much sharper, an abstract diagram inserted at various points in the film that depicts a dotted-line frame emerging from a single point. As in Travelling Matte, where the lack of resolution in the video image is emphasized by Frampton’s subsequent kinescope of the image, here again Frampton is contrasting the amoeboid video frame with its platonic ideal in the graphic diagram. Remote Control contains what Frampton calls “apposite ‘found’ narratives” that he uses to manufacture “a ‘baroque’ summary of film’s historic internal conflicts” in relation to montage and space.47 The

1.5

Hollis Frampton, Ordinary Matter, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

1.6

Hollis Frampton, Remote Control, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan39

conflicts are “chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space,” and they reflect the contrast between Hollywood narrative and Soviet montage cinema.48 The single frame reduction deforms the original narratives, but the looping structure allows the spectator to recognize images; for example, when a close-up of Ray Milland (re)appears, the iconography and visual language of Hollywood narrative comes flooding into the imaginative space of the viewer. Even the sudden introduction of color in the film—the only example of color within the entirety of Hapax Legomena—functions as a historical quotation, pointing to the color sequence in part 2 of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1958) and Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 94 (aka the Surprise Symphony).49 The seventh and final film, Special Effects, depicts only a dotted-line frame, filmed by Frampton at some distance from the diagram with a telephoto lens.50 This manner of presenting the frame renders it highly unstable, jumping around (mostly) within the projected frame of the film, as Frampton tried to center the dotted-line frame through the lens (the dotted frame has the same aspect ratio, 1.33:1, as 16 mm film). Frampton recounted an anecdote of one viewer’s experience of Special Effects: “He wondered what the dotted line was about, and it occurred to him that it was to show where the movie would be if there were any.”51 If the frame, as Frampton states, “partitions what is present to contemplation from what is absolutely elsewhere,” then the final film of Hapax Legomena points to both no film and all films.52 Frampton signals the conceptual importance of the frame and its complex abstraction when he says, “The visible limit of the projected image itself—the frame— . . . has taken on, through the accumulation of illusions that have transpired within its rectangular boundary, the force of a metaphor for consciousness.”53

1.7

Hollis Frampton, Special Effects, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

40Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

On the one hand, the frame is a material condition of film whose reductive abstraction Frampton explores: the trajectory of Hapax Legomena through the seven films rehearses the exclusion of apparently extraneous representational matter. On the other hand, in the capacious spirit of Wit, the frame in Hapax Legomena additionally embodies the epistemological investigation of vision and consciousness, precisely through metaphorical, allusive, even literary allegories that would be considered foreign, in Greenbergian terms, to a purely abstract and reductive modernist investigation.

AXIOMS OF FILM: THE PLAUSIBILITY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ILLUSION The key conflict with the abstraction of Greenberg’s painterly modernism is Frampton’s embrace of “the plausibility of the photographic illusion,” the second axiomatic Frampton claims for film.54 Frampton was conscious of how this embrace violated the protocols of modernism, especially in the New York art world of the late 1960s and early 1970s: “I didn’t find it a picnic to be a photographer through the sixties, not because photography was disregarded, although of course that was true, but because my predicament was that of a committed illusionist in an environment that was officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion and, of course, utterly dominated by painting and sculpture.”55 While Greenbergian modernism celebrated the flatness and materiality of painting, it expressed a simultaneous—and Frampton would argue excessive—abhorrence of the arts of reference and of deep space (including photography and film) that activated that illusion, exemplified in Michael Fried’s influential essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967).56 Meanwhile, advanced film theory of the 1970s and 1980s, especially Screen theory and structural-materialist doxa, was dominated by a critique of illusionism.57 But Frampton’s insistence on the axiomatic importance of photographic illusionism was not a naïve embrace of realism; rather, he was interested in “the plausibility of the photographic illusion”—its effect on consciousness—which he says is hardwired into our perceptual matrix: “I simply mean that the mind, by a kind of automatic reflex, invariably triangulates a precise distance between the image it sees projected and a ‘norm’ held in the imagination. (This process depends from an ontogenetic assumption peculiar to photographic images: namely, that every

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan41

photograph implies a “real” concrete phenomenon.)”58 Frampton is quick to distinguish this element of illusionism from any hint of representational or realist illusion, which is where, to him, abstraction is in fact found: “I do not refer to what is called representation, since the photographic record proves to be, on examination, an extreme abstraction from its pretext, arbitrarily mapping values from a long sensory spectrum on a nominal surface.”59 Representationally, the two-dimensional image is understood by Frampton to be massively abstract; i.e., like a map, the photograph merely diagrams the specificity and enormity of threedimensional space onto “a nominal surface.” For Frampton, this sense of abstraction is highly reductive. The operation of the photographic illusion in consciousness through the reflex action of perception has enormous force for Frampton. Every photograph indexes “a ‘real’ concrete phenomenon”; i.e., every film image has a reference in the world, even if it is simply a dotted line, as in Special Effects. Indeed, the original dottedline diagram for that film can be found in the “Special Effects” file, box 2, of the Hollis Frampton fond at the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center in New York. In “For a Metahistory of Film” (1971), Frampton elaborates on what he calls the “poignancy” of photographic illusion: “Their amplitude instantly made the photograph—within the very heart of mechanism—the subversive restorer of contextual knowledge seemingly coterminous with the whole sensible world.”60 Where theories that critiqued illusionism tended to hyperbolize the ideological power of illusion over spectators, Frampton sees photographic illusionism as a productive and indeed “subversive” force that restores “contextual knowledge” of the sensible world. Moreover, where these critiques of illusionism sought—unsuccessfully—to eliminate realism from art and cinema, Frampton’s terms look forward to the current massive diversity of realisms in cinematic art as well as the complex historical relationships among art materials, illusions, and the “whole sensible world” that the recent post-1990s photographic and cinematic turn in the art world is witnessing. The expansive quality of this second axiomatic of film, the “plausibility of the photographic illusion,” rests in dialectical tension with the reductive force of the first axiomatic, the frame. The photographic illusion does not generalize; rather, it is specific to each frame on the filmstrip, since each photographic frame is unique, however imperceptibly different it might be from another. Frampton elegantly proposes the epistemological expansiveness of the photographic image: “The camera deals, in some way or other, with every particle of

42Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

information present within the field of view; it is wholly indiscriminate. Photographs, to the joy or misery of all who make them, invariably tell us more than we want to know.”61 This specificity and expansiveness resists the abstraction of the frame. As with the title of this serial work, Hapax Legomena—“things said once”—Frampton’s metaparadigm of film’s axiomatics and possibilities contains both redundancy (“characteristics that are ‘totally redundant,’ that are to be found in all films”) and singularity.62 Above, I described each of the seven films to show how they explored the frame as a complex medium-specific quality of film. I now return to the seven films to show how Frampton explores the plausibility of the photographic illusion. In each case, he undercuts any possibility of simple representational illusion by performing a series of displacements that create complexities of reference. Crucially, these displacements take place in both image and sound (also an indexical register) and in the sound-image relation; Frampton followed the Soviet filmmakers’ insistence that the image and soundtrack retain their independence.63 Hapax Legomena alternates sound and silence, with the first, third, fifth, and seventh films having soundtracks. But what we see or hear is not what we get; through displacement, Frampton creates reverberations of meaning that traverse the serial trajectory of the films. A further trajectory in the series is language. The first three films of Hapax Legomena foreground and displace elements of language before the “pivot” film, Travelling Matte, a silent film with no language content. Thereafter, there is no recognizable language in Hapax Legomena (with the possible exception of Ordinary Matter, discussed below) as the remaining four films explore different possibilities of sound. Frampton’s (nostalgia) presents thirteen photographs, most made by him, and a voice-over that elliptically narrates moments of his life or offers commentary relating to the history of art and photography. But if we seem to be in the realm of realist image and sound, their relation is immediately subject to displacement. The voice-over is doubly displaced, first, by having the first-person narration read not by Frampton but by artist Michael Snow, and, second, by having the relevant narration precede the photograph pictured. This gesture requires the viewer, after figuring out the displacement, to remember the voice-over and imagine the image to come. The final payoff of this strategy of sound-image displacement means that the ominous final image described in the voice-over is withheld from the spectator:

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan43

Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded, in that speck of film, fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph again. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?64

The imperative we hear can only be imagined. It points expansively to an impossible sight—perhaps another kind of abstraction captured under its definition as “the act of withdrawing or removing.”65 This absent yet infinitely imaginary image carries over into Poetic Justice as the words of the screenplay evoke scenarios. Some are mundane: “#4. (close-up) A small table below a window. A potted cactus, a coffee cup.” Some are fantastic: “#126. (middle shot) Bedroom. Love making. Outside the window are hyenas disputing a carcass. (dissolve to . . .)”. On one level, we have a reduction of representational diegetic space to written language. But the written descriptions of scenes inevitably invoke images in the viewer’s mind. Language evokes fictive space, with another built-in disjunction created by the use of the second person (“you” and “your lover” are central characters). In Frampton’s words, “Writing in the second person creates an automatic disjunction between the imaginative space of the work and the real space in which the spectator finds himself.”66 As a viewer/reader, I must orient myself to the “you” being (more intimately) addressed. In Critical Mass, the sound of language returns, but once again it is displaced from its source in the performers’ bodies. Although the meaning of the words is surprisingly intelligible given the staccato editing, the displacement enhances the performative shifts in tone, inflection, pitch, and volume that underlie the often volcanic argument improvised by performers Barbara DiBenedetto and Frank Albetta. Words become phonemes, grunts, breaths, all at once more abstract, and more rooted in the body. Ordinary Matter features a roughly synchronized sound on tape that consists of Frampton reading the Wade-Giles syllabary of Mandarin Chinese. Frampton insists that his reading in Ordinary Matter is “without tones,” which renders it “unintelligible to both a nonspeaker of Chinese and essentially to a speaker of Chinese; it is as if one recited a portion of the dictionary.”67 Through a cultural displacement (the Wade-Giles syllabary attempts to list romanized sounds of

44Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

Chinese language), a complex communicative language is reduced to abstract sound. Finally, Ordinary Matter is the only film in Hapax Legomena in which the soundtrack is disconnected from the 16 mm film reel and comes in as a separate form of sound media. When it was first released, a reel-to-reel tape accompanied the film print; subsequently, cassette tapes and CDs have been used. There is a sync mark on the film to instruct the projectionist to start the film after initial silence; usually the soundtrack runs out before the end of the film if it is projected at 16 fps.68 But the sound-image relation is loose and subject to contingency. Frampton’s own description of Remote Control suggests that its modernist investigation of form concentrates on editing in contrast to the referential (if rapid) movement through space in Ordinary Matter:69 “A ‘baroque’ summary of film’s historic internal conflicts, chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space. It incorporates 3 opposite ‘found’ narratives, condenses 5 ways of making, and includes a ‘surprise’ out of Haydn (or S. M. Eistenstein’s Ivan [the Terrible, Part II]).”70 Though the description makes the film seem highly systematic, in real-time viewing, even at 16 fps, the logic of the “3 opposite ‘found’ narratives” or “5 ways of making” is impossible to see, given the rapidity of the single-frame filming.71 Frampton filmed television dramas, many with science fiction and mystery scenarios, with each single frame corresponding to a new shot/cut on the television show.72 Frampton might expect viewers to examine the physical film frame by frame on its reel to see its editing patterns, in the same way students of serial music would examine a score.73 But what is evident at a projected screening is that a sequence of repeated images recurs to form a series of loops, although each loop is slightly different. For example, a series of numerals sometimes appears on the screen, though differently in each loop; once, the loop recurs in color. The very fact that the loop can be recognized may reflect Frampton’s observation about television that “I’m positive that you could see the entire spatial repertoire of television 10,000 times in the course of the single day’s viewing.” 74 Frampton’s modernist isolation of a medium-specific element of television—in this case, its limited spatial repertoire—is both condensed into the twenty-nine minutes of Remote Control and points outward from the medium to the massive body of cultural work referenced photographically in the film. Even the silence of Remote Control is a commentary on the protocols of sound in media: in broadcast television, the main technical taboo is silence, broken

Frampton’s Films Before Magellan45

insistently by the film. Here again, Frampton’s gestures of modernist analysis and abstraction work in both reductive and expansive directions. As discussed above, the final film of Hapax Legomena, Special Effects, seems easiest to understand as a reductive abstraction from the fullness of the photographic image in (nostalgia) to the dotted-line frame, with the soundtrack a reduction from Michael Snow’s vocal reading to the artificial electronic sounds of a Buchla synthesizer. But this generic frame, which could open up the full possibility of cinema, is also hyperspecific in the sense guaranteed by its photographic image production. Since the dotted frame was filmed handheld with a telephoto lens at some distance from the camera, the movement of the frame-within-a-frame is specific to Frampton’s body and its vibrations. Frampton said that camera movement is an “inscription” of a cameraperson’s body, introducing an unlikely autobiographical dimension: “With any material filmed by a particular person there’s a kind of kinesic autobiographical inscription, is there not? Just one’s physiological or motor state on a given day will mark a shot with a gesture that on another day it might not have. The hand-held camera, at least, inscribes the presence of the cameraperson on the invisible side of the camera.”75 Moreover, there are autobiographical dimensions throughout Hapax Legomena. While this is most explicit in the personal anecdotes recounted in (nostalgia), in films like Poetic Justice and Critical Mass their tales of domestic breakdown echo the dissolution of Frampton’s marriage during the making of the serial. The hotel room television used for Remote Control even evokes Frampton’s displacement from “home” during this period. The tour of landscapes in Ordinary Matter involves “visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” 76 Frampton’s body is omnipresent in Travelling Matte, videoed through his hand. Even the soundtrack of Special Effects can be said to echo the bodily inscription he claims for the image, as the score is improvised on the synthesizer. Improvisation is more a result of spontaneous experimentation than systematic performance from a score, thus contrasting with the systematicity evident elsewhere in Hapax Legomena. As Michelle Puetz says, “I wouldn’t want to make the claim, nor, I think, would he, that Frampton is a particularly gifted synthesizer player. In his own words—the synthesizer was ‘a splendid toy to play with’ and ‘something to improvise on.’ ” 77 Puetz emphasizes the visceral quality of both image and sound: “That said, I really like this soundtrack—I mean, I find it really

46Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

humorous—mostly for the way that it vibrates and pulses, almost compulsively— which, to me, makes it seem something like an amplified track of a troubled digestive system. It foregrounds the physical nature of the vibrating body, or something completely internal and embodied.”78 Even the most seemingly reductively abstract film of Hapax Legomena, then, points directly and even viscerally to Frampton’s bodily specificity at a particular place and time. Frampton’s first two axioms of film are the frame and “the plausibility of the photographic illusion.” The third is narrative, which he distills into what he calls “Brakhage’s Theorem”: “For any finite series of shots [‘film’] whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term in the series, together with its position, duration, partition and reference, shall be perfectly and entirely accounted for.”79 To name a theorem of narrative after the famously anti-narrative filmmaker Stan Brakhage is mischievous on Frampton’s part. However, this definition differs from the familiar sense of narrative as a story with characters, events, and settings. Rather, Frampton defines narrative in quasi-mathematical terms as a series composed of basic units of shots. The sequence of shots, if it is a “rational narrative,” has a rationale for each shot’s position in the series, its duration or temporality, its “partition” (or internal divisions or elements), and, finally, its reference (index or meaning). Frampton’s definition of narrative is akin to the principle of aesthetic unity—or at least a principle of economy consonant with a Greenbergian sense of modernist renunciation of elements that are extrinsic to a medium’s fundamental properties. Yet even here, this seemingly reductive modernism is contradicted. Hapax Legomena is many things, but it is not economical, clocking in at three hours and twenty-two minutes. The sheer duration of the film serial, its many longueurs, creates an effect of excess rather than economy. Film, different from the stillness of painting and sculpture, is time-based, inherently theatrical and performative, whether it is being projected in a theater or unfolding on a video monitor. Finally, as demonstrated in this section, Hapax Legomena has a dialectical, even contradictory, trajectory through time, engaging more formal and historical elements than it rejects. As mentioned above, the serial work is as encyclopedic as it is medium-specific. Frampton would continue to extend these concerns in Magellan, an epic film project of massive duration, encyclopedic reference, and intensified contradictions.

chapter 2 An Introduction to Magellan

W

hat is Magellan? As we shall see, very many things.1 Concretely, Magellan is a large film project that Frampton began filming in the early 1970s comprised of many short multipart films. In his essay “Notes on Composing in Film,” Frampton said, “What we learn when we read a text is how it was written,” and one of the fascinating aspects of Magellan is how both its “writing” and construction became increasingly ambitious over the course of its decade-long production. In this chapter, I first outline and unpack the intricacies of Magellan as it emerged during the 1970s. Second, I take up Frampton’s “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” the document that most explicitly outlines the ambitions and themes of Magellan and provides an overview of the conceptual parameters of the project and his cinema more broadly.2 The last version of “Statement of Plans” lists nine “goals” of his work, the first five of which he says continue “concerns of my earlier work,” while the remainder “explore four other interlocking territories.”3 I sketch each goal to understand Frampton’s sense of how Magellan both extends from and develops his earlier body of work, especially his epistemological metahistory of film and its tension with modernist notions of medium specificity in art history and theory in the 1970s and 1980s.

MAGELLAN: A PROJECT IN PARTS The first written record of a film project, in 1971, describes a two-part structure: • •

Straits of Magellan Clouds of Magellan

48An Introduction to Magellan

In 1974 it became a five-part structure comprising: • • • • •

The Dreams of Magellan The Small Cloud of Magellan The Straits of Magellan The Large Cloud of Magellan The Death of Magellan

In 1978 the last iteration of its structure was a three-part cycle comprised of: • • •

The Birth of Magellan (incorporating Dreams) Straits of Magellan (incorporating Clouds of Magellan) The Death of Magellan

It expanded from a combined nine-hour, thirty-six-minute serial in 1971 to a thirty-six-hour film cycle by 1978, when Frampton drafted the Magellan Calendar, which scheduled a screening date for each film of Magellan in a yearlong-plusfour- (or six-) day calendar, organizing its single- and multipart films and the ways the films would interact with one another.4 Depending on how one counts them, Magellan would have been comprised of roughly 830 to over 1,000 planned films or film segments, although the majority of these would have been one-minute films, 720 of which were planned for Straits of Magellan. The Birth of Magellan was to be an intense cluster of films screened on 2 or 3 days, 29– 31 December. The Straits of Magellan films were to be screened over 365 days—or 366 days in a leap year—from 1 January through 31 December. The Death of Magellan was a smaller cluster of films to be screened over 2 or 3 days, 1– 3 January. The overlap and condensation of the Birth and Death of Magellan suggests the importance of cycles of repetition, and even resurrection, in the project. The ambiguity as to whether the Birth and Death sections were intended to be two or three days long underlines the fundamentally unstable nature of Magellan as a work in progress.5 Throughout its production, Frampton altered the design of Magellan, rearranging, retitling, and altering even apparently finished films. For example, in the calendar, Frampton breaks up two completed films, Magellan: At the Gates of Death (1976) and INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT (1975), into much smaller parts that would be interspersed through the year’s screening. The calendar document has the notation “subject to change without notice,” which

An Introduction to Magellan49

functions as a conditional warning for the project as a whole: the boundaries of Magellan are difficult to draw. Frampton completed only about eight hours of the projected thirty-six hours of film that he outlined in the calendar; between 1972 and 1980, he released a total of about twenty-five released titles as part of Magellan. In January 1980, at the Whitney Museum of Art, Frampton presented a screening (over two days) of films that roughly followed the order of the Magellan Calendar. This screening list, along with the calendar, constitutes the most direct evidence of Frampton’s intentions for the released titles in his oeuvre; as the program note states, “The completion of portions of Magellan over the past year has made it possible to place the fragments into a semblance of their intended order.”6 Even as the plan for Magellan changed and evolved during its making, Frampton maintained a high pace of production, releasing films yearly from 1972 through 1980.7 Although he did not release any films between 1980 and his death in 1984, the extensive production notes and large body of unedited footage he left behind suggests much more was to come. Straits of Magellan was the first section that Frampton began in the early 1970s, making a series of one-minute films in imitation of the actualités of the Lumière brothers. He released forty-nine of these films as Straits of Magellan: Drafts and Fragments in 1974; the second phrase in the title was an homage to Ezra Pound, who published part of his epic Cantos as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII. As Magellan changed over the decade, the planned number of one-minute films expanded in the calendar from 240 to 720. Footage for some of these films exists at Anthology Film Archives, where a substantial amount of footage and production papers for Magellan were deposited. It is tempting to examine this footage in order to supplement Straits of Magellan, but Frampton left instructions that his production footage should not be released after his death. Even with a one-minute film, two decisive edits are necessary: at the start and end of the film.8 Moreover, since he redesignated footage from time to time as he worked on the project, it is difficult to speculate on how to read this archived footage in relation to Magellan as a whole. Along with this large cluster of one-minute films, a second element of Straits of Magellan upon which Frampton worked in the early 1970s was SOLARIUMAGELANI (1974), comprised of films that were to be screened on the solstices and equinoxes in the Magellan Calendar. Three roughly half-hour-long films (Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice) with highly complex editing strategies were

50An Introduction to Magellan

completed in 1974 along with Vernal Equinox, a much longer film (sixty-seven minutes) with footage shot in 1970. Frampton later repurposed Vernal Equinox, retitling it INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, which he planned to divide into thirteen five-minute parts to be distributed over roughly lunar cycles in the Magellan Calendar.9 The three SOLARIUMAGELANI films were subsequently superimposed over each other and released as a separate film in 1979 as The Birth of Magellan: Dreams of Magellan: Matrix I. The superimposition is a literalization of the Freudian dream operation of condensation, in this case of three films that embody the cultural weight of three seasonal activities: summer (a pastoral film of cows in a field), autumn (cows slaughtered for food), and winter (the hearth on the epic scale of the steel factory). Matrix I is also an homage to Stan Brakhage’s Prelude: Dog Star Man (1961), which likewise includes dense superimposition of images found in Dog Star Man 1–4 and which Brakhage describes as a “created dream for the work that follows.”10 This homage is just one example of many in which Frampton uses titles and allusions to make Magellan a metahistory of film that points obliquely to films, filmmakers, and art that he conceives as central to both film’s history and its possibility. Frampton also produced fifteen discrete short films ranging in length from one second to eighteen minutes between 1972 and 1979, films whose status in relation to Magellan is sometimes uncertain. For example, the four very different short films he released in 1972 provide a glimpse of the complexity of establishing their relationship to Magellan as a whole. He claimed that all films made from 1972 onward were to be included in Magellan, but some films were not given a slot in the calendar. Of these four, only one’s title was given a definitive place in the Magellan Calendar document: Tiger Balm, a short, lushly colored landscape film that had a second title in the calendar, “(Memoranda Magelani: #1)” and was slotted into Death of Magellan on “Day 0YY (02 JAN)” as “Interlude: Memoranda Magelani.” A second film from 1972, Apparatus Sum, is subtitled “(Studies for Magellan #1),” which seems to make it clearly part of a larger cycle, while its autopsy footage recurs in Magellan: At the Gates of Death (1976). The third film from 1972, Yellow Springs, described by Frampton as “a portrait of the filmmaker, Paul Sharits, in particular response to energies he generated one May afternoon in 1971,” was shot at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This was screened in the January 1980 Whitney Museum’s Magellan screening as part of what the program note lists as “Interlude: Pares Magelani,” a title that is included in The Death of Magellan in the calendar—yet not listed as Yellow Springs. Finally, Public Domain, also released in

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1972, is listed in neither the calendar nor the Whitney screening program, yet, as I argue in chapter 4, it logically fits into Straits of Magellan given its composition as a serial compilation of early films from the Library of Congress. The shifting status of these four films in relation to the Magellan Calendar fits a larger pattern of Frampton’s production over the decade, as the short films he released from 1972 to 1980 were shuffled in and out of the calendar as the project grew and changed. Finally, at the end of his filmography, Frampton lists two more never completed film projects in sound and color, “Monsieur Phot. A Film by Joseph Cornell, begun 1973, incomplete,” and “R, begun 1980, incomplete,” both of which seem to be outside Magellan altogether.11 These projects and the lack of films released after 1980 led some to speculate that Frampton had given up on Magellan. For example, in Mitch Tuchman’s 1985 tribute, he reports, via his conversations with Marion Faller, that Frampton had turned his attention to computer design, photographic work, and R: “Hollis continued to shoot—he was working on R—but he never edited Magellan footage again.”12 But he also recounts that “the lab in New York City that had processed much of Hollis’ work closed, and he never worked out a new relationship,” a circumstance that, along with his cancer diagnosis, may have simply impeded his ability to complete and release more films.13 In a December 1981 interview with Pamela Purdy, Frampton states that the doubling of lab printing costs was a major delay and provides a status report on Magellan: “Given the resources I need, I guess I could probably finish it in another 10 years. It’s probably about a third done—edited and printed—and it’s about 50 per cent shot.”14 The wealth of material in Frampton’s production files—including fully developed designs for new films—suggests that Frampton could have released far more material had he lived. He even commented in 1981, “I’m entertaining the idea, if I have to, of finishing in video, rather than not finishing it at all.”15 Frampton’s Magellan films encountered a generally cool critical and audience reception in the mid- to late 1970s. Although some critics engaged with the complexities of the new films, there were many who found the films wanting, even aggressively inaccessible, an impression exacerbated by Frampton’s sometimes defensive reactions to hostile audiences who missed the pleasures of his earlier work.16 Long silent films like Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, Winter Solstice, INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, and Magellan: At the Gates of Death were different from Frampton’s more popular films in eschewing language, instead devising highly complex and seemingly impenetrable editing and conceptual designs. P. Adams Sitney summarizes this “fundamental criticism” of the Magellan films: “The films

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he made without his ironic use of words and without his characteristically paradoxical structures lacked the wit and originality his sympathetic viewers had come to expect.”17 In addition to challenging audience expectations, the Magellan films were perplexing to many viewers partly due to the work-in-progress status of the larger project. For example, within the Magellan Calendar, many films were not meant to be viewed in one screening. Magellan: At the Gates of Death was released in two parts (The Red Gate and The Green Gate), each nearly an hour long, and they are exhausting (though not unrewarding) to watch. Yet within the calendrical exhibition scheme for Magellan as a whole, Magellan: At the Gates of Death was meant to be seen in five-minute segments sandwiched among other films with different visual textures and rhythms.18 Frampton’s INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT was divided into thirteen five-minute parts over the calendar. The exasperated reaction of some spectators to the work-in-progress screenings was understandable. Another, more local, context for the cool reception of the late films can be found in changing trends in the experimental film and visual art worlds of the 1970s. By the time Frampton began to screen Magellan as a work in progress in the mid-1970s, the critical fashion for so-called structural film had somewhat faded. Paul Arthur, in his 1987 essay “The Last of the Last Machine?: Avant-Garde Film since 1966,” discusses how many experimental filmmakers of the period, including Frampton, embarked on larger, more expansive projects.19 Even as Frampton moved away from language in the early to mid-1970s Magellan films, other prominent Anglo-American experimental filmmakers, such as Yvonne Rainer, James Benning, Jon Jost, and Laura Mulvey, were featuring language and engaging with narrative and a broader range of film conventions. Where many were moving past the pure vision aesthetic of Brakhage, Frampton was deeply engaged in a critical dialogue with Brakhage’s work in the early and mid-1970s that led to many films that eschewed language and sound in favor of explorations of visual rhetorics of camera movement, color, and montage. Language and sound returned to Frampton’s films released in the late 1970s, and Frampton’s essay “Film in the House of the Word” was included in a special issue of October in summer 1981 titled “The New Talkies” that featured essays on Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, and Marguerite Duras. In the 1970s, more experimental filmmakers and critics were engaging with newly urgent themes of gender and sexual identity (Frampton’s Pas de Trois [1975] is arguably about gender and performance) and increasingly explicitly referencing political struggle and contradictions of representation.

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During this decade, Frampton’s theoretical alliance with Marxism became more pronounced, and his historical consciousness led him to articulate more pointed critiques of elements of high modernism (while still devoted to its epistemological mission and ambivalently utopian character). But his politics were apparent only in his lectures and interviews, not in the “content” of his films. The Magellan films thus seemed resolutely “formal” and apolitical in comparison. While it might have seemed to his audiences that Magellan perpetuated the modernist preference for abstraction and ignored the trend toward more explicit investigations of politics and identity, I argue that his epistemological project in fact navigated a wide sea of cultural history.

“STATEMENT OF PLANS FOR MAGELLAN”: NINE GOALS The document “Statement of Plans for Magellan” outlines the project’s ambitions and themes and accompanied several successful grant applications that Frampton submitted in the 1970s. The fact that he wrote and developed several versions of it after he started Magellan means that it also functions as a kind of evolving midterm report, articulating what he had been doing and what he foresaw in the future. His plans for a Magellan project had begun a decade earlier in 1964, when Frampton conceived of sculptural installations with the names Clouds of Magellan and Straits of Magellan, but Magellan officially appears in his filmography in 1972 immediately following Hapax Legomena. Indeed the first film after the serial in the filmography is Apparatus Sum (Studies for Magellan: #1), a “study” for a larger work. He published his “manifesto” for Magellan, “For a Metahistory of Film,” in 1971 during the production of Hapax Legomena. Among the nine “goals” listed in the final 1978 version, he identifies the first five as continuing themes from pre-Magellan work and suggests four new areas of exploration.20 Each goal is worth exploring to understand his sense of how Magellan extends from and develops his earlier work. In the introduction, I emphasized Frampton’s sense of Magellan as an epistemological project whose exploration sought increased complexity, turning from the “chemistry of cobalt” (he gives as examples his earlier films Surface Tension and Zorns Lemma) to the “chemistry of dirt.” 21 Frampton charts both continuities with and significant breaks from this trajectory of modernist artistic practice and discourse in the 1960s and

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1970s, specifically in foregrounding the place of the messiness of history in contrast to the cobalt-like purity associated with notions of medium specificity in art history and theory.

Goal 1: Metahistory 1. Rationalization of the history of film art. Resynthesis of the film tradition: “making film over as it should have been.” The making of a coherent body of work that shall systematically map the terrain of film art, together with its boundaries, according to poetic principles extrapolated or induced from film’s irrational natural history.22

Frampton claims Magellan to be a project of metahistory that attempts to refigure the history of film and art on “rational” terms, “making film over as it should have been.” Frampton is undertaking a self-consciously modernist project, a “systematic” mapping of the boundaries of film art, defining rational principles of poesis (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the process of making; production, creation; creativity, culture”).23 In a 1980 interview, he speaks of generating “a grammatically complete synopsis” of the “infinite cinema” that he postulates for Magellan, what Brian Henderson calls “an analytic inventory of all extant filmic figures and modes of signification.”24 Only partially tongue-in-cheek, Frampton proposed that Magellan would remake cinema as it “should” have been had a modernist sense of medium-specific investigation—starting from “the most obvious material limits of the total film machine”—been activated in works of the Lumières, Edison, and other early filmmakers from cinema’s beginnings in the last part of the nineteenth century.25 This remaking would generate a “coherent body of work” of film art from its basic formal aesthetic parameters. However, this high modernist directive was qualified by Frampton’s sense of film deriving not only from its “material limits” but also from its expansive “irrational natural history,” which activates a familiar modernist tension between the timeless universal and the historically specific. This tension gets expressed in film in ways that are different from other arts that have a more developed tradition and theory of self-analysis. Frampton saw making a “large work” like Magellan in film as more challenging than making a large work in literature or art: “Film has not thus far achieved levels of organization that are in any means comparable with

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literature and especially I think it has not constituted itself as a mode of production on the one hand or a field of cultural potentialities on the other such that it can contain the large work.”26 Film lacked the legacy of theorization of its ontology and form that literature (e.g., Plato) or the visual arts (e.g., da Vinci) had within the Western tradition. Frampton was aware of film theory by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Walter Benjamin, and André Bazin—partly through his long friendship with Annette Michelson through the 1970s—but understood its legacy to constitute barely half a century of writing, while film’s conventional history was not yet a century old. Another problem was that most people’s understanding of film, including that of his own circle of artists and intellectuals, equated it with popular movies. Film (and photography) had little respectability, which foregrounds the contributions that figures like Jonas Mekas and Michelson made simply to bring the existence of experimental film to public and art world consciousness. As academic departments of cinema and film began to appear in the late 1960s and 1970s, narrative art cinema was the main object of study—in contrast to well-established departments of art history, English, and music in which the avant-garde was the main subject of scholarship and teaching.27 Only in a few schools was experimental and avant-garde film important, including New York University, where Michelson brought the study of the avant-garde to a new generation of scholars; SUNY Binghamton; and, by 1973, SUNY Buffalo, where Frampton was employed. This context foregrounds just how innovative his concept of metahistory was to the field. But if Frampton was in the forefront of the film avant-garde and, like others, resented the equation of cinema with Hollywood in the public eye, he did not ignore film’s vernacular history. Frampton’s metahistory encompassed all film and sought to theorize it not only as an art but also as a medium for all types of expression and use: “Of the whole corpus [of cinema,] the likes of Potemkin make up a numbingly small fraction. The balance includes instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography, and much, much more. The historian dares neither select nor ignore, for if he does, the treasure will surely escape him.” 28 His point was not to elevate all film to the status of art; rather, by the radical gesture of asserting the existence of film outside “the hegemony of the fiction film,” Frampton could “reject at the outset any suggestion that film, thus far, exhibits a coherent normal paradigm,” especially not “the narrative fiction film, with synchronous sound track.”29 His writings and films engage a wide variety of historical film, both banal and bizarre, and he incorporated footage from science films,

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educational films, and particularly early film, into Magellan, for both historical and metaphorical purposes. Frampton’s modernist impulse had the twin burden of attempting to catch up to other art forms’ long theoretical traditions while also engaging with the full range of film’s vernacular and industrial history. George Derk, in his reflection on Frampton’s relationship to Pound, celebrates Frampton’s embrace of the cinematic vernacular, partly to rebuff the “high-toned solemnity” of high modernism and partly to forge a new approach to history: “As much as high modernism permeates the films of Hollis Frampton, his own epic reverses Pound’s dictum to ‘Make it new.’ His voyage after knowledge ultimately strives to make a new medium old, to return to its starting point and dwell within it, to recuperate the burlesque beginnings that it sloughed off when the industry of commercial filmmaking took over.”30 There is a productive tension between “making film over as it should have been” and daring to “neither select nor ignore” from the plethora of “film’s irrational natural history.” Finally, in addition to encompassing all forms of film footage, Frampton ultimately understood film in an even more expansive sense as what he called the “total film machine.”31 The total film machine includes not only all films and footage but also all of its cameras and projectors, as well as its systems of production, distribution, and exhibition and the cultural, aesthetic, and economic historical traditions from which cinema derives. Frampton had the aesthetic task to redefine “the boundaries of filmic discourse,” but its wider history, politics, and culture were never divorced from his overall conception.32 The crucial final component of the total film machine was the spectator who does the work of bringing film to consciousness, which links this first goal of Magellan to its last goal: “The notion of a hypothetical, totally inclusive work of film art as a model for human consciousness.”33 Magellan’s ambitions in relation to history were self-consciously impossible, in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges’s figure of the Library of Babel, a frequent reference for Frampton. This articulation of a “total film machine” in the early 1970s predicts how the discipline of cinema studies would expand, eventually to become cinema and media studies.34 Frampton not only conceived of film as an art object and an apparatus connected to ideology and history; his critical approach to modernism was at the forefront of an era when the idea of a bounded artwork, author, and text were being exploded. Frampton was certainly not alone in this expansive sense of film, but this articulation in his essays and films was quietly influential.

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Goal 2: Time 2. The malleability of the sense and notion of time in film. Investigation of the temporal plasticity proper to an art that subsists at once within the colliding modes of memory, absolute “presentness,” and anticipation.35

Frampton explored cinematic time in many of his films and writings. An anecdote that dramatizes his fascination with time appears in a conversation with Jonas Mekas when Frampton recounts a dream in which he and Michael Snow exchange gifts, which are signs with lettering. Frampton gives Snow the word “space,” and Snow gives Frampton a neon sign of the word “time” that blinked once per second.36 Time is perhaps most directly theorized in his essay “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity” (1974), in which he discusses the temporal parameters of what he calls historical, chronological, and ecstatic time, and where he refigures the conventional triad of time—past, present, and future—as memory, “presentness,” and anticipation, which he posits as part of the human experience of time from birth to death: Toward that cessation of consciousness that is to be our death, as toward a vanishing point in convergent rectilinear space, an instrument within the mind, which we might call conjecture, maintains incessant attention. Along the same axis, the instrument of memory addresses itself to a complementary vanishing point: the incipience of consciousness that first stirred, as some reason, at the instant of our conception. The confused plane of the Absolute Present, where we live, or have just seemed to live, brings to irreconcilable focus these two divergent images of our experience of time.37

The first film of Hapax Legomena, (nostalgia), is the key text for examining this formulation of time. The simplicity of the film’s serial nature belies its complexity. As noted above, a series of thirteen long takes depict photographs being burned on a hot plate while a voice talks about an image; it soon becomes clear that the voice is not talking about the image we are seeing burning but about the photograph we are going to see next. This disjunction between the soundtrack and the images demands that spectators mobilize their capacities of memory and anticipation/conjecture simultaneously in the present as the film activates a full range of temporal consciousness.

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Other Frampton films use a number of strategies to play with time. Some anticipate (nostalgia)’s disjuncture of sound and image. Surface Tension records Kaspar Koenig speaking to the camera, but the voice is moved to a later section (over a pixilated image), while later still, selected words from the speech are translated into English, appearing as subtitles. In Carrots & Peas, the soundtrack from a found Canadian Armed Forces training film is played backward over the eponymous image in satiric commentary on the art history lecture. Many of Frampton’s films use long take and duration to engage instruments within the mind (e.g., Lemon [1969], Travelling Matte), while others modulate temporal registers, sometimes with metronomic regularity (e.g., Zorns Lemma and Poetic Justice). But Magellan, both in its individual films and the cycle as a whole, pushes this activation of temporal experience furthest. Frampton describes the cycle as, conceptually, “a work in sculpture that exists in time rather than in space.” 38 Within the films, at one extreme are the distinctive editing rhythms of the three films that comprise SOLARIUMAGELANI and the intense simultaneity of The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall I–VII (1977–1980), which uses an Eisensteinian vertical montage of image and sound fragments for ecstatic effect. At the other extreme are the 720 one-minute-long panopticons (or as Frampton calls them, “pans”) that comprise Straits of Magellan, most single-take, that would have been viewed through the extended calendrical organization of the entire film cycle. The temporal experience of these short films would have been a slow-motion montage over the course of a year. Throughout Frampton’s oeuvre, but certainly in Magellan, the goal to explore the “malleability of the sense and notion of time in film” is fully activated.

Goal 3: Procedural Parameters (Serial Music) The third goal cements Frampton’s self-conscious embedding of his films within the larger methodology of avant-garde twentieth-century music, a key modernist aesthetic tradition for his work. Perhaps counterintuitively, what initially may seem like formalist investigations of modernist musical parameters open a range of cultural and epistemological dimensions, among them the status of the artist in this historical period: 3. Establishment of rigorous procedures to generate the several parameters of filmmaking (strictly analogous in intent to the serial and post-serial techniques

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of advanced musical composition), with a view to the elimination of those nominally subjective, “thumbprint” procedures which, in fact, originate not within the artist’s sensibility but rather within his cultural ambience and pass unexamined into the axiomatic set of operations that constitutes a generative epistemological subtext for every work of art whatsoever. My procedures have derived, in every case, from long contemplation of a body of camera footage, and a resultant extrapolation of the formal necessities and intellectual resonances implied therein.39

On one level, in aligning himself with the tradition of serial and post-serial music (Frampton’s writings and interviews are rife with references to Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage, among others), Frampton is part of the century-long tradition of experimental film artists examining the analogies between film and music. Musical parameters of sequence, simultaneity, repetition, and inversion, common to twelve-tone composition, can be applied to film from the analogy of the filmstrip to Western sheet music notation. Especially in animation, and its “visual music” tradition, the historical films of Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann, and Hans Richter, and in a more contemporary vein, Peter Kubelka, Rose Lowder, and Paul Sharits, apply metrical plans with mathematical precision. Yet Frampton seeks to go beyond the mere application of mathematical schemas to footage. His call for the “long contemplation of a body of camera footage,” whether on Steenbeck editing machines or editing table reels, suggests the need to respond less to predetermined schemas than to actual footage, working inductively to formulate “procedures” that “extrapolate” what he calls “formal necessities and intellectual resonances” between formal procedures and footage. For example, Magellan: At the Gates of Death is a film that Frampton intended to have set editing patterns based on the modification or inflection of a “row” on the model of serial music.40 It has two parts, The Red Gate and The Green Gate, each with twelve roughly five-minute segments, each of which is structured in palindromic fashion, its beginning mirroring its end. This means that each segment could be projected forward or backward, and indeed each segment has a place in the Magellan Calendar with one of two notations: to be screened right side up and forward (RI) or upside down and backward, or obverse (O).41 Within each segment, subject matter, color, and other visual elements in each shot are varied in sequence in the same way that serial music would explore and exhaust the

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permutations of a musical phrase. The “body of camera footage” for this film is imagery of medical cadavers layered with color filters and superimpositions: the shocking, literally visceral subject matter provides a vivid counterpoint to the “rigorous procedures” he is using to process it, including metric montage, repetition, and inversions. Each segment begins with a five-shot sequence, repeated in reverse at the end: a) b)

c) d)

e)

swirling hexagons in two-layer superimposition of green and red black-and-white image of a skull with top sawn off; the camera cranes up to look inside skull (this is reversed in the end sequence as the camera cranes away from the skull) close-up of a cadaver’s face, usually with red tone and then another color—often one face fades out and another face fades in pan right to two halves of bisected skull, upside down (this is reversed in the end sequence as the skull’s sections are right side up and the shot ends on a pan left) repeat of hexagons in shot (a)

The motifs range from identifiable images like the open skull to camera movements like the rapid handheld movements into extreme close-up to color tinting in red, green, and yellow. An important variation on these segments comes at the beginning of The Red Gate when a prelude of sorts first shows Sharits-like color field frames that slowly shift from green to yellow to red, followed by a shot of a bisected head; Frampton’s hand comes into frame and turns the skull up. At the end of The Green Gate, the sequence is reversed, his hand “closing” the skull. Film as a metaphor for consciousness is literalized here, on a material plane, as the skull as housing for the brain is opened and then closed. On another level, Frampton indicates his understanding that these somewhat clinical “procedures” have a cultural dimension that is linked to any artwork’s “epistemological subtext.” Frampton was part of a generation of filmmakers including Rainer, Sharits, and Snow, who embraced theoretical models from science, information theory, and minimalism to differentiate themselves from more expressive and lyrical traditions associated with what he calls “nominally subjective” art making (the tradition identified by Sitney as “psychodrama” and “lyrical” film, associated with the work of Maya Deren, Marie Menken, and

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especially Brakhage).42 Ostensibly, the artist leaves their “thumbprint” on the artwork, but this assumes that an artist’s subjectivity can transcend its “epistemological subtext”; i.e., the ideological and knowledge frameworks of the cultures that surround the artist. Frampton’s critique of the expressive mind-set sought to restore the centrality of cultural and epistemological frameworks of art. Frampton resented what he called the “cartoon” understanding of his work as dryly mathematical and characterizations of himself as a dispassionate technician.43 Fighting the mid-century American distrust of articulate artists—and Frampton was nothing if not articulate—Frampton wanted to bridge the cultures of science and art. As I explore in later chapters, Frampton’s work on Magellan articulates a theory of art that is highly invested in considerations of culture and history. It is no surprise that this embrace of musical procedures for film invokes both cultural and epistemological dimensions for modernist analysis.

Goal 4: Language The fourth goal invokes the element of Frampton’s work that is perhaps most celebrated in the extant critical literature on his work: its relation to language. Experimental film in the 1960s was dominated by an emphasis on the visual, partly to serve a modernist stress on medium specificity and partly to differentiate experimental film from culturally dominant narrative film forms. For Frampton to bring film together with language was revolutionary, paralleling a number of other radical artists who were infiltrating their art with language, especially Duchamp and Rainer but also the emerging generation of conceptual artists such as Robert Barry, Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono, and Lawrence Weiner. Frampton’s efforts emerged out of his lifelong work in language and literature, manifested in his first vocation, poetry, and his familiarity with multiple languages. In his youth, he was simultaneously immersed in literature (reading the work of Pound, Eliot, and Joyce; editing the Phillips Academy literary magazine, Mirror, wherein he published his own poetry and stories in English, French, and German), and the logophobic world of Abstract Expressionist painting in the late 1950s. (His teachers at Phillips Academy brought students to the Cedar Tavern in New York.) It makes sense that Frampton would seek to unite these apparently contradictory modernist worlds.

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For Frampton, film and language were both commensurate and necessary for his figuration of film as a medium capable of capturing not only the external history of the world but consciousness itself: 4. The function of the written and spoken word in film. I have begun an exploration of the tense mutuality that exists between the art founded in language (prose, utterance, poetry) and those founded in kinetic visual illusion (animation, document, cinema) as they seem poised to annex one another, and, together, to annex music, in the interest of founding an art that shall be fully and radically isotropic with the movement and substance of consciousness.44

Frampton sees language as central to art, in contrast to certain ideologies in the visual arts, including experimental film, that isolate and celebrate the visual to the exclusion of registers of language and sound. Film works with “the written and spoken word,” and Frampton’s ambition in relation to the incorporation of language into film is such that it becomes inseparable from his ambition to make film the art that captures “consciousness” itself. The key element of consciousness in relation to film is its dynamic energy, its “movement and substance,” which is found in the three fields of art he sees dialectically synthesized into art as consciousness: language arts (“prose, utterance, poetry”), moving image arts (what he calls “kinetic visual illusion,” which include “animation, document, cinema”), and, finally, music. If he saw film and language in dialectical tension, his sense of film’s cultural trajectory was that it still had to catch up to language. But film, language, and music, in addition to emerging electronic arts, shared a materiality rooted in dynamic, energetic, sequential form. Frampton conjectures “that photography and then film and now, heaven help us, that thing that begins with ‘v’ [video] may eventually be seen . . . as tentative attempts, at once complete and approximate, to construct something that will amount to an arena for thought and presumably as well an arena of power commensurate with that of language.”45 In his writings and projects in the late 1970s and 1980s, he explored language in relation to semiotics, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and “natural language” systems like kinesics, neurophysiology, and sociobiology.46 According to his description, one of his earliest lost films, Obelisk Ampersand Encounter (1965), consists of three shots: a tilt down Cleopatra’s Needle (outside the New York Metropolitan Museum), a black leader over which the word “and” is heard, and a shot of collision between two people.47 Already, Frampton uses

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the linguistic conjunction “and/&” as a metaphor for film editing. Surface Tension, as noted above, plays with verbal and graphic forms of language, including translation and subtitles, while (nostalgia), Poetic Justice, and Critical Mass explore variations on spoken and written language in Hapax Legomena, with discrepancies in performance, comprehension, and the imagistic products of reading. Finally, Zorns Lemma constitutes a sustained reflection on the relation of language to alphabetical and numinously organized experience and knowledge, especially in the shift from word images to replacement images in the middle section of the film. Language seems to disappear from Magellan, at least until Gloria! in 1979, but may be seen to be displaced onto Frampton’s many writings published during its production; for example, “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” (1973/1975) is a fabula about a filmlike ideographic language. Several films that were never completed clearly explored elements of language, at least from the evidence of their production notes, and his non-Magellan project R was also concerned with theoretical elements of language.

Goal 5: Autobiography 5. The manner in which it may be understood that a single human life, seen as an intricate but apprehensible “figure” in space and time, designates and details, literally and metaphorically, a creative life work. Uses of autobiographical information, seen in stereoscopic focus with the historic canons of one’s art, as a source of shaping mythic reverberation.48

The fifth goal, and the final one that Frampton posits as continuing his earlier work, is autobiography. Frampton means to investigate not just his own personal stories but also the very idea of autobiography and with it, authorship, detaching those concepts from a personal, expressive register, locating them instead within history and culture. In interviews and talks, Frampton refers often to theorists like Roland Barthes, whose “The Death of the Author” was first published in Aspen in 1967, and later to Michel Foucault (“What Is an Author?” [1969]), both of whom were reconsidering the status of authorship and autobiography as anchors of meaning for artworks.49 In Frampton’s many interviews, he elaborates, in his performative manner, on the personal dimensions of his films, which would be otherwise opaque to most viewers. For example, his two best-known works,

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(nostalgia) and Zorns Lemma, are the most explicitly autobiographical, yet the stories of Frampton’s life contained therein remain highly elliptical.50 As in Frampton’s stated desire above to avoid “thumbprint” composition, he was adamant about avoiding making himself the explicit subject of his films: “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was express my personality. It is still the last thing. It’s almost inevitable that one will in any case.”51 If autobiographical expression is inevitable, then Frampton resolves to make it work aesthetically as a formal layer, in the way that metaphor uses “vehicle” to express “tenor,” buffering the direct expression of a thought or emotion. He, Frampton, is a “life” but also a “‘figure’ in space and time”—abstract, even impersonal—who can signify a “creative life work.” Throughout his oeuvre, he connects “autobiographical information” with art history, what he calls the “historic canons of one’s art,” in order to tell the (meta)history of an art through metaphorical autobiography. Frampton’s interest in the history of culture’s “mythic reverberation” helps us understand how many of his artistic strategies have dimensions that range from local through historical and even millennial scales. The last film that Frampton completed in Magellan, Gloria! is a tribute to his grandmother, Fanny Elizabeth Catlett Cross, that also functions as a commentary on Irish literature, cinematic history, and the future of computing arts (indeed, Frampton dedicated the whole of Magellan to Cross).52 Gloria! points to a larger body of portrait films in Frampton’s oeuvre, some featuring artist friends or their work, or simply inspired by or dedicated to them. Early films like Manual of Arms and Artificial Light present a rogue’s gallery of the New York avant-garde of visual arts and dance, while Snowblind (1968) captures a Michael Snow “environmental sculpture Blind,” and Lemon includes the dedication “(for Robert Huot).”53 In Magellan, Yellow Springs (Vanishing Point: #1) is a portrait of Sharits and Quaternion (1976) is a portrait of artist James Rosenquist.54 More indirectly, For Georgia O’Keefe (1976) is a film homage to her painting Radiator Building, Night (1925), and Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976) is in sly dialogue with Stan Brakhage, shot partially at his Colorado residence. Frampton’s sense of the inevitability of expression demonstrates his deeply historicized sense of art and its production. He understands himself as a historical subject who, like the artwork, is inevitably symptomatic of their time. Art work and life work echo and inform each other and are understood as work, a form of cultural labor. Frampton was thus free to push film toward wider histories in literature, art history, and music and to explore speculative topics in science and

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mathematics. Frampton was also inevitably symptomatic of the presumptions of the universalized straight white male subject of modernism, although, as I discuss throughout the book, his thinking about gender and the colonial history underlying the Magellan metaphor evolved through the 1970s and 1980s. He was more explicitly sensitive to issues of class and highly aware of hierarchies within the New York art world, leading him to seek property outside the city in the early 1970s, solidifying his return to what he identified, even if ambivalently, as workingclass and rural roots. In his “Statement of Plans,” Frampton calls attention to a break between the first five goals and the last four, which he claims to be new areas of exploration. The genre of writing into which “Statement of Plans” falls—the grant application— requires novelty, perhaps leading Frampton to isolate the last four goals as those that would be advanced by the new funding. Certainly, his work prior to Magellan was already exploring most of these areas, although this exploration may have been more self-conscious and intentional. As mentioned above, Frampton revised the document several times, underlining the dynamic and evolving nature of Magellan; as it expanded in scope, complexity, and ambition, new goals were added.

Goal 6: Graphic and Plastic Elements The sixth goal concerns the relationship between the flat screen and its depiction of deep space and between materiality and illusionism in film and photography, key concerns of many of Frampton’s earlier films. He defends the illusionism inherent to film and photography’s representation of space along with their medium specificity. 6. The dialectical relationship between graphic and plastic elements in a cinematic closed field that includes both. The graphic cinema is as old as filmic illusion. I refer not only to the animated film but also to the ancient presence of intertitles, whose intrusion in the midst of the film experience recalls our attention to a frontal picture plane that we feel to be at odds with that deep space whose aggressive recapture more clearly marks the onset of cinematic thought than the mere artifactual appearance of the analytic filmstrip or, even, the illusion of motion. I am interested to effect a direct confrontation between these two coeval cinematic modes.55

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Here, Frampton posits a generative conflict between what he calls “graphic” and “plastic” elements in cinema. He associates graphic cinema with early animation (e.g., Richter’s Rhythmus 21 [1921] or Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale [1924]), in which geometric shapes activate awareness of the play between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of perception of the moving image. Ryan Pierson notes that Frampton, like many in the New York avant-garde scene, distanced himself from the traditions of animation that were such a major part of U.S., Canadian, and European experimental film culture from the 1940s through the early 1960s. Pierson suggests that Frampton’s Heterodyne (1967) was conceived as a retort to Norman McLaren’s Blinkity Blank (1955), refusing anthropomorphic shapes or the impression of movement; instead, Frampton uses a mathematical structure and high modernist compositional strategies inspired by Webern.56 In Frampton’s words, “I intended [Heterodyne] to be a kind of revenge done with the bare hands against—first of all animation— or cell animation in particular and secondly, against abstract films with a capital A as they were practiced in the late 1940s and 1950s as a kind of engine cooler for the art houses where I first saw serious foreign movies.”57 In 1969 Frampton distanced himself from Heterodyne, declaring it “made in abject, total, lamentable ignorance of the whole body of Paul Sharits’ work,” and suggested that his future investigations of animation would take different forms, underlining how long this apparently new goal within Magellan had been germinating.58 Frampton was also interested in how the written word functions as a graphic sign in cinema, calling attention to a “frontal picture plane” (which he explored in Surface Tension and Zorns Lemma, in which we read text superimposed on the image and embedded in the three-dimensional world, respectively). The intertitle takes on metahistorical resonance in his interest in experiments by Soviet filmmakers who activated the graphic qualities of text as a visual element. Frampton stages numerous encounters between graphic and plastic modes in the Magellan films, especially in his use of mini graphic animations between shots in The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I & XIV and Mindfall I & VII (all 1977–1980) and his insertion of flat color frames between each shot of photographic material in the three completed films in Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice. The flat frames and animations shuttle us back and forth from flat screen to deep space. While not named in this goal, color is a key element of these animations and flat frames. In a 1977 interview, Frampton noted the formal separation of drawing from color in relation to space: drawing, normally in black-and-white, creates surface and volume and “seems to be about space mostly” but does not require color,

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from which he infers that color “is not an inseparable attribute of space.”59 Frampton’s use of color animations and frames between almost every shot of his late Magellan films marks an insistent optical break from the illusions of deep space and movement in the photographic image.

Goal 7: Sound 7. The general “problem of sound” in film.60

Frampton touched on the seventh goal frequently in interviews in the 1970s and 1980s. The “problem” is conventional synchronous (or “sync”) sound, which has limited the exploration of sound-image relations in film, which in theory should respect the mutual independence of the soundtrack and image track. Highly influenced by Soviet film theorists and filmmakers like Eisenstein and Vertov, Frampton claimed, “Since 1928, this problem has hung over cinema like a Damoclean sword.”61 Frampton proposes to examine “a rhetorical spectrum [that] extends from the supreme artifice of ‘lip sync’ (tacitly understood to be transpiring within a perfectly degraded or evacuated auditory universe) to the supreme artifice of silence (proclaimed as the perfect exaltation . . . by default . . . of vision).”62 Continuing his dialogue with Brakhage, Frampton frames the artificial history of film sound between one extreme of Hollywood “sync” sound and the other extreme of Brakhage’s claim that silence intensifies vision. Rather than accept these artifices, Frampton seeks to explore parameters of synchronous sound (including what he calls “dissyncrony,” “asynrony,” and “disjunct” sound) in relation to what he calls “iconic” sound (“the acoustic ‘image’ is of astonishing durability”) and “synesthetic” sound.63 Frampton’s pre-Magellan films had already explored sound in manifold ways, especially in those exploring language discussed above (Obelisk Ampersand Encounter, Surface Tension, Carrots & Peas, Zorns Lemma, and the four sound films in Hapax Legomena). Maxwell’s Demon (1968) uses the buzz of sprocket holes (synced with its water imagery), although Frampton decided to use a higher-pitched 8 mm sprocket buzz rather than the film’s 16 mm sound, underlining the artifice of his approach. Among the roughly twenty-five films released as part of Magellan, only three have sound— Cadenzas I & XIV, Mindfall I & VII, and Gloria!, all released at the end of the 1970s—but his ambitions regarding sound composition were clearly important in light of the frequency with which Frampton would discuss it in

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interviews and the emphasis on sound materials in Magellan budget documents. In Mindfall, where these sound experiments are most developed among the completed films in Magellan, the realm of what he calls “perfectly disjunct sound” is explored, “from which we might expect discoveries of a magnitude comparable to those proceeding from the surrealist Encounter.”64 He concludes his discussion of this goal by admitting, “I do not propose, of course, to ‘solve’ this problem of sound but rather, simply, to probe its extent, seeking, in particular, the dissolution of those perimeters where sound merges, on the one hand, into ‘language’ and, on the other, into ‘music.’”65 In Melissa Ragona’s important work on sound in Frampton’s films, she notes the importance of Eisensteinian vertical montage and mathematics: “In order to rethink the possibilities for vertical montage in the postwar era, Frampton turned to the permutational and operational forms used in experimental music, minimalist sculpture, and set theory.”66 For Ragona, Frampton’s embrace of “conceptual mathematics” allowed him to “open up what he believed was the ‘closed system’ that film semiotics had begun to develop in the late 1960s.”67 Even as language was crucial to Frampton’s work and acknowledged as the master code of culture, the wider possibilities of sound opened up by mathematics and music were a crucial dimension of Magellan and Frampton’s late work.

Goal 8: Electronic and Digital Computing Tools The eighth goal introduces one of the most contentious elements of Magellan: the role of computers and digital technology, or what he called: 8. Rhetorical options available to film art through such image-forming and -manipulating tools as optical and video synthesizers, electronic means for synthesizing and modifying sounds, and the digital computer.68

On the one hand, Frampton engaged with these media at a time when film and video/electronic arts were largely separate worlds institutionally and aesthetically.69 Even if his artistic output remained predominantly in film, Frampton increasingly engaged with other arts to the point where, in the last six years of his life, he exhibited color xerography and performance pieces; published texts of music, fiction, and theory; and designed computer software and hardware, leading to the speculation that he had abandoned Magellan and film. On the other

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hand, at least in the “Statement of Plans,” Frampton is explicit that the role of digital computing in Magellan is limited to a set of tools bent toward completing films. Reacting to the utopian discourse that often accompanies new technologies, he insists, “I am not in the least interested in wandering among the ‘infinite possibilities’ of such devices,” and clarifies that he seeks to use the computer in the same way that he wants to use his camera: “I want to press them into the service of cinema as directly as others have done with the mechanical camera.”70 The emphasis in the eighth goal is on exploring the “rhetorical options available to film art” through these tools. In Andy Uhrich’s comprehensive analysis of what remains of Frampton’s computer work, “the digital operated alongside and in tandem with the photochemical” in the totality of the artist’s work.71 One pragmatic benefit of computing for Frampton was the possibility of saving time by harnessing the computer’s ability to perform repetitive tasks rapidly: “I am particularly interested in these devices in proportion as they make available to film, within a framework that has some discoverable relation to ‘real time,’ generative or metamorphic options that once lay outside the possibilities of film art simply because they could not handily be entertained during a single lifetime.”72 As he joked in a letter to Donald Richie, it is “the only life I may reasonably expect to have.” 73 Several of the Magellan goals involved processes that would be highly time-consuming with the technology of his day. For example, the third goal refers to the importance of serial music as a model for film, which involves processing multiple permutations. The sixth goal, of exploring graphic and plastic elements, involves animation, with its painstaking frame-by-frame requirements. In Frampton’s production notes, he designed several films in Magellan that would play out complex predetermined schemes on visual and audio tracks. Frampton’s production notes contain plans for several never completed films that seemed to rely on computer-generated elements, including Clouds of Magellan, which calls for a massive number of throws of dice to generate permutations to populate hundreds of complex matrices, a process that would benefit from computer algorithm operations (discussed further in chapter 6). Along with pioneering video artist Woody Vasulka, Frampton set up the Digital Arts Lab (DAL) in 1977–1978 at SUNY Buffalo. He and his students, especially Bob Coggeshall, Bob Franki, and Helene Houston, cocreated a number of computer projects, including two computer languages: DEMON, “an interpretive microcomputer language for audio-frequency data editing & control, 1979,” and IMAGO, “a video raster graphics computer language (1980– 81),” to work on “computer-generated, -controlled & -processed image, sound & text.” 74 Keith

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Sanborn, who was Frampton’s student in the DAL from 1978 to 1980, sees Frampton’s computer design as an extension of his earlier film schemas, an “Algorithmic Aesthetic” experimenting with what Frampton called “control mechanisms.”75 Uhrich argues that the achievement of the DAL must be contextualized in relation to, first, its innovations in applying computers for creative use on an artisanal, DIY level and, second, the volume of labor involved in building these tools from scratch in the 1970s: “Hollis Frampton and his students at the DAL did not just create programs of artists’ tools. In constructing the entire computing environment—software with its unique command language, one-of-a-kind hardware designed to maximize the deficiencies of commercial systems, delimiting the on-screen space, and so on—they created an idiosyncratic blueprint for interacting with the digital world.” 76 Frampton’s progress on this eighth goal of Magellan is impossible to gauge. Ulrich assessed the archive of Frampton’s computer work at Anthology Film Archives and concluded it was impossible to reconstruct or emulate. Jeff Menne, in his definitive recent account of the DAL as a variation on the tradition of the artist’s studio, concludes that Frampton “had a share in foretelling the forms of digital culture” and suggests that his computer work might have “subsumed” the infinite cinema, making the computer “the metamachine” to Frampton’s sense of cinema as the “Last Machine.” 77

Goal 9: Film Art as a Model for Human Consciousness Frampton’s final goal is perhaps the plan’s most ambitious and most prescient of the current power of media to imbricate itself with human consciousness, as its ubiquity and sophistication approaches the asymptote of artificial intelligence: 9. The notion of a hypothetical, totally inclusive work of film art as a model for human consciousness. I propose a work of art (not a scientific or philosophical theory) that shall touch upon a sufficient number of shores to cartoon my own affective world. We may assume that each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is its complexity; on that principle, I conceive, distantly, of an art of cinema that might encode thought as compactly as the human genetic substance encodes our entire physical body.78

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The relation of art to human consciousness is a central assumption of aesthetics, whether thinking of the expressive or reflective functions of art. But Frampton seeks not only to outline or “cartoon” his “affective world”; he also mobilizes a scientific metaphor: encode thought on the model of DNA functioning as a blueprint for living beings. Like a proto–Human Genome Project for the art of film, Magellan starts with the historical flesh of celluloid and extracts a conceptual substructure that can then function as a blueprint for cinema’s future. In his 1974 essay on time in photography, he adds an aside about cinema: That other art that uses the camera, the cinema . . . has discerned and enunciated for itself a task, namely, the founding of an art that is to be fully and radically isomorphic with the kineses and stases—in short, with the dynamic “structure” (if one may still dare to use that word)—of consciousness. Film art has, perhaps, been able to predicate for itself an ambition so appalling precisely because it is “about” consciousness.79

That Frampton calls this ambition “appalling” underscores the dangers he saw in undertaking Magellan and, in some way, the challenges that face those exploring and following in Magellan’s wake. As he developed his “Statement of Plans” through the 1970s, Frampton shifted his formulation from “epistemological model for the conscious human universe” to a simpler but more expansive formulation: “model for human consciousness.” With his shift, he expands his sense of consciousness from knowledge (the realm of epistemology) to how Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world ostensibly encompassed “all human experience,” including less cognitive elements of thought and mental life such as sexuality, the unconscious, and death. Magellan is meant to investigate the full range and affinities of cinema and consciousness, an index of the project’s perhaps dangerously totalizing aspirations. Frampton articulated the contradictions of these goals in his writings and films as well as the pull in Magellan between a commitment to the modernist enterprise of investigation of the essential conditions of film and a critical, metahistorical approach to modernism through an embrace of irony and excess. In the chapters that follow, the force of these metaphors of consciousness will be explored to assess the range of their ambition and inevitable limits.

chapter 3 Metahistory and the Archive “Historical Necessity” and Tradition

I

n an interview in 1976, Hollis Frampton signals his understanding of modernism as deeply invested in a historical project: “The action painters, after all, were incorrigible museum hounds; they were, in fact, a generation of art historians. . . . They were not making those paintings because those were the kinds of paintings they personally found pleasant or interesting or wanted to see, they were making those paintings out of some version of what they perceived to be historical necessity.”1 He brands the Abstract Expressionist painters, who were so central to his understanding of art in his youth, as secret art historians— “museum hounds”—and aligns himself with their mission: making art as a matter of “historical necessity,” with the urgency that necessity implies.2 Earlier in the interview, he suggests that modernist artists integrally connect a “detailed textural and textual history” of an art form with its “practice”; this connection between history and artistic practice is central to Frampton’s sense of his filmmaking.3 Frampton deepens this connection in that his sense of historical consciousness impels both hands-on, material historical research and conceptual reflexivity: “Now, it’s not always a simple path—this notion of perceived necessity—but it’s one that does look into the tradition of the art (or that part of it which is available and known), re-evaluating it, discerning within it what seem to be operative principles that can be of use (or, on the other hand, should be argued with, engaged with).”4 Frampton looks critically into the historical “tradition” to seek out its “operative principles,” but these principles are not static; they must be constantly “argued with, engaged with.” Moreover, Frampton’s sense of history is not driven simply by the cultural demands of a tradition. It is tempered by a sense of the material limits of that history, “that part of it which is available and known.”

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Frampton’s sense that what limits history is that which is unavailable and unknown led him to research early film history and to experiment with the appropriation of found footage into his films and massive intertextual quotation throughout Magellan. It also signaled the importance of contingency and an epistemological fallibilism to Frampton’s thinking: failure is one of the horizons of possibility for ambitious speculative work like Magellan, and for modernism generally. In the first part of this chapter, I outline how Frampton understood Magellan as a historical necessity for the medium of film, a fundamental task he believed he had to undertake on behalf of film culture. Frampton called this historical mission a “metahistory of film” in a 1971 essay that he later called a “manifesto” for Magellan.5 This sense of metahistory both enables and burdens his project, creating an ambivalence that I argue pervades Magellan and much of Frampton’s art; the fact that Frampton prepared this manifesto while completing Hapax Legomena (1971–1972) shows the persistence of this mission. I examine this ambivalence through T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a frequent touchstone in Frampton’s writings. Eliot provides terms that root Frampton’s need for history (requited through his embrace of early film) and his devices of appropriation (found in the wealth of filmic quotation and literary and art historical allusion throughout Frampton’s oeuvre). Magellan echoes Eliot’s emblem from The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The immensity of Magellan constantly threatens to render it a ruin—a fate actualized by Frampton’s early death—but the strategy also invites speculative and imaginative play over a broad historical and cultural landscape. Furthermore, as Frampton worked through his ambivalence toward tradition and the tasks set by his sense of “historical necessity,” he found a way to distance himself from the authority wielded by a series of “artistic fathers” who were formative to his aesthetics; indeed, as his understanding of the force of this historical necessity developed, it displaced the oedipal draw of these authority figures.6 These fathers were born in what Frampton frequently called the “generation of the eighties,” figures like Eliot, the poet Ezra Pound, and photographer Edward Weston.7 Frampton’s metahistory of film is, in this sense, a recuperative metacritique of high modernism; he called this task, in a late text from 1980, a “double effort (repair modernism’s defects, reassume the burden of its emblem).”8 Frampton is aligned with Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, and others critiquing monumental high modernism in favor of a modernism that emphasized the relation of the artwork to the spectator, reassuming the emblem of modernist radicality of analysis in a more open field.9

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FOR A METAHISTORY OF FILM Frampton’s essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” is the manifesto for the Magellan project that articulates Frampton’s early sense of the historical dimensions of the project. Frampton describes “metahistory” as a “set of rational fictions” that provide an account of the world less devoted to “systematic” causality or “the fairly recent invention we call facts” than to a speculative understanding of the epistemological aspirations that motivate cultural and artistic activity.10 In other words, metahistory gets at an underlying logic or force that shapes historical facts and events. For example, he relates “four facts” that are “probably unrelated” in a mere history of cinema but that “may ultimately be related” in a metahistory of cinema’s invention: “In the 1830s, Georg Büchner wrote Woychek. Évariste Galois died, a victim of political murder, leaving to a friend a last letter, which contains the foundations of group theory, or the metahistory of mathematics. Talbot and Niépce invented photography. The Belgian physicist Plateau invented the phenakistiscope, the first true cinema.”11 For Frampton, there is a logic underlying these seemingly abstruse events that points to metahistorical forces that constitute a prehistory of film reaching back toward cinema’s infinitude. Cinema emerges from parallel experiments in photography (fixing an image from the flux of time) and mathematics. (Frampton likens the way the brain infers a moving image from a succession of related frames to how, in calculus, a curve is constituted by successive points.) Büchner’s Woychek, through its status as the first “modern” play, and one characterized by fragmentation, fits in with the intersecting logics Frampton is drawing together in the invention of cinema.12 Woychek is a politically revolutionary work whose innovation was to portray a protagonist constructed by social forces rather than being a product of cosmic forces or a generic/genetic character type. Like Frampton’s metahistory itself, Woychek dramatizes a theory of history in which we are as subject to a period’s episteme as we are master of it. The fourth “fact” is a recognizable precinematic device, the phenakistiscope. These four “facts” coalesce into an apparatus Frampton calls the “infinite cinema,” a figure for Western culture’s production of technologies of the moving image that fulfill a desire to represent “the appearances of the world.”13 The objective of Frampton’s metahistory, of this abstract “rational fiction,” is an account of historical forces that converge into cinema: “Plateau’s little device [the phenakistiscope] started putting Humpty Dumpty together again,” though the final credit

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goes to “two brothers bearing the singularly appropriate name of Lumière,” referring to their Cinématographe, which premiered in 1895.14 The essay is replete with figures of convergence that carry erotic connotations (e.g., the “union of cinema and the photographic effect” is described as a “crucial tryst” and an “expected consummation”) suggesting the instinctual urgency of this cultural desire and Frampton’s insistence on embodiment imbricated with epistemology.15 The Lumière brothers may be “inventors” of cinema, but they are riding waves of metahistorical cultural and scientific forces that crest with the display of the Cinématographe.16 At the conclusion of “For a Metahistory of Film,” Frampton asks how a historical “tradition” can be “derived” (in the mathematical sense of that term) from essential “material limits” of the medium: “The metahistorian of film generates for himself the problem of deriving a complete tradition from nothing more than the most obvious material limits of the total film machine.”17 In the terms that Frampton uses in his 1976 interview, the metahistorian seeks “operative principles” in the investigation of the “obvious material limits” of film. The key question, however, is how to derive a “tradition” from them. The metahistorian of cinema, as Frampton states earlier in the essay, “is occupied with inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent, wieldy set of distinct monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art.”18 The phrase “inventing a tradition” is oxymoronic: How can tradition, rooted in the past, be invented in the present and future? This paradoxical project is shared by other modernist artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson; Frampton undertakes this investigation to argue for cinema as a medium belonging to this tradition. To unpack this apparent contradiction between the embedded materiality of historical tradition and the forward-looking magic of “inventing a tradition,” I turn, as Frampton did, to T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Eliot speaks of “the relation of the poet to his past,” to tradition, which “compels” the artist to have historical consciousness: [Tradition] involves, in the first place, the historical sense [that] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. . . . This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.19

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Like the Abstract Expressionist “museum hounds” he admires, Frampton identifies with this “historical sense.” First and foremost, a deep knowledge of the past is what allows artists to be conscious of their place in time. But this consciousness of tradition involves a sense of “the timeless and the temporal together”; i.e., how historical change—“the temporal”—is imbricated with what Eliot calls “values” and an “order,” which are closer to “the timeless,” the operative principles of the aesthetic tradition.20 Clearly, the problem of tradition is different in the period of late modernism when Frampton was working, sixty years after Eliot. However, Frampton and his fellow contemporary filmmakers had yet to work through these questions of the constrictions of the past on artists and their relationship to tradition in the production of something new because the question of a film tradition was itself up for grabs. Informed by deep classical training and immersed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist aesthetic debates, Frampton was acutely aware of the burden that a sense of tradition brings to the artist. Tradition places what Eliot called “great difficulties and responsibilities” upon the artist in terms of the burden of understanding “the main current” of tradition and the restrictions placed on the artist’s freedom: “He can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. . . . The poet must be very conscious of the main current.”21 In other words, for Eliot, artists cannot arbitrarily or subjectively choose the criteria by which they will approach history; what Frampton might choose as his operative principles cannot merely be “one or two private admirations.” Eliot nonetheless promises that when the artist, working with an intimate knowledge of tradition and with “the intensity of the artistic process,” creates a “really new” work of art, it has the power to alter tradition itself.22 This power contains a paradox—and a cost: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. . . . Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.23

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Frampton provides a compact summary of Eliot’s point in a 1972 interview: “There’s time as an elastic fluid. The frog Tennyson leaps into the elastic fluid and creates waves which ultimately joggle the cork Eliot. Or, in Eliot’s view, the elasticity travels in both directions; tradition and individual talent. Eliot, of course, says that Eliot has changed Tennyson, and that is clearly true.”24 Eliot’s formulation outlines the promise of Frampton’s metahistorical project. Tradition exists as an ordered but not inflexible set of patterns; tradition adapts to change and thus exists in the future, awaiting invention by “really new” works—like those of Frampton and his contemporaries.25 But what are these “great difficulties and responsibilities” of which the artist must be aware? The first is to recognize the massive extent of tradition, the weight of what Eliot, and also Pound, calls the “mind of Europe”—an intimidating prospect even for an artist as erudite as Frampton and a highly problematic Eurocentric notion whose colonial legacy emerges in late works of the Magellan project. The second is that the very agency granted to the artist of the “really new” to change the tradition carries with it a burden of responsibility. Like the “museum hounds” driven by a sense of historical necessity, modern artists have been given a task, one dictated by their understanding of history, which empowers them to “re-evaluate” tradition, “discerning within it what seem to be operative principles,” and then using, arguing with, and engaging with those principles.26 Endowed with the power and obligation paradoxically to remake tradition, they must get it right. An example of the burden of the metahistorical task is articulated when Frampton discusses the intricacies and potentials of editing in The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall I–VII, exploring the Eisensteinian concept of “vertical montage” in the relation of the image to sound.27 Mindfall is densely edited, with the innovation of solid-color frames added between every photographic shot, accompanied by a percussive asynchronous soundtrack of discrete but recognizable sounds, many from stock sound effects recordings. Frampton states that Eisensteinian vertical montage is “the most interesting single body of suggestions that I have found in film theory which has not been worked out.”28 He laments the technical and conceptual complexity of this “working out,” saying, “In Magellan, there is everything from overt homage and imitation and retesting corroboration (in the scientific manner of repeating the experiment) to literal workings-out and speculations in practice upon suggestions that were made a very long time ago and which have not been acted upon.”29 Indeed, so cognizant was Frampton of the

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permutational possibilities of vertical montage, he turned to designing computer hardware and software in order to facilitate the onerous work involved in these complex algorithmic editing patterns. Nevertheless, he concludes this section of the interview on Mindfall with the words “But it must be done,” an imperative that evokes the powerful sense of obligation that inheres to historical necessity.30 The burden is such that, at the conclusion of the metahistory essay, Frampton names “Insomnia” as Magellan’s muse: a figure of exhaustion and restlessness.31 As a young man, Frampton was taken with the modernist imperative to “make it new.” The negative imperative of this dictum is to curtail activity that is “not new” or that might not contribute to the remaking of aesthetic tradition. One can find Frampton’s conflicting sentiments about the relationship between the desire to make it new and the burden of history echoed among other artists and filmmakers of his generation, who came of age betwixt and between these seemingly conflicting imperatives. Yet Frampton seems to take on the burdens of obligation personally. For example, in a 1960 letter to his friend Reno Odlin, Frampton reflects on hearing some pieces by Anton Webern and expresses his relief that someone has already worked out the aesthetic issue he identified: “The variations, along with three bits of Webern instrumental music & the clarinet & guitar songs, relieve me of writing any instrumental music for a long while.”32 In relation to film, Frampton is early on intrigued by the prospect of a medium with an open field of aesthetic experiment less encumbered by the millennia of traditions in music and literature. In 1959, in Young Turk mode, he rejects Eisenstein, Jean Cocteau, and D. W. Griffith as boring and writes, “Nobody alive now doing work of consistent interest. Problem of invention, how much one wd/ have to invent by oneself, vurry absorbing.”33 Nearly a decade later, he says, with some pathos, “There is so very much to say and do about film. . . . I begin to understand a little better the hint of sadness and irony in Brancusi’s ‘Je peux commencer une chose.’” 34 Indeed, Frampton has “very much to say and do about film,” but the excitement is tempered with the weight of historical obligation. If Eliot burdens Frampton with a sense of historical obligation, Eliot’s historiography of art has the benefit of being nonprogressive; for Eliot, the “obvious fact” is that “art never improves” but, rather, constantly changes.35 Art’s change is a “development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.”36 Eliot thus rejects dismissing early forms of art as primitive.37 Yet he still values contemporary artists’ intentionality and their self-consciousness of the past:

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“Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”38 Frampton, through Eliot, escapes a teleological destiny of art—indeed, art, including film, does not “improve.” But he retains the virtue of self-consciousness as a consequence of the accumulation of memory through history. Self-consciousness captures the ambivalence that comes with the paradox of understanding oneself as a historical subject; i.e., both a subject in history and subject to history. Self-consciousness allows artists to make certain essential claims in relation to their investigation of the tradition of art by providing them with a subject position from which they can search for origins and attempt to discover what Frampton called “the really binding conditions of the art.”39 The method of that investigation, however, is one that requires a self-conscious understanding of the historical contingency of that search for origins. Historical origins exist, but Frampton can only begin to explore them by considering himself as a contingent historical subject. Frampton needs history to ground his search and enforce its contingency. Frampton’s need for film to have a historical context led him to early film. In his 1979 Whitney Museum lecture on early film, fittingly titled “The Invention without a Future,” Frampton paraphrases Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” addressing himself to those who would make claims to an art’s novelty— film’s novelty—without grasping its history: So that, in fact, finally there is one thing we should stop doing. We should stop calling ourselves new. We are not. They were new. We are old, and we have not necessarily aged as well as we should. To cite Eliot again: he reports himself as answering to someone who objected to, I suppose, Shakespeare, Dante and Homer on the grounds that we know more than they did by replying, “yes, we do, and they are precisely what we know.”40

He concludes his lecture with a plea for historical research: We also know more than that very early cinema did. Unfortunately, they are not precisely what we know. We are only beginning to penetrate the phantom, the fiction of the copious and the readily available, to poke around in dusty attics and so forth, into the sort of mausoleums guaranteed by a rapacious copyright system, for example, and to retrieve . . . at least something of the context in which those texts, if they ultimately are exhumed, will be perceived.41

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For Frampton, the context provided by film history will form the grounds for its metahistory. If history as context is formed ultimately by film texts, then Frampton can formulate a concrete strategy for working out the paradox of a tradition in the future: early films are part of the same tradition that Frampton’s metahistorical project is forming, but they do not enter that tradition until they are “exhumed.” In other words, the construction of Frampton’s dynamic tradition through the investigation and recontextualization of historical texts is facilitated by the work of both the artist and the archivist, condensed in the figure of the metahistorian. Early film is simultaneously the scrap heap of history and the monuments of its tradition as found and reworked by the metahistorian. In the end, Frampton recasts Eliot’s essay on tradition via the singularly appropriate figure of Louis Lumière, underlining the crucial role played by early film and the search for history in Frampton’s project. Frampton refers to the title of his lecture, Lumière’s famous aphorism, “Cinema is an invention without a future,” and suggests that Lumière was “touched for a moment with an insight, newly implied if not original, about history. From a certain point of view, it was impossible at the beginning, as Lumière said ‘let there be light,’ for the cinematograph to have a future because it did not have a past.”42 Certainly, Frampton as metahistorian is interested in establishing that past in order to have a tradition. Moreover, Frampton’s sense of the future requires a critical and historiographic sense of “historical process” even to establish a horizon of possibility for tradition: “Now the future is, after all, something that we manufacture. We can be willful about it and perverse, if we wish, but nevertheless even our willfulness, even our perversity is ordinarily understood, I think, to be subsumed by a temporal machine containing and originated and guided by human beings called historical process.”43 The “temporal machine” called historical process is an “apparatus for prediction and extrapolation” that runs on the energy of critical analysis, the conceptual work of the metahistorian: Until such time as there is a past of some sort, a history, furthermore, of some sort, that is, a past which has been examined, has been subjected to a critical, a theoretical analysis, there can be no future because there is no apparatus for prediction and extrapolation. I do not mean of course that history in any exact sense is something that is guaranteed by a possession of a past. Only its possibility is guaranteed.44

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Finally, it is only with the on-the-ground historical work of archival research that the conceptual work of metahistory can be enabled: “So it is only now, I think, that it begins to be possible to imagine a future, to construct, to predict a future for film, or for what we may generically agree to call film and its successors, because it is only now that we can begin to construct a history and, within that history, a finite and ordered set of monuments, if we wish to use Eliot’s term, that is to constitute a tradition.”45 Artists’ willfulness and perversity, their creative capacity for invention, is subordinated to historical process. That process requires historical subjects to uncover and analyze the past as a precondition to constructing a tradition in the future. This analysis, crucially, requires and values self-consciousness in the historical subject. Finally, the creation of a historical tradition is always only contingent, not guaranteed—but it is at least possible. It is at this threshold of theoretical possibility that Magellan as a metahistorical project gets off the ground—and dives headfirst into the archive. Frampton delivered this lecture in 1979 and it is prophetic of the massive work to be performed by artists and scholars in the film archive. Frampton’s sense of metahistory and the tension between novelty and tradition looks ahead to the contemporary richness of histories of media study, especially comparative work on the early histories of so-called new media and critical practice by artists and thinkers enabled by recent comparatively easy access to digital online texts in archives.46 Frampton, in his simultaneous investigation of film’s historical and material origins and new digital technologies, anticipates our current moment as we consider the legacy of film and its relation to other media along with the renewed attention to the archive.

FRAMPTON AND EARLY CINEMA Frampton and other experimental filmmakers anticipated by more than a decade the mainstream academic interest in the history of protocinema and early film. The discipline of cinema studies marks the key event that sparked scholarly interest in early film as the Brighton Project of 1978, a meeting of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), which brought archivists and academics together to screen and discuss a previously unseen range of films made before

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1906. Today early cinema is appreciated as part of the larger recuperation of the diversity of film and media history, partly due to efforts by cinema studies scholars from the late 1970s through the 1980s who waged a consistent campaign to change the term “primitive cinema” to “early cinema.” Tom Gunning’s work on the “cinema of attractions,” coupled with André Gaudreault’s aesthetic of “monstration,” made legible the fragmented and frontal look of many early films, while Noël Burch elaborated a “Primitive Mode of Representation” in contrast to an “Institutional Mode of Representation” to delineate the political stakes of early films’ aesthetics. (Burch’s use of the term “primitive” is vestigial of this transition but also a reminder of its use in modernist art history.)47 But it is crucial to remember the extent to which early cinema was dismissed in this period to understand the foresighted audacity of the intervention of experimental filmmakers who had begun to investigate protocinema and early film, seeing in them alternative articulations of cinematic space, time, framing, sequence, narrative, spectacle, and politics. Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) is the landmark film, frequently cited by Frampton in his writings and interviews, complementing other work in the 1970s by avant-garde filmmakers such as Bill Brand, Ernie Gehr, Peter Gidal, Malcolm LeGrice, and Al Razutis.48 Gehr describes Jacobs screening early films for Frampton, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland in 1969, which may have been Frampton’s introduction to the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress.49 In this period, when experimental filmmakers engaged with early cinema, they were reclaiming truly disdained objects—not least because so many early films in circulation were low-quality 16 mm copies from educational distributors, including the poor first generation of prints generated from the Library of Congress. Some avant-garde filmmakers romanticized early cinema as an Edenic mode of lost possibility for cinema— cinema as it might have been had not narrative entertainment cinema appropriated cinema’s aesthetic possibilities—but it is nonetheless important to recognize the sheer excitement and sense of discovery and possibility experienced by these artists, including Frampton. For example, we know from a letter to Annette Michelson that he admired the British film The Big Swallow (1903), and he called The Life of an American Fireman (1903) “an amazing, absolutely crazed film.”50 Frampton takes seriously the sheer otherness of much early cinema along with its scope and variety. In interviews, Frampton describes the “legacy” of the Lumière brothers in the simple act of placing the frame to record the world, a historical act that captures an essential quality of the medium:

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The qualities of the thing itself are so interesting, that one’s conscious act is to place the frame. Now that already, the frame itself, is the supreme artifice you see, that is the boundary of consciousness. Having done that, why not then see what will transpire within that consciously placed boundary? OK. So the train comes roaring into the station, it scares the shit out of you, all the people jump out and run away, other people jump on the train. Well, that’s enough, you know. . . . That’s a worthwhile minute of your time, right?51

The radical possibilities of cinema as a metaphor for consciousness are recognized by Frampton as inherent in the Lumière brothers’ basic framework. Of this cadre of experimental filmmakers, Frampton (along with Jacobs) sustained the most intense and long-lasting engagement with early film, which is a persistent reference point in his writings, interviews, and lectures. Frampton researched early histories of photography, film, and protocinema and took seriously historiographic questions (as his work on the concept of metahistory testifies).52 Frampton says he spent “a lot of time, half a summer, looking at [early films] in Washington [at the Library of Congress], made a lot of notes, as they say,” and he spoke of planning to incorporate 100 of the 125 films he had bought from the library (which included “certain Victorian naughty movies”) into Magellan.53 Interestingly, many of the 125 titles Frampton purchased relate reflexively to artistic or photographic practice, underlining how early films function as metaphorical precursors for cultural works—though many are also part of early cinema’s erotic display of bodies in “artistic” contexts like life drawing and the theater. Sample titles include The Artist’s Dilemma, An Artist’s Dream, The Artist’s Studio, Art Studies, The Camera Fiend (no. 2), Behind the Screen, The Fate of the Artist’s Model (parts 1– 5), One Way of Taking a Girl’s Picture, The Photographer’s Mishap, and The Picture the Photographer Took, among others. The centerpiece of Straits of Magellan was going to be a series of 720 one-minute films in explicit imitation of Lumières actualités. Forty-nine of these films were released as Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments; more were completed but never released.54 Frampton’s concept of the infinite cinema, in which the idea of cinema has always existed, waiting for its invention, helps explain his recurring interest in devices like Plateau’s phenakistiscope and protocinema figures like Eadweard Muybridge. Frampton’s modernist-analytical approach to art and his early career as a photographer led him to examine how protocinema navigates cinema as both still image and serial “moving” image. The earliest published reference to early film

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in Frampton’s oeuvre is in 1968 when he issued “Phenakistiscope” as a print wheel in the artists’ book journal SMS, using images from his film Prince Ruperts Drops (1969).55 Frampton subsequently published two essays in Artforum that reference early cinema and protocinema: “For a Metahistory of Film” and “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract” (1973).56 Frampton further alluded to Muybridge’s motion studies of nude female bodies in his photo project A Visitation of Insomnia (1970–1973) and, more generally, to Muybridge’s cataloguing project in the photo series made in collaboration with Marion Faller, Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (1975), which replicates Muybridge’s pseudoscientific grid background in a parody of Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion. Within Magellan, two films reference Muybridge: INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, which features a nude woman performing mundane tasks in black limbo, and Otherwise Unexplained Fires, which contains images that Frampton shot of a mechanical horse at the Musée Méchanique in San Francisco, indexing Muybridge’s most famous analysis of movement (settling the bet for Leland Stanford that all of a horse’s hooves leave the ground at a gallop).57 A preliminary version of The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall had included early medical footage of epilepsy patients from 1905 to 1911.58 Three completed films of Magellan incorporate early films from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection: Public Domain, Cadenza I, and Gloria! Frampton’s interest in the history of photography and protocinema extended to their impact on art and human consciousness in the context of the development of early twentieth-century modernity. For example, Frampton had research files with material about early encounters with cinema like Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904), which features a man obsessed with an image of a woman descending from the train in the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895).59 Other texts in his research files include Nicole Védrès’s Images du cinéma français (1945), and Ivor Davies’s “Western European Art Forms Influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson before 1914, Particularly Italian Futurism and French Orphism.”60 Védrès also made an innovative compilation film, Paris 1900 (1947), which incorporates early cinema, while Davies’s essay connects technologies of movement like the Cinématographe, steam train, and galloping horses (via Muybridge) to developments in modern art. Frampton’s expansive sense of the history of the camera arts leads him to an interest in the sheer breadth of cinema, one that encompasses not only great, monumental films but also its detritus: “Of the whole corpus, the likes of Potemkin

3.1 Hollis Frampton’s double-sided “Phenakistiscope,” published in SMS, 1968, adapting images from Prince Ruperts Drops, released in 1969 (original in color). Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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make up a numbingly small fraction. The balance includes instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography, and much, much more.”61 He uses film in the same way that visual artists and poets use collage materials to integrate art and the everyday but also to undercut the self-seriousness of monumentality, comparable to Joseph Cornell’s integration of everyday objects into his assemblages or T. S. Eliot’s incorporation of vernacular language into poetry. Frampton uses footage to mine and create historical tradition as part of his metahistorical method. He starts with an argument for appropriation of any piece of film “footage” in the same way that language and visual elements may be appropriated for modern literature and visual art: “There is no evidence in the structural logic of the filmstrip that distinguishes ‘footage’ from a ‘finished’ work. Thus, any piece of film may be regarded as ‘footage’ for use in any imaginable way to construct or reconstruct a new work.”62 Having liberated all film as potential “footage,” his work as a metahistorian—to create a tradition—is enabled: “Therefore, it may be possible for a metahistorian to take old work as ‘footage,’ and construct from it identical new work necessary to a tradition.”63 Frampton, as an artist metahistorian, appropriated footage from across film history into his films, transforming them into “new work” geared toward his “invention of tradition”: [The metahistorian] 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. Or they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And then he must remake them.64

This “remaking” is incorporated most explicitly within Magellan in his films that incorporate early actualities and comedies. Since Magellan was about “inventing a tradition” in the service of “the growing body of [film] art,” Eliot’s terms facilitate a combination of appropriation as an aesthetic strategy (i.e., the self-conscious reworking of material into artworks) with an understanding of the material’s historical nature. This catholic sense of film history is reflected in two different approaches Frampton took to the appropriation of film footage in his films, one metaphorical and one historical, distinguishing films like Maxwell’s Demon, Carrots & Peas,

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Works and Days (1969), and Otherwise Unexplained Fires from films like Public Domain, Cadenza I, and Gloria!65 In these later cases, the status of early film is important: footage from the archive, especially the national repository of film history, the Library of Congress, is different from footage that Frampton acquires elsewhere. Frampton takes pains in his catalogue statements and interviews to specify the origin of the outside footage used in his films. Maxwell’s Demon and Works and Days use found footage from Canal Street junk shops, both “bought for a buck.”66 The Library of Congress is a different source, an archive, systematically organized, through which Frampton searches. Footage rescued from the scrap heap differs from archival footage sought out as part of the metahistorian artist’s historical quest for origins. Frampton’s early found footage films appropriate footage from instructional films for metaphorical functions. Maxwell’s Demon intercuts sections of a Canadian Armed Forces training film of a man doing exercises, personifying James Clerk Maxwell’s metaphor used to explain energy transfer of (in Frampton’s words) a “Demon, mythic and microscopic as Spirochaeta pallida, [that] is a perfectly imaginary being who deals entirely in pure energy.”67 That Spirochaeta pallida is the microorganism that causes syphilis is an ironic subversion of the disciplined body of the military exercise film. Meanwhile, Carrots & Peas uses the soundtrack from the same Canadian Armed Forces training film but runs the sound backward, evoking a nonsensical version of an art history slide lecture over Frampton’s static shot of the titular vegetables. Works and Days presents in its entirety a World War II British instructional film about how to make a Victory Garden. Although image editing is the dominant mode of found footage filmmaking, for Works and Days Frampton performs three different, simple interventions: he removes the original explanatory soundtrack, he titles the film, and he attaches a logo to the end of the film.68 By removing the soundtrack, Frampton refigures educational films’ deliberate and resolutely ordinary footage as dance, in specific homage to Yvonne Rainer (an artist Frampton held in the highest regard), whose work of this period of the late 1960s recontextualizes quotidian movement as dance (the measured gestures of the gardeners recall the simple, elegant movement in Rainer’s work of the 1960s).69 The title refers to a Hesiod poem that is also alluded to by T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and was also important for Pound.70 Finally, of the logo, Frampton said, “I bought this film in a Canal Street junk shop for $1.00 and found myself in complete agreement with it. . . . I have attached my logo to the film, not to

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claim it as a readymade but in the spirit of the Chinese connoisseurs who affixed their vermilion seals to paintings as a mark of admiration.”71 Frampton’s logo is less an act of appropriation than one of criticism and selection as the film is, for Frampton, an apt metaphor for Rainer’s work.72 In Otherwise Unexplained Fires, the metaphorical allusions—here to Stan Brakhage—are more ironic and critical. The relationship between Frampton and Brakhage was long and complex. When Frampton was first exploring experimental film, Brakhage was the first “serious” film artist he encountered.73 They later had a brief and intense friendship culminating in a 1973 interview in Artforum, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” and Frampton taught seminars on Brakhage’s films in 1973 and 1975 (recordings of which are held at the Harvard Film Archive). But their fascinating correspondence in the early 1970s shows signs of increasing tension.74 In Otherwise Unexplained Fires, Frampton shows us roosters and hens he filmed at “the Brakhage Colorado residence” as animistic substitutes for the household.75 Frampton’s handheld camera work and editing are a metacommentary on Brakhage’s camera diction and editing rhythms, shifting Brakhage’s expressive movement to a rhetorical register.76 As Bruce Jenkins puts it, “If Brakhage’s films are about seeing, then Frampton’s are about an awareness of that sight.”77 Frampton was self-conscious about camera style and discussed it with Brakhage in their correspondence (22 July 1972) and in interviews; extending the metaphorical logic of footage appropriation, Frampton is “quoting” Brakhage’s camera style. Keith Sanborn calls attention to the found footage that brackets the film, which shows an anonymous scientist demonstrating a fiery experiment for onlookers. It can be read as an instantiating metaphor of the film’s larger strategy of providing an analytical rebuttal of Brakhage’s first-person cinema, which in the romantic tradition puts the artist at the center of the artwork. The found footage of the scientist displaces Brakhage as a central performer, which functions to depersonalize Brakhage’s visionary claims in favor of Frampton’s analytical stance. Sanborn calls the bracketing footage “metahistorical quotation marks” that function to present “with mock-Hegelian modesty . . . a cut-out Brakhage as one case among the varied and colorful effluvia of film history, of which he, Frampton, is in possession of the general laws.” 78 All of these films use found footage primarily for metaphorical purposes that dehistoricize the footage itself. There is a distinction between appropriating metaphorical imagery and appropriating the historical quality of footage—however much that historical quality becomes, ultimately, metaphorical in Frampton’s

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schema. The footage that is used in Cadenza I, Gloria!, and, especially, Public Domain is marked as old, inflected with the quality of history, a quality bestowed by its point of origin, the archive, an institution devoted to preserving artifacts from the period of the cinema’s origins. In Frampton’s lecture on the Lumières, it is clear how much he invests in this historical sense inventing a tradition for cinema. As a metahistorian, he will explore the playful and ultimately artistically generative consequences for that tradition.

IRONY AND HISTORY: REJECTING THE FROWNING FATHERS OF MODERNISM Frampton’s sense of history and metahistory is, I argue, ultimately critical and ironic—and, as Noël Carroll asserts, “artistically generative” for “the working avantgardist.” 79 That is, at the heart of Frampton’s historical sensibility is his vocation as an artist generating a future for his own work and for the medium he serves. After all, one option, following Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” would be for Frampton to bow down to an “idea of order” that conforms to a dominant narrative of culture akin to “the mind of Europe”—“the whole of literature of Europe from Homer” that Eliot describes.80 On one level, Frampton at times shows fealty to that dominant narrative. Frampton’s intellectual training was Eurocentric, from his knowledge of classical Greek and Latin to his immersion in Western poetics, as is the cinema whose metahistory he attempts to (re) make in Magellan. Frampton sometimes indulges in a rhetoric of monumentality; for example, in his “Metahistory” essay, the tradition that the metahistorian is inventing is composed of “a coherent, wieldy set of discrete monuments.”81 Frampton often betrays a concern with the prominence of films (including his own) and artworks in history. For example, he describes the work of Michael Snow in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, placing him within a legacy that goes back metaphorically to cave painting: All that survives of an epoch is its typical art form. For instance: painting (in all its enormity) comes to us intact from the New Stone Age. Film is surely the typical art form of our time, whatever time that is. If the Lumières are Lascaux, then we are, now, in the Early Historical Period of film. It is a time of invention. One of little more than a dozen living inventors of film arts is

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Michael Snow. His work has already modified our perception of past film. Seen or unseen, it will affect the making and understanding of film in the future. This is an astonishing situation. It is like knowing the name and address of the man who carved the Sphinx.82

Using terms that strongly recall Eliot (“His work has already modified our perception of past film”), Frampton celebrates Snow as a “really new” artist who will affect the future of film. From the perspective of the future, Snow’s work is akin to Egyptian monuments, placed in an archaeological context complete with “epochs,” with film in the privileged position of encompassing all art, recapitulating the developmental stages of earlier art forms. But on another level, Frampton embraced a conception of culture much broader than that of the “mind of Europe,” one of global scope and millennial time frame, incorporating art and science, great art and the quotidian, and one ultimately critical of the Eurocentric and colonial dimensions with which the “the mind of Europe” is fraught. Frampton’s cultural references were first broadened through his engagement with Ezra Pound’s poetry, whose Cantos include Chinese characters (although Pound’s references are overwhelmingly to ancient and European civilizations, and his grasp of Chinese is tenuous). Frampton studied Mandarin Chinese (and some Sanskrit) and retained an interest in Chinese culture throughout his career, calling Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China (1954–), the “supreme work of scholarship of the twentieth century.”83 (Needham’s research showed the importance of Chinese technology to the development of European modern culture, undercutting the Eurocentric bias asserting Western superiority.) Discussing the historical figure of Ferdinand Magellan, Frampton is perfectly aware that he was “an evangelist of European commercial imperialism” whose insistence on Christian conquest as a “bearer of the true faith” led to his death.84 Frampton was aware of colonial history (“It reminds me of the Spanish ‘discovery’ of gold in South America. The Incas had already dug it out of the ground”), but he remained invested in what he called the “spirit of investigation and speculation” he saw at the heart of the Renaissance.85 Frampton seeks to contribute to the modern project of intellectual and artistic investigation and speculation while remaining critically cognizant of the ambiguous legacy of that tradition. One way to chart Frampton’s critical relationship to the “mind of Europe” and its universalizing cultural claims is to examine his rejection of a succession of burdensome artistic father figures associated with modernist orthodoxy. In a 1972

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interview, Frampton complains, “There used to be this thing called the mind of Europe, . . . Well the mind of Europe is a wonderful idea except that the mind of Europe never wrote a goddamned poem and it never painted a picture.”86 He brings the cultural abstraction down to the actual material activity of artists like himself and his ancestors. His artistic biography, as he freely admitted, consisted of a troubled movement through a series of artistic fathers whom he needed eventually to outgrow—an ambivalent intersection of patriarchal and aesthetic authority.87 For Frampton, the main figures were Ezra Pound and Edward Weston, with Constantin Brancusi and Stan Brakhage also in the mix. In 1978 Frampton called Pound’s Cantos a “supreme failure” because, he asserted, Pound failed to have a “theory of history.”88 Of course, Pound did have a theory of history—but a poisonous one that put him in bed with Mussolini’s fascism, driven by a critique of “usury” that led him to anti-Semitism. Frampton’s 1978 declaration is a clear denunciation of his own youthful, sycophantic infatuation with Pound in the late 1950s, when they corresponded (1956–1958) and when Frampton spent a year in Washington, DC, visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital in 1958.89 This infatuation was driven on one level by a precocious young poet’s desire for recognition by an acknowledged artist and on another level by a shared personal identification, as both Pound and Frampton grew up as midwestern American outsiders to artistic society. As Alice Lyons puts it, “Both were linguistic prodigies who claimed roots in the American ‘outback,’ came East to be educated and were snobs about European high ‘kulchur.’ ”90 Frampton’s class animus found a different grounding in the late 1960s and 1970s in what he would call his “theoretical Marxist leanings,” which helped form a theory of history pervaded by a materialist understanding of film as industrial product and a modernist matrix of possibilities.91 George Derk, in his essay on Pound and Frampton, sees Frampton’s turn to metahistory as a counter to “the excesses of modernism as well as to the troubling political manifestations that arose in conjunction with it”: Reconceptualizing Frampton’s career in relation to his artistic forebears as one of revision, rather than emulation, opens a space for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between modernist poetics and postwar American avant-garde cinema. Frampton, in particular, shows that these filmmakers developed a modernism for an inherently vernacular medium by turning not outward to the literary arts but inward to film’s historical origin.92

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For Derk, Frampton’s embrace of the full range of film history within the metahistorical framework of Magellan makes his film cycle “his most significant point of divergence from Pound,” despite the parallels between an “epic-in-film” and Pound’s “epic-in-verse.”93 A residue of Frampton’s shift of allegiance away from Pound was a suspicion of artistic authority figures that took on almost oedipal dimensions, as each master, once embraced, needed to be rejected and put in their place. Of Brancusi, Frampton was early on taken with his famous proclamation that “direct cutting was the true path to sculpture.” In one of his earliest writings, a 1965 text, “Some Propositions on Photography,” Frampton elaborates on how Brancusi’s aesthetic principle of cutting could be applied to photography, poetry, serial music, and filmmaking.94 In a 1969 letter, he proposes that Carl Andre “is Brancusi’s true heir.”95 But by 1978, Frampton sarcastically excoriates Brancusi’s adage: “Constantin Brancusi, who is on record with no more than ten prose sentences, achieves a sanctity that tends to make his work invisible, tacitly admonishing against critical examination. Somewhere in the firmament, at this very moment, the cunning Romanian soul announces once more that Direct Cutting Is the True Path to Sculpture, and choiring angels sings hosannas around him.”96 It is not that he necessarily rejects Brancusi’s principle; after all, this is the same period when Frampton was experimenting most aggressively with montage, cutting film and sound following the theory and practice of Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein and Vertov. The argument, rather, is with the cultural authority wielded by the modernist master and the way that the pronouncements of authoritative figures function repressively to dictate the terms of art based on principles separate from history. The self-ironic tone of Frampton’s escape from slavish devotion to tradition is best echoed in his 1978 essay on Edward Weston (in which the above critique of Brancusi is embedded). Frampton attacks the timeless pronouncements of figures like Weston as self-interested claims to territory that cut off exploration by subsequent artists. Rather than serve as generative principles to open artistic ground, the pronouncements justify only the work of the father: “As an intellectual parent, he amounted, finally, to one of those frowning, humorless fathers who teaches his progeny his trade and then prevents them from practicing it by blackballing them in the union.”97 In contrast, speculating about the “intellectual parents” he would prefer, Frampton suggests, “Since some sort of choice must be made, I

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would state a personal preference for a chimera—a hybrid of Venus Genetrix, who broods over the mountains and the waters, indifferently donating pleasure and pain to everything that lives, and Tim Finnegan, who enjoyed everything, and most of all his own confusion, and ended with the good humor to preside happily over his own departure.”98 Tim Finnegan points to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of Frampton’s explicit modern models for Magellan. Venus Genetrix, meanwhile, as P. Adams Sitney notes, is a key figure for Lucretius, defender of Epicureanism.99 Lucretius begins his epic poem De Rerum Natura with an invocation to Venus, a figure of fecundity and creative integration.100 Both Venus and Finnegan embody—in the full sense of that word—a positive, even chaotic, creative force in deep contrast to the restrained minimalism of many high modernist masters. In reaching back to antiquity and continuing to reference modernists like Joyce, Frampton remains a “traditional” artist, in Eliot’s sense, connected to the “mind of Europe.” But tradition must be engaged with an active spirit, full of humor, confusion, and ambivalence. Indeed, in one of his last published texts, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy” (1980), Frampton celebrates a group of artists he labels “heresiarchs”—heretical patriarchs—within modernism: There are always heresiarchs with modernism itself: I am thinking of the socially and psychologically utopian Joyce of Finnegans Wake; Marcel Duchamp, who abandoned painterly modernism as an infantile disorder; John Cage, who began with a severe testing of Western music’s most intransigent parameter, timbre, and a systematic corruption of high capitalism’s indispensable instruments, the piano and the orchestra.101

Frampton claimed that his heresiarchs were attempting to save modernism from its worst excesses. He acknowledges “intellectual modernism’s triumphs . . . among the finest achievements of the West” but insists that we admit our “predicament— that we are, at once and always, the children and parents of imperfection.”102 He offers here a humble restatement of Eliot’s sense of how the artist relates to tradition, both to its past and to its role in the future: if we stand on the shoulders of giants, they remain imperfect and sometimes are in need of being cut down to size. It is in this spirit that I turn to Cadenza I, the first film in the Magellan Calendar, which uses historical footage from the Library of Congress with both monumental and ironic resonances.

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APPROPRIATION, BORGES, AND CADENZA I Cadenza I is exemplary of the density of Frampton’s thinking on metahistory and the metaphorical remaking of tradition, as the film’s seemingly insignificant and opaque images—black leader, flashes of light, and what he called an “idiotic” early film from 1902 appropriated in toto—point to questions central to the idea of the infinite cinema, modernist aesthetics, and the nature of language in relation to the cinematic image.103 Cadenza I would have been the first film screened in the Magellan cycle as part of the elaborate plan for the first two days of The Birth of Magellan. The Birth of Magellan: Fourteen Cadenzas was meant to be a fourteenpart film that framed, using Magellan’s palindromic structures, the other multipart films that comprised the first day of The Birth of Magellan: the seven-part Mindfall and six separate films that were subtitled Dreams. In The Birth of Magellan, only Cadenza I and XIV, Mindfall I and VII, and two Dreams were completed.104 Here is the complete plan for how the Cadenza films would intersect with other film series on 30 December, transcribed from the Magellan Calendar: DAY 0XX = 30 DEC : Cadenza 1 : Mindfall, Part 1 : Cadenza 2 : First Dream: Ludus Luminis, Ludus Chromaticus : Cadenza 3 : Mindfall, Part 2 : Cadenza 4 : Second Dream: Palindrome : Cadenza 5 : Mindfall, Part 3 : Cadenza 6 : Third Dream: Natural History : Cadenza 7 : Mindfall, Part 4 : Cadenza 8 : Fourth Dream: Untitled 1 Dec 1978 : Cadenza 9 : Mindfall, Part 5

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: Cadenza 10 : Fifth Dream: Untitled 1 Dec 1978 : Cadenza 11 : Mindfall, Part 6 : Cadenza 12 : Sixth Dream: Hexachordum Apollinis : Cadenza 13 : Mindfall, Part 7 : Cadenza 14

In Cadenza I, Frampton pays playful homage to some of his “new heresiarchs,” Duchamp and Joyce, through what we might think of as his very serious methods of tongue-in-cheek appropriation through the lead heresiarch, Jorge Luis Borges. In the “Metahistory” essay, Frampton concludes his discussion of appropriation with an homage to Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939). Borges’s story describes a new version of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615) that is so richly researched and comprehended that it and the original are seemingly indistinguishable—but with a caveat: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.”105 Frampton parallels this activity of research and recontextualization with his reworking and making of film footage in Magellan, quoting Borges’s text: “It may be possible for a metahistorian to take old work as ‘footage,’ and construct from it identical new work necessary to a tradition. Wherever this is possible, through loss or damage, new footage must be made. The result will be perfectly similar to the earlier work, but ‘almost infinitely richer.’”106 Like Eliot’s traditional poet, whose deep knowledge of the past allows for the making of “really new” literature, Frampton, via Borges, sees this research as making art “almost infinitely richer.” Moreover, this process is not just about diligent deference to the past. Borges emphasizes that the process of remaking involves error and forceful recontextualization: “Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution.”107 In Cadenza I, Frampton reworks a ridiculous early film as a deliberate anachronism, A Little Piece of String (1902), into a grand metaphor for Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923), an “erroneous attribution” of truly ambitious proportions, a found footage quotation with allusive resonances akin to Menard’s technique.

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The prelude of Cadenza I (also the prelude to the entire Magellan) offers two creation stories that contain an elaborate set of allusions to origins both physical and metaphysical. The metaphysical origins echo the biblical testament “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The film begins with a pan right on a stone surface that ends on a carved letter A: the first letter of the alphabet, the beginnings of language. A graphic A also refers us to the first image of Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, where we see an A typewritten into tinfoil and magnified, followed by the rest of a tintyped alphabet. But in Cadenza I, the letter A is found in the world, specifically, shot at a gravesite in Puerto Rico, where it is balanced by an omega symbol (Ω) on the other side of the grave. I speculate that Frampton might have concluded Magellan with a pan left across that symbol, from alpha to omega.108 The second creation story in the prelude to Cadenza I (which begins after the A fades to black) is scientific and material, an account of life created by energy and the elements. The screen begins to flicker; flares increase in intensity and frequency, the effects of light leakage on the beginning (or end) of a film roll. Over this light play is the sound of an orchestra tuning up. Then a thunderclap erupts into the soundtrack followed by the sound of rain; the colors of the light flares deepen from yellow to red and blue. The tuning of the orchestra just prior to the outburst of natural sound, like the A preceding the light flares, readies the organization of a signifying system (here harmonic music and written English). The physical world is created when lightning animates the dark crucible of the elements, transforming the black void of matter into life. Cadenza I’s long section of black leader interspersed with light flares and flashes of color evokes Frampton’s own description, in “For a Metahistory of Film,” of the “infinite cinema”: “A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focussed upon all the surfaces of the world. Before the invention of still photography, the frames of the infinite cinema were blank, black leader; then a few images began to appear upon the endless ribbon of film. Since the birth of the photographic cinema, all the frames are filled with images.”109 Magellan recapitulates the coming-into-images of the infinite cinema in the beginning of Cadenza I. The sound of rain that concludes the prelude of Cadenza I invokes the final image of Cadenza XIV (the conclusion of the Cadenza series), a fade-in from black to an extreme long shot of a rain forest at daybreak (as the crowing of a rooster suggests). If the Cadenza series can be seen as a series of origin stories, then his shift from language to light, from culture to physics, can be analyzed for the

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logics that underpin it. Zorns Lemma is a precursor film that also shifts from the logic of language to the materiality of light. In the second section of Zorns Lemma, what Frampton called “word images” are replaced by images from the world. In its concluding section, we see three long takes of a couple walking in the snow, disappearing into a forest, ending in a fade-out to white light. The soundtrack over this third section is a fifteenth-century text by Robert Grosseteste (as translated and edited by Frampton), “On Light, or the Ingression of Forms.” Via Grosseteste, Frampton elaborates light as a metaphor for creation—moving from abstract components of language to the depth and substantiality of the threedimensional photographic image. Frampton suggests the resonance of the text: “The key line in the text is a sentence that says, ‘In the beginning, light drew out matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.’ Which I take to be an apt description of film, the total historical function of film, not as an art medium, but as this great kind of time capsule . . . which led me later to posit the universe as a vast film archive.”110 This rich metaphor of light drawing itself out to form the world has several dimensions. First, light and matter form the totality of the “fabric of the world.” If film is grounded in a metaphysics of light, then the Lumière brothers are the founding saints. In what is the first written reference in Frampton’s texts to the Lumières and early film, we discover, in a handwritten note on one of the Zorns Lemma production matrices, a description of the “word images” that make up the film’s long middle section: “With the exceptions noted, all were carefully framed tripod shots. I wanted Lumière’s static camera—for which all cinematographic images were numinous and replete.” 111 For Frampton to invoke the numinous (that which approaches the divine) and being “replete” (filled up) underlines the total, metaphysical quality of his metaphor and its connection to Grosseteste’s theological aesthetics.112 Second, Frampton extends this metaphysics of light to what he calls film’s “total historical function” as a “time capsule,” which he distinguishes from film’s artistic function as a medium. This metaphor can be understood in terms of Frampton’s metahistory of representation: if time expands like the waves created in Eliot’s puddle, so the human elaboration and modulation of light constitutes the human history of (visual) representation. Here, we can take literally the place of light, as Frampton seems to, in the term “Enlightenment.” Frampton suggests the need to understand film in relation to the total cultural history of Western representation; film, as the “Metahistory” essay argues and as I elaborate in the next

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chapter, is the ultimate product of the Enlightenment quest for total representation. It is this totalizing aspect that leads to Frampton’s extension of the “time capsule” to a “vast film archive.”113 When Frampton raises the archive, he inevitably invokes Borges. (Indeed, Frampton often joked about the frequency of his allusions to Borges, “Yes, he’s going to quote Borges again.”114) Borges writes parables that extend cultural desires ad absurdum in order to invoke the enormity and absurdity of those desires. Frampton compares the film archive to Borges’s story “The Library of Babel”: “This is my metaphor because I am a filmmaker. Borges has a wonderful story called ‘The Library of Babel,’ in which the entire universe has been transformed into a library of books. While conjecturing as to the actual structure of the library, he manages to reconstruct the entire history of human thought. All through this one metaphor! The cinematic metaphor seems to me more poignant, more meet.”115 What makes the cinematic metaphor “more meet,” or more apt, for Frampton is the extension of language to light and matter. The photographic quality of the camera arts can transcend language’s reductive tendencies, as photographic simulacra provide spatial and temporal coordinates to inhabit, a more literal universe to explore than language’s symbolic code. Frampton says of the Grosseteste text, “The text itself is, I think, apposite to film and to whatever my epistemological views of film are.”116 The central insight that he takes from Borges is how the totalizing metaphor invokes “the entire history of human thought.” In terms of Magellan’s ambition to function as a metaphor for human consciousness, the archive is not a static collection but is rather activated into consciousness. Frampton says, “It was thinking about this, which led me later to posit the universe as a vast film archive (which contains nothing in itself) with—presumably somewhere in the middle, in the undiscoverable center of this whole matrix of film-thoughts—an unlocatable viewing room in which, throughout eternity, sits the Great Presence screening the infinite footage.”117 A correlative of the metaphor of light drawing out the fabric of the world is Frampton’s description elsewhere, via Jean Piaget, of the development of consciousness itself: To the undifferentiated consciousness all the sensible world must be continuously, and infinitely, replete. The act of distinguishing an image, that is, of partitioning a “figure” from its proper “ground” is, if we are to believe with Jean Piaget, one of the first heroic feats of consciousness. . . . The infant mind

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erects a structure that is as intricate as the world, because, for the purposes of the animal within, it is the world.118

Frampton’s imaginary Great Presence (channeling Bishop Berkeley) screening the infinite footage of the universe as a film archive seems to describe the formation of human consciousness itself: through the image, we erect the structure of the world. What is at stake in this comparison is that our understanding of the world might be structured by the ways culture structures the image, structures the archive, the historical collection of “footage” that comprises history. Frampton’s metahistorical project makes the claim to historical necessity by suggesting that the metahistory of film amounts to a complete redescription of the world—perhaps as it “should have been.”119 The prelude of Cadenza I gives way to the main section of the film, which consists of nine intercuts of two scenes. The first is in color, shot by Frampton, a handheld long shot captured by a long zoom lens of a man and a woman dressed in formal clothes standing on a bridge, being arranged and shot by a wedding photographer in a lush garden. The second scene is Frampton’s appropriation of an early film, A Little Piece of String, noted above, that features two men ripping the dress off an unsuspecting woman. These two scenes are punctuated by a piece of red and white graphic animation, a dot swirling in and out to engulf the frame. From the biblical creation story, we can read the couple in the garden as Adam and Eve, just after their union, which sends them out from the garden into the world. Mystical creation is interwoven with the scientific creation story in the rain forest/Eden that concludes Cadenza XIV: from the creation ex nihilo from God’s Word in the prelude, we fall into sexuality and history. The copresence of Adam and Eve and a thunderclap in a prelude to an artistic project predicated on a seafaring expedition also evokes the opening section of Finnegans Wake: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation . . . (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!).”120 The connections between the massively playful and allusive Finnegans Wake and Magellan are many and cannot be exhausted here. The novel is famously circular, as one of the last lines is “Finn, again!” with the title an invitation to return to the beginning, the wake a recirculation of water and text, paralleling the Magellan Calendar’s cyclical nature and, of course, Ferdinand Magellan’s crew’s circumnavigation of the world. Brian Henderson notes

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that both works have endings “joined to its beginning in a perpetual loop”—in Finnegans Wake, “So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypisical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined”; and, for Magellan, through the calendrical screening arrangement within which the Birth of Magellan and Death of Magellan are adjacent.121 Reading Finnegans Wake is like bobbing in a stream; we have to be open to the meanings we take, which are contingent, and partial, like the experience of Magellan for the viewer. There is no complete reading of Finnegans Wake nor of Magellan.122 The presence of the photographer with the couple in the garden evokes a passage from Frampton’s 1974 essay “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” which begins with a fabula featuring a debate on the problem of history. A character states, “The trouble with the Universe, seen from a rigorously historical point of view is just this: no one was there to photograph the beginning of it—and presumably, at the end, no one will bother. After all, history, like pornography, couldn’t really begin until photography was invented. Before that, every account of events is merely somebody’s panting prose fiction.”123 Magellan as a Borgesian metaphor for the history of Western representation begins, in Cadenza I, with a creation myth presided over by the photographer, who, within the cosmology of the biblical story, is either God or the devil. Metahistory will begin intact with its witness: photography. The first shot of the scene in the garden (which, significantly, contains only the bride) is followed by the first shot of A Little Piece of String: a woman exits a store and is engaged in conversation by a man. The two scenes are then intercut; in the garden a nonlinear series of events ensues as the photographer gives directions; the couple pose, all three figures variously exiting and entering the frame; each shot is of a different length. The early cinema gag film, meanwhile, proceeds in linear fashion. The man to whom the woman is speaking notices a loose thread near her skirt. A second man approaches; as the woman turns to speak to him, the first man begins to pull on the thread with various expressions of surprise and delight. Finally, with a flourish, he pulls the dress off; Frampton cuts, and when we return to the scene, we see the eighth and final shot of the gag film as the dress falls, the woman picks it up and runs back inside the store, and the two men bend over laughing. The ninth and final shot of the garden features the bride alone and then fades to black. Frampton points to the allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass/The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: “Among the things you saw, by the way, was

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another ancient film which is in the Cadenza, the film about the bride in which two gentlemen, who we may presume to be bachelors, strip more or less bare a putative bride of some kind. It’s a very muddled situation that, given its context, I think someone might get a chuckle out of eventually.”124 That Duchamp and The Large Glass should have an important place in an ironic meditation on points of origins is appropriate. First, as noted earlier, Frampton’s original plan for Magellan, as outlined in letters from 1964, was two sculptural installation projects— Clouds of Magellan and Straits of Magellan—that he considered issuing on the model of Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934).125 Second, Frampton brings into play Duchamp’s concern with language functioning as a grand contextual framing device that is constantly threatened by the eruption of sensual and sensuous energy from the phenomenal world. Frampton points to his own affinities with Duchamp’s ambivalent place in modernism, and Duchamp’s use of aleatory strategies and appropriation, by choosing to begin Magellan with this ironic emblem. Frampton wrote in a letter to Sally Dixon, “If Ezra [Pound] is my father, then Rrose Sélavy is my mother”; meanwhile, Frampton, in a letter to Reno Odlin, understands “Finn” as “Irish groom,” which makes Finnegans Wake a groom to Duchamp’s Bride.126 The conclusion of Frampton’s discussion of the Duchamp allusion above is instructive in relation to the importance he attaches to self-conscious appropriation: “There are films in that collection [at the Library of Congress] that are interesting now and important now as their posterities have modified them. In itself, the one man engaging the lady’s attention while another one unravels her skirt is idiotic.”127 Material from the point of origin of cinema is not valued for its own sake. (Frampton does not share certain archivists’ fetishization of early film.) The metahistorian searching for quintessence in the history of film is faced with its “infantile” rawness. However, by appropriating A Little Piece of String, segmenting and intercutting it, and placing it within a larger conceptual framework, Frampton transforms its slim narrative into a grand metaphor. This metaphor doubles back to ironize the grandeur of its correlative: the already self-ironic Duchampian modernist masterwork it echoes—and the grand voyage of Ferdinand Magellan that is “launched” in Cadenza I. Frampton, moreover, establishes the metaphor precisely by crosscutting linguistic and visual texts; while the iconography of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even bears no relation to the title of the early film, the narrative of A Little Piece of String echoes only Duchamp’s title. Indeed, titles are not only a consistent emblem of Frampton’s self-consciousness

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of appropriation but also a constant reminder of the importance of language. Frampton discusses how Joyce kept the title of Finnegans Wake secret: “The name of the thing is a big magic. The name of something is a very powerful indicator of its meaning,” also pointing to the example of Ulysses.128 Throughout his career, Frampton reused and repurposed titles; e.g., many terms found in his early letters reappear as potential titles for parts of Magellan in his production notes. As he does here, Frampton often chooses deliberately ordinary films to echo or allude to high modernist masterworks: Duchamp’s Large Glass or Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even in Cadenza I; Rainer’s dance in Works and Days; and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in Cadenza I and Gloria! As noted above, Frampton’s interest in vernacular culture means that the metahistorian must attend to all films and not just classics like Battleship Potemkin: “The historian dares neither select nor ignore, for if he does, the treasure will surely escape him.”129 Frampton practices a poetics of transformative appropriation, making metaphors that bridge low art and high art, linking historical documents and low comedy with grand narratives of consciousness. Frampton ironizes the biblical myth and the epic modernist masterwork with a short early film, a concrete instantiation of the cinema’s lowly historical beginnings, and thereby grounds metahistory in a productively ironic relation to history and origins.

chapter 4 Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything

T

he encyclopedia is a recurrent trope in Frampton’s films, writings, and interviews, and many scholars have noted the encyclopedic—i.e., wideranging and comprehensive—nature of Frampton’s erudition. The connection may be literal; according to Lucy Fischer, Frampton “claims to have made his way through the entire twelfth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica at an age when most others are discovering Classic Comics.”1 Frampton repeated this claim in an interview with Mitch Tuchman, where he elaborated on what he calls his two “favorite” entries, quaternions and waterfalls: You read the article about waterfalls, and the encyclopedist assumes you have never heard of waterfalls. You have never seen a waterfall. You do not know anything about the force of gravity. He begins, as it were, from the first principles: if you pour it, and it’s liquid, it drops to a lower level, and so forth. It’s a kind of fantastic, intellectual Dick and Jane, replete with lots of pictures of waterfalls. On the other hand, the contributor who writes about quaternions assumes apparently that everybody knows all about quaternions, an extremely abstruse part of mathematics, and would simply like a concise and accurate refresher.2

Federico Windhausen has noted that Frampton appropriates these “favorites” from Hugh Kenner’s 1964 book, Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians.3 As Windhausen brilliantly demonstrates, Kenner was an enormously important figure for Frampton—a literary critic who specialized in Ezra Pound and who partook of Frampton’s enthusiasms for film, mathematics, and artists such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, and Jorge Luis Borges, some of

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Frampton’s “heresiarchs” of modernism. Frampton also shares Kenner’s sharp wit, associative writing style, and somewhat curmudgeonly erudition. In appropriating Kenner’s contrast of the “quaternion” and “waterfall” entries, Frampton adopts Kenner’s sense of the encyclopedia’s historicity and his critique of its claims to describe general knowledge objectively and comprehensively. Kenner identifies the popular conception of the encyclopedia: “the book which nobody wrote and nobody is expected to read, and which is marketed as the Encyclopedia: Britannica, Americana, Antarctica or other.”4 But as Kenner and Frampton both assert, encyclopedias are texts like any other, inevitably circumscribed by disparities in style and their presumed readers, not to mention authorship. (Unlike Wikipedia, many earlier published encyclopedias had specific contributors write most entries, authorship modestly indicated through initials.) Frampton analyzes encyclopedia entries written by Constantin Brancusi and Edward Weston, partly concentrating on the paratactic authority each high modernist wields.5 The encyclopedia, while purporting to offer disinterested knowledge, has authority, power, historicity, and specific epistemologies embedded within its apparently bland texts. Frampton’s films—especially Magellan, with its explicit encyclopedic mission—embody and perform metacommentary on the encyclopedic discourse. For Frampton, the encyclopedia’s authoritative organization of knowledge signals the intersection of knowledge and power. But whereas Kenner emphasizes the encyclopedia’s relationship to language, Frampton emphasizes how both language and the image are articulated in the Enlightenment and modern periods.6 Frampton refers to plates that illustrated some entries: “the first [sic] encyclopedias were not even primarily written works. The Encyclopédie was an enormous generator of images.” 7 Magellan, also “an enormous generator of images,” was to be a modernist monument on the scale of Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that would bring the moving image into competition with language, which Frampton asserts as the master code of culture. Frampton conjectures “that photography and then film and now, heaven help us, that thing that begins with ‘v’ [video] may eventually be seen . . . as tentative attempts, at once complete and approximate, to construct something that will amount to an arena for thought and presumably as well an arena of power commensurate with that of language.”8 The encyclopedia, understood by Frampton as an “arena of power,” serves as a condensation of Magellan’s epistemological ambitions, articulated through both language and the image and through a resolutely historical lens that

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references the enormities of the modern period’s legacies of colonialism, mechanization, and gross exercises of power.

ENCYCLOPEDISM: THE SUMMA AND THE CATALOGUE IN STRAITS OF MAGELLAN Frampton, like most, tends to equate the start of encyclopedism with Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1778). However, the encyclopedia has a longer historical legacy that opens our understanding of Magellan and its epistemological stakes during late modernism, when its narratives of order and organization were increasingly upended by encroaching postmodern aesthetics. In her synoptic catalogue, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges, Anna Arnar provides an appropriately comprehensive gloss on the form.9 She begins by observing a contrast between two major encyclopedic forms, the summa and the catalogue, which helps frame a significant tension in Frampton’s thought. Put simply, the summa and the catalogue contrast top-down and bottom-up approaches to knowledge. The summa is “a summation of knowledge presenting a particular view of the world both comprehensively and systematically.”10 The systematicity that articulates a “particular view of the world” can be found, for example, in medieval texts that reveal a divine order and unity; e.g., Vincent de Beauvais’s thirteenth-century Speculum historiale. An encyclopedia like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817) has a hierarchy of knowledge that shifts from divine to philosophical categories. In these cases, the encyclopedic text reflects a world already understood as ordered from above, whether by God, philosophical ideas, or, in the case of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “universal encyclopedia,” mathematics.11 At best, these categories illuminate their contents; at worst, they function teleologically, marshaling evidence from the world to prove what their authors (and their episteme) already know.12 By contrast, the catalogue form, as Arnar states, “tends to emphasize the subject matter over any particular system; it is, in fact, the subject that determines the order, rather than the order that determines the subject.”13 The key example is Pliny’s Historiae naturalis (77 C.E.), sometimes seen as the “first” encyclopedia, which reads as a profusion of detail and description.14 Although the text is divided into books and chapters (e.g., “Book II. An Account of the World and the

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Elements”), Robert Fowler declares, “The organization of his data is probably the sloppiest in the history of book-making.”15 It nevertheless remained influential into the Renaissance as a manifestation of omne scibile, the aspiration to record “all that can be known.” At various points in the development of Magellan, Frampton discussed the project in ways that recall the encyclopedia both in the summa tradition and in the form of a looser catalogue. Arnar summarizes what’s at stake in the contrast: “Where the author of the metaencyclopedic summa strives for totality, completion, and synthesis, the compiler of a catalogue seeks diversity, plenitude, and particularity.”16 On the one hand, Magellan aspires to the comprehensiveness and totality of the summa, including its need for completion and synthesis; for example, Frampton elaborated a number of universal metaphors for cinema whether based on light, the archive, or the work of consciousness itself. On the other hand, he tempered this totalizing aspiration by emphasizing diversity (extreme montage strategies that juxtapose heterogeneous material); plenitude (films and texts that delight in lists and accumulation; the very plenitude of the photographic image, which, Frampton states, “invariably tells us more than we want to know”17); and particularity (Magellan’s profusion of detail and fragments; the Poundian dictum described by Kenner that “knowledge resides in the particulars”).18 In Magellan, Frampton enunciates the more open qualities of the catalogue through self-ironic gestures that undercut the hubris of the summa’s totality. Indeed, the tension between the summa’s top-down organization of knowledge and the catalogue’s bottom-up approach helps shape the productive ambivalence of Magellan generally. This tension between summa and catalogue is dramatized in Frampton’s account of how he began making Magellan. His initial impulse was toward the catalogue: “I set out to make a simple inventory or catalogue of the appearances of the world.”19 He explained how Magellan expanded upon the collection of words and things in Zorns Lemma in the “tradition of intellectual inventory, the listing of the contents of the world. Now [in Magellan] it’s not so much a question of things as an inventory of modes of perception and classification that’s involved. What I’m after, what I’m building is the largest possible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experience.” 20 If Magellan is an “inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experience,” then perhaps the most direct manifestation of this impulse comes in Frampton’s initial work in the early 1970s on Straits of Magellan, a collection of heterogeneous one-minute films modeled on

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the Lumière brothers’ actualités. In 1972 he said, “Straits of Magellan is something that I have already begun. And I’ll be working on that, on those one-minute Lumières, ‘daylights,’ probably for the next year and a half or so. . . . I’ve already made twelve or fourteen of these one-minute anti-extravaganzas, and they have been very instructive.” 21 The original impulse behind Frampton’s catalogue was open; he began collecting simple one-minute films that captured sometimes striking, sometimes humble, elements of perception and experience. In one, a red glass bead strung on a woolen thread sways back and forth in the frame like a hypnotist’s prop. In another, a child (Will Faller) shows off his successful fishing catch, but when the frog caught on the hook starts to struggle, a disquieting bathos undercuts the child’s epic tale. (The film is silent, further distancing us from the scene.) In yet another, the cover image for Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, the simple technique of superimposition gives a ghostly quality to a simple symmetrical shot of three pieces of paper, tacked to a wall, moving in the breeze. However, that tendency toward the catalogue soon raised problems of categorization. In a 1976 interview, Frampton gives a fuller account that indicates a problem with open form: I set out to make a simple inventory or catalogue of the appearances of the world, which I imagined might run to a few hundred short films, but as I actually began to gather these film segments they began to organize themselves—to my discomfiture—in a manner that I suppose is determined by my own immersion in montage: one thing suggests another, and if you have five things there seems to be some best order in which they should be seen. The bits of film, which were as opaque as an isolated word, seemed somehow to be demanding a more intricate organization than I had originally planned. At first I thought that simply meant sorting them into more intricate categories; I had originally imagined that there would be four categories—“ordinary, extraordinary, exotic, and erotic views”—which were the categories used by the Lumières. So I attempted a more complex sorting, which led to the question of an equilibrium among the categories. I suppose I could give a very detailed history of a series of insights and decisions (though I can’t necessarily remember the dates), but what basically evolved from that proposed inventory—or catalogue, or storehouse—is a work whose working title is currently Magellan.22

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The loosest form of encyclopedism, the catalogue or inventory, eventually could not be borne by Frampton; rather, the films themselves seemed to be calling for organization, for a “best order,” for “categories,” and then for “equilibrium among the categories.” Inventories and catalogues need not be systematically organized; they can, like history, be one damn thing after another. But when they turn into the summa, a systematic form of organization (including authorial choice) takes over, breeding activities like sorting and categorization.23 In the early 1970s, Frampton reorganized the Straits of Magellan numerous times, each increasing in complexity and comprehensiveness. Eventually, the once liberatory “daylights” were renamed “panopticons” (or “pans” for short) in reference to Jeremy Bentham’s prison, an architecture of optical control. The “twelve or fourteen films” Frampton made by 1972 ballooned to 720 one-minute films he planned for the 1978 Magellan Calendar. Changing the name from “daylights” to “panopticons” points to the shift in Frampton’s sense of his own place in relation to these short films’ function and organization, from a collection of randomly captured snippets to a series of short films organized by a control system within the Magellan Calendar. I have been following Frampton’s lead in synonymizing the terms “inventory” and “catalogue.” The terms are related; in the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb form of “inventory” is defined as “to make a descriptive list . . . to catalogue.” But there is a deeper resonance to the term “inventory” that points to a key intertext with Magellan for Frampton: Joyce’s Ulysses, which Kenner describes as a “comedy of the inventory.”24 Kenner’s description of Joyce’s cataloguing method mirrors Frampton’s own move from loose to categorical collection: What he [Joyce] does, by way of incorporating his material, is enumerate and inventory its riches. But again logic closes in. The delights of enumeration lead him inexorably to another principle, the book as a closed system, containing, even replacing, all that it concerns itself with; since the very notion of the inventory implies that the set of things inventoried is complete. The spirit, as with Flaubert, is still scientific; but the method is now to master the material by exhausting it; and then permuted and exhibited and reexhibited until every relevant category is filled and fulfilled, and all Dublin and all knowledge grow coterminous.25

As with Frampton, Joyce’s simple “delights of enumeration” are overtaken by a systematic need for completion, permutation, and categorization. But if the systematic summa, the “closed system,” also seems to overtake the open catalogue

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or inventory in the Straits of Magellan, it is important to note the coexistence, even dialectical tension, between the two modes over the course of Magellan’s production. Even as Frampton heeds the call for increased organization, he seeks to destabilize systematicity and the presumption to comprehensiveness implicit in the summa’s ambition. For example, with the 720 one-minute pans, he proposes two ways to undermine what he calls a “canonic order.” In the first, using the analogy of cogs in a machine, he proposes to offset the scheduling of the films in the calendar to create a massive number of possible combinations: There will be not one but two cycles of one-minute pieces, which constitute the panopticon of the Straits of Magellan. One of those wheels—or series—is, as it were, a gear with one more tooth, 366 teeth against 365, so that if they were seen in a real, determined canonic order—in fact, seen along a strictly calendrical model in which there would be something to see for every day of the calendar year—then it would take 366 years to see all the combinations.26

Second, he proposes to add “indeterminacy” by delinking sound from the image. Half of the pans were to have sound, but the addition of what he deliberately calls “a piece of sound” is randomized: “But at any given screening, whether or not the sound will actually be played or the track run silent will be determined by other, local, factors.”27 Frampton insists that even though Magellan will be “very rigidly structured in one sense,” it is also open to massive indeterminacy.28 Frampton playfully engages the tropes of encyclopedism’s comprehensiveness and explores these contradictions in ways that have unexpected resonances with the larger culture. These epistemological issues are central to twentieth-century modernism and to the tension between the top-down application of aesthetic principles and the bottom-up imperative to respond to materials at hand. In the 1970s and 1980s, the movement toward larger destabilization of the standard narratives of dominant culture anticipated the “postmodern” reshuffling that came at the long tail end of modernism.

THE LAST MACHINE Frampton often explored these tensions within modernism between comprehensive and local outlooks and between universal and historical perspectives. The

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encyclopedic impulse toward comprehensiveness, aligned with the summa’s proclivity for systematicity, is announced explicitly in Frampton’s “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” in his list of nine “territories” of “investigation.” The first, following the geographic contours of the Magellan metaphor, marks his intention to “map the terrain of film art” according to systematic, rational poetic principles, rescuing film from what he calls its “irrational natural history.”29 The ninth and final territory proposes that Magellan shall embody “the notion of a hypothetical, totally inclusive work of film art as a model for human consciousness.”30 The target is the complexity of human consciousness; Frampton proposes that Magellan shall serve as a model, a work of art that is “hypothetical, totally inclusive.” In both of these, the totality of the system and the complexity of history come together. In the first and ninth principles, it is important to note that, in addition to comprehensive and systematic reach, the ambition is tempered and qualified as partial, as “hypothetical.” I argue that Frampton’s ambition is ultimately “metaencyclopedic,” a variation of encyclopedism named by Arnar within the tradition of the summa that provides “an outline for the organization of knowledge but does not implement it; it is a theory for an encyclopedia without the specific contents of an encyclopedia.”31 As historical examples, Arnar lists works by Francis Bacon, Hegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, all of whom planned and partly executed metaencyclopedias that function as treatises on the nature of knowledge but that did not propose to encompass all knowledge.32 The full title of Frampton’s manifesto for the Magellan project, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” makes clear that, rather than a comprehensive history, he promises only “Notes and Hypotheses.” Yet within this essay, we find an articulation of Magellan that points toward a figure through which he will organize knowledge: “the infinite cinema,” a massive simulacrum emerging from his conceptualization of film as “the Last Machine.” In the infinite cinema, Frampton finds the organizing principle of his encyclopedic project. But Frampton concludes the essay by acknowledging its impossibility; rather than assert a universal claim, Magellan is only a metaencyclopedia, providing what he calls a “synoptic conjugation” (a term I unpack below) of film.33 In the “Metahistory” essay, Frampton outlines his metaphor of film as the Last Machine to evoke a number of tensions: between epistemological categories and the personal experience of looking, between part and whole, and between facts and the larger systems to which they are connected. To begin, Frampton asserts that we must understand film not simply as celluloid but as a larger apparatus

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that includes cameras, projectors, and film stock together, all comprising “one machine, which is by far the largest and most ambitious single artefact yet conceived and made by man.” 34 Frampton calls this artifact the “Last Machine,” linking it to a larger history of mechanization of human thought and society. Once again, Kenner’s writing is influential, especially his book The Counterfeiters.35 Kenner asserts that the Enlightenment emphasis on empirical observation, while successful in transcending previously dominant dogma (e.g., that the earth revolves around the sun [Copernicus] vs. the earth as the center of the universe [Ptolemy]), had the reductive consequence of diminishing humanity to a simulacrum of empirical appearances and functions, to an assemblage of observable “facts” that accumulate, like parts, into a machine. In the “Metahistory” essay, following Kenner, Frampton proposes, “Dean Swift . . . invented the fact . . . [as] the indivisible module out of which systematic substitutes for experience are built.”36 Bits of knowledge, epistemological modules, replace experience. Frampton then explicitly cites Kenner’s anecdote about how a “fact” may be extracted from a larger system, in this case the workings of a dog’s digestive system: “Hugh Kenner, in The Counterfeiters, cites a luminous anecdote from the seed-time of the fact. Swift’s contemporary savants fed the dice to a dog. They (the dice) passed through the dog visibly unchanged, but with their weight halved. Thenceforth a dog was to be defined as a device for (among other things) halving the weight of dice.”37 This absurd definition exemplifies how empiricism sacrifices a sense of the whole (the dog) for the articulation of datum (the functioning of its digestive system). As Kenner notes, in “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” Swift writes an outline of how human beings too can be seen as machines. It is a mechanical theory of being in which the power of empirical observation and analysis threatens to lose the forest of the human for counting the trees, an ongoing problem for artists seeking to balance individual perception with larger systematic thinking. But once again, Frampton’s interest in the image, especially the photograph, tempers Kenner’s dark view of reductive epistemological mechanization. Frampton sees a potentially redemptive effect in the photographic image (both still and moving) that undermines the mechanical reduction of the world to modular facts through its “amplitude”: The camera deals, in some way or another, with every particle of information present within its view; it is wholly indiscriminate. Photographs, to the joy and misery of all who make them, invariably tell us more than we want to

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know. . . . The photograph seems a virtually perfect continuum. Hence the poignancy of its illusions: their amplitude instantly made the photograph— within the very heart of mechanism—the subversive restorer of contextual knowledge seemingly coterminous with the whole sensible world.38

For Frampton, the plausibility of the photographic illusion appeals to the human ability to make sense of the modular fact by placing it in a larger context, connecting the image to the world. If Swift’s savants concentrate on mechanical facts, the photograph, providing a “virtually perfect continuum,” subversively restores what Frampton calls “contextual knowledge,” a sense of the whole that is available to the photograph’s human spectator. Photography, film, and other camera arts have a special status among the arts for this capacity. In The Counterfeiters, Kenner accuses Swift’s contemporaries of losing a sense of a dog’s being, its caninitis, “the essence which makes the thing that thing which it is.”39 At stake for humans is losing their humanitas, replaced by Swift’s “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.” The photograph, the ultimate mechanical simulation of reality, in being “indiscriminate” in its processing of “every particle of information present within its view,” resists the isolation of facts that might define a dog “as a device for . . . halving the weight of dice.”40 The amplitude of the photograph nonetheless invokes another dark possibility for film as the Last Machine—that is, the potential for its simulacral force to engulf the world. The epistemology of the Enlightenment tends to the creation of simulacra, machines substituting for reality, whether in texts like the encyclopedia or the literally mechanical automata that feature in Kenner’s The Counterfeiters.41 Frampton claims film as the grand culminating project of the Enlightenment, a total representational apparatus that ultimately creates a simulacrum of the world, a comprehensive representation impelled by encyclopedic totality. As Frampton writes, “It is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the sole survivor.”42 Yet in exploring this metaphor, Frampton again departs from Kenner’s pessimism to concentrate on the power of art—and the human consciousnesses activated by art—to use play and imagination for exploration. He proposes, “If we are indeed doomed to the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe, the fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe, it is reasonable to suppose that such an artifact will resemble the

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vaults of an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film.”43 The infinite film offers infinite possibilities for the ambitious artist. As discussed in chapter 3, when Frampton calls the universe an archive, he invokes Jorge Luis Borges, the writer who perhaps best captures the spirit of encyclopedism even as he serves as its sharpest critic. In his stories, Borges writes parables that extend cultural desires ad absurdum to invoke the irrationality and enormity of those desires. The notion of a map becoming so precise as to engulf its original territory is posited in Borges’s essay “On Exactitude in Science.” In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a fictional world is written about in a fake encyclopedia, but the text begins to influence the real world to the extent that it overtakes reality. The specific simulacrum that Frampton evokes responds to Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” in which Borges posits the universe as a massive library. The total film machine that has engulfed the world has fabricated a simulacrum, “an artifact called The Universe,” that he compares to “an endless film archive” housing “the infinite film.” But Frampton makes clear that the infinite film reconstructing “the entire history of human thought,” or acting as “a model of human consciousness,” is impossible, especially for the artist-metahistorian to complete. The inevitability of the gap between aspiration and failure shared by Frampton and Borges is captured by James Irby in his analysis of Borges’s stories: “The insight they provide is ironic, pathetic: a painful sense of inevitable limits that block total aspirations.”44 Aware of this inevitability, Frampton calls this simulacral process the “comically convergent task of dismantling the universe.” Frampton often elaborated on the comic aspects of his project in literary terms: “‘Comic art’ resolves in favor of its protagonist,” in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.45 Frampton frequently noted that the real protagonist of Magellan was not Ferdinand Magellan, whose ignominious and incomplete journey we know, but rather his imagined film viewer. Like Kenner’s description of Joyce’s Ulysses as a “comedy of inventory,” the simulacral universe promised by Magellan would be a “whole sensible world” made newly accessible to its human protagonists, its spectators. Crucially, for human protagonists, such empirical accessibility comes through the work of art, with its potential for structuring rational systems and its capacity for invoking play and imagination. As Windhausen puts it, Frampton’s “comic game . . . displace[s] beliefs about the power of empiricism, rational systems, and logical orders into the domain of art.”46 Put simply, if film as the Last Machine and the ultimate expression of mechanical Enlightenment thought threatens to create a simulacrum that

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devours reality, Frampton sees the agency of the human spectator’s experience and exploration of the plenitude of the photographic image in redemptive terms, precisely through the fullness of the metaphor of the infinite cinema that he activates in Magellan. In the “Metahistory” essay, Frampton proposes a metaphorical path for how the metahistorian (rather than simply a historian) might explore the infinite film: the Knight’s Tour in chess. The Knight’s Tour is an exercise in which the knight visits every square on the chessboard—an exercise in comprehensiveness with systematic economy.47 The exercise is potentially infinite because the number of open tours is unknown. The chess game exercise functions as a metaphor for the task of Frampton’s metahistorian: “The metahistorian of film generates for himself the problem of deriving a complete tradition from nothing more than the most obvious material limits of the total film machine.”48 Frampton sees the exploration of these material limits, the isolation and articulation of film’s material qualities, residing in the work of the post–World War II avant-garde in films by Tony Conrad, Peter Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, and Michael Snow: “It should be possible,” he speculates, “to pass from The Flicker through Unsere Afrikareise, or Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, or La Région Centrale and beyond, in finite steps (each step a film), by exercising only one perfectly rational option at each move.” By contrast, the task of the artist-metahistorian of film as the “infinite cinema” is impossible: “Understood literally, it is insoluble, hopelessly so. The paths open to the Knight fork often (to reconverge, who knows where). The board is a matrix of rows and columns beyond reckoning, whereon no chosen starting point may be defended with confidence.” Frampton’s way out of the insoluble problem is to gain one extra level of analysis, what he calls a “Tour of Tours”: “Nevertheless, I glimpse the possibility of constructing a film that will be a kind of synoptic conjugation of such a tour—a Tour of Tours, so to speak, of the infinite film, or of all knowledge, which amounts to the same thing. Rather, some such possibility presents itself insistently to my imagination, disguised as the germ of a plan for execution.” Frampton glimpses this possibility in Magellan understood as a meta–Knight’s Tour of cinematic possibility. On the one hand, Magellan articulates the difficulty of reconciling the aspiration and the failure inherent in mapping human consciousness through the infinite cinema. On the other hand, Frampton’s aspiration for the Knight’s Tour suggests that Magellan will not enact a useless mapping of the infinite film akin to Borges’s simulacral map, in which there is no difference between the map’s scope and its territory. Rather, the metaphor of the Knight’s Tour

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suggests that Frampton sees multiple ways a spectator might experience and contextualize cinema through their navigation of the individual units of film that make up Magellan. Crucially, then, Magellan is not the infinite cinema itself. Rather, it is a “synoptic conjugation” of it, a Knight’s Tour of possibility. The comprehensive scope of Magellan is signaled by the term “synoptic”; i.e., “general summary.” This is an encyclopedic epistemological project in which Frampton equates the “infinite film” with “all knowledge.” “Conjugation” is “the formation or existence of a link or connection between things”: it is the movements of the Knight on the chessboard that link its discrete units. Rather than a totality, Magellan is composed of both fragments and a radical montage that would conjugate—make connections— among these fragments. These connections would be suggested by Magellan’s structure but ultimately completed by the spectator, who would be faced with the utopian task of performing this synoptic conjugation.49 Ultimately, Frampton privileges the spectator’s open relation to the material over his own authorial control and the summa. As he says, “We have tended toward the view that there is some one pathway through that material, understood to be the most meaningful, the one that the artist chooses. . . . I’d like to call [that] into question.”50 For Frampton, the labyrinth is a figure that encompasses this oscillation between the encyclopedic urge to comprehensive totality and an embrace of open contingency. Seen from above, the labyrinth of the Knight’s Tour is like a map of paths across the chessboard. But seen from the perspective of the knight—and the spectator watching Magellan in linear time—the paths are open and complex. In a 1972 interview, Frampton links the labyrinth as a figure of comprehensiveness to his use of Robert Grosseteste’s medieval treatise on light in the final section of Zorns Lemma. The text itself is, I think, apposite to film and to whatever my epistemological views of film are. The key line in the text is a sentence that says, “In the beginning of time, light drew out matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.” Which I take to be a fairly apt description of film, the total historical function of film, not as an art medium, but as this great kind of time capsule. It was thinking about this, which led me later to posit the universe as a vast film archive (which contains nothing in itself) with— presumably somewhere in the middle, in the undiscoverable center of this

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whole matrix of film-thoughts—an unlocatable viewing room in which, throughout eternity, sits the Great Presence screening the infinite footage.51

As discussed in the previous chapter, in this allegory, the light of film becomes a simulacral mass as great as the fabric of the world, a time capsule or archive that functions as part of Frampton’s metahistory. At the center, like the spectator experiencing Magellan, sits a Great Presence, linked to Bishop Berkeley by Borges in his story “A New Refutation of Time”: “The God of Berkeley is a ubiquitous spectator whose function is that of lending coherence to the world.”52 Frampton’s utopian spectator as a stand-in for the Great Presence lends coherence through the infinite possibilities of their Knight’s Tours through the film cycle. However, it is the spectator’s inevitable failure to successfully navigate the complexity of inadequate categories that Frampton finds most exciting. In his interview with Mitch Tuchman, Frampton indicates the payoff of the synoptic conjugation in the spectator’s formation of productive interferences: The Magellan cycle purports to be encyclopedic, but it’s more like a tour of the possible principles for forming an encyclopedia—all, I hope, dutifully laid out and exemplified, all at the same time. And, of course, since not all modes fit very well together, they begin to generate interferences, and, in fact, it’s the interferences between ways of classifying things that begin to generate a form that interests me.53

A “tour of the possible principles for forming an encyclopedia” is precisely in line with Arnar’s “metaencyclopedic” impulse, the “theory for an encyclopedia without [its] specific contents.”54 But what is ultimately interesting for Frampton is the “interferences between ways of classifying things,” which generate, in his terms, new “forms.” Systematic classification can only take the artist so far; indeed, it is the failure inscribed in systematicity as it collides with the complexity of the world that creates the new. Magellan is a machine, a film machine that, like the encyclopedia, is designed to fail. But, in Samuel Beckett’s words, to “fail better.”55

BORGES AND ENCYCLOPEDISM Frampton delivers a playful critique of the certainty of the Enlightenment thinkers in the opening sections of his “Metahistory” essay. He describes the

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Enlightenment as the emergence of “a time of absolute certainty,” a time based on assumptions about the possibility of complete enumeration and seamless comparison in “facts”: The world contained only a denumerable list of things. Anything could be considered simply as the intersection of a finite number of facts. Knowledge, then, was the sum of all discoverable facts. Very many factual daubs were required, of course, to paint a true picture of the world; but the invention of the fact represented, from the rising mechanistic point of view, a gratifying diminution of horsepower requirement from a time when knowledge had been the factorial of all conceivable contexts.56

Frampton locates the conceptual origins of film in this time as a product of new defining terms of knowledge and consciousness based in a drive toward complete but reductive representation. He asserts that before this time, representations of the world like histories depended on “contexts” of understanding. Histories were acknowledged discursive constructions whose aim was not a mechanistic sum of facts but rather a conscious reflection “upon the qualities of experience in the times they expound”: “These artifacts shared the assumption that events are numerous and replete beyond the comprehension of a single mind. They proposed no compact systematic substitute for their concatenated world; rather they made up an open set of rational fictions within that world.”57 Frampton calls these rational fictions “metahistories of event,” which we might understand as frameworks for understanding the world. This pre-Enlightenment version of history calls into question objective claims to certainty and insists upon the importance of perspective and context, whose specificity triggers the epistemological limitations that any acknowledgment of perspective and context imposes. Frampton understood Magellan, although embodying the comprehensiveness and even hubris of the encyclopedic summa, as in its complete form to be an “open set of rational fictions,” providing not just “facts” but also contexts of understanding. One such context is the critique of encyclopedism provided by Kenner and Borges.58 Perhaps the strongest illustration of this critique of Enlightenment epistemological certainty is Borges’s account of a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into

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(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.59

The description of the category of animals from the “Chinese encyclopedia” is taken, not from one of Borges’s fictions, but from one of his essays, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942). While Wilkins is a real historical figure, a seventeenth-century philosopher, or natural scientist, the “Chinese encyclopedia” is a fictional text that Borges added to the essay. Although fictional, its list of surreal definitions echoes the disparity and chaos—and unlikely poetry—that emerges from the artificial language Wilkins outlines in his massive tome, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668).60 Borges sketches the principle of Wilkins’s invented language and places it within a tradition of artificial languages stemming from René Descartes (who speculated about the possibility of a mathematically based language in 1629): “Wilkins divided the universe in forty categories or classes, which were then subdivisible into differences, subdivisible in turn into species. To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame.”61 In theory, such a system removes the semiotic arbitrariness of language, in which the graphemes “f-l-a-m-e” refer to the phenomenon of a flicker of fire only by convention. As Borges says, “The word salmon does not tell us anything about the object it represents; zana, the corresponding word [in Wilkins’s language], defines (for the person versed in the forty categories and the classes of these categories) a scaly river fish with reddish flesh.”62 Meaning is inscribed in the systematicity of Wilkins’s language, the learning of which promises comprehensive knowledge: “Children could learn Wilkins’s language without knowing it was artificial; later, in school, they would discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.”63 This desire for words to match things—as God names the things of the world in Genesis—promises the clarity and comprehensiveness of a mechanical one-toone correspondence of words to things. Borges adds a literally parenthetical note to the effect that “(Theoretically, a language in which the name of each being

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would indicate all the details of its destiny, past and future, is not inconceivable).”64 Language would thus not just correspond to the world; it would define it. Wilkins’s system runs aground, as Borges says, on the arbitrary, “contradictory and vague” nature of his categories.65 But the problem is wider than just Wilkins’s particular artificial language; for Borges, “obviously, there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural.”66 Why? “The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.”67 Just as Frampton says that “events are numerous and replete beyond the comprehension of a single mind,” so the universe of things, concepts, and potentialities remains outside human comprehension, where that word connotes the comprehensiveness demanded by encyclopedism. But, perhaps dialectically, the conflict between Wilkins’s impossible aspiration and the complexity of the universe yields, in Borges’s “rational fiction,” the marvelous incomprehensibility—in the full sense of that word—of his “Chinese encyclopedia.” The animal category of “those that have just broken a flower vase,” is not so far off from Wilkins. When Borges writes that, for Wilkins, “The whale appears in the sixteenth category; it is a viviparous, oblong fish,” the absurdity of the formulation breaks the rational frame.68 This is akin to what Frampton called the “interferences” that arise in “closed rational systems. . . . They begin to generate discrepancies, irrational values, accumulations of error.” For Frampton, these discrepancies and disjunctions find echoes through the patron saint of Surrealism, Comte de Lautréamont, whose proposed meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine Frampton once capitalized as “the surrealist Encounter.”69 The power of surreal disjunction is generated as a direct by-product of the excess of organizational energy that goes into encyclopedism’s efforts to corral the chaos of the world. Frampton and Borges share a sense of how the complexity of the world defeats human attempts at comprehension. For example, Daniel King’s mathematical analysis of Borges’s “Library of Babel” reveals that the number of permutations contained in its hexagonal pods (calculated by King as 101,836,800) is massively larger than the number of atoms estimated to exist in the universe (1080). As King notes, “The library defies the physical universe but mathematics [and human imagination] has no limits: the most recent prime number is about 109,000,000.”70 With Magellan, Frampton was attempting to open further the “set of rational fictions,” which would provide imaginative “contexts of understanding” for not only art and film but the world. He understood that Magellan exceeded in complexity his earlier acclaimed works like Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena, which he had come

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to see as somewhat schematic. The consequence of this extra complexity was to make the films daunting for audiences and critics. As described in the introduction, unlike the pure, contained chemistry of cobalt, “a product of the laboratory . . . a fiction,” Magellan is better described as having the “genuinely complex” chemistry of “dirt.” 71 This is a central problematic (and pleasure) of Magellan: Frampton’s metaphorical voyage is in search of the “genuinely complex.” But the problem is a double one. On the one hand, we have the chemistry of dirt—of reality—which exceeds the complexity of our laboratory or artistic fictions. On the other hand, as Frampton said on another occasion, “We have this awful problem, of course, and that is that the universe is far simpler—infinitely complex as it is—than any of our explanations of it.” 72 Magellan is Frampton’s attempt to confront this paradox: how to chart the already infinitely complex—the world—with the even more complicating aesthetic forms and languages at our disposal. Neither Borges nor Frampton have a desire to emulate cumbersome forms like the artificial languages attempted by figures like Wilkins nor the impossible summas attempted within the encyclopedic tradition. But they remain fascinated by the quixotic attempt and the “interferences” and “discrepancies, irrational values, accumulations of error” that arise.

PUBLIC DOMAIN Hollis Frampton’s film Public Domain richly condenses several themes and tensions embedded in Frampton’s encyclopedism. The film is enigmatic in its sheer simplicity; it consists of sixteen early films laid end-to-end to form a film of eighteen minutes.73 When I first encountered Public Domain, I presumed that there must be a principle of organization and pored for hours over the film trying to understand it. The film begins with two shorts featuring children and ends with two men weighing a baby, suggesting that Public Domain as a whole might be read as a kind of catalogue of human experience. It is difficult, however, to rationalize a sequence for the other shorts, although a group of three in the middle might roughly be about recreation (children playing with a ball, early airplanes, and a strongman showing his muscles). Perhaps the shorts are arranged by type of activity, like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a film that Frampton openly admired. The film contains a remarkable (though hardly comprehensive) sampling

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of early cinema forms, including exterior actualités and studio scenes; public events and staged historical reenactments; a so-called famous first, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894, aka Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894); and one of Frampton’s personal favorites, Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). Later, I reexamined some screening notes I had made and found notations on thematic clusters, camera angles, single- versus multishot films, running time, actuality versus staging, and exterior versus interior shooting, all testifying to my desire to find an organizational key. Finally, Frampton’s film archivist, Bill Brand, kindly provided me with a copy of Frampton’s production notes. This document revealed that Public Domain is organized alphabetically according to the crucially omitted titles of the individual films that comprise it. All the films are from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection—the earliest from 1894, the latest from 1904. In the spirit of one of the most popular genres of early film, Public Domain is a trick film with the joke on the spectator who tries to discover a sequential logic in the images.

4.1

Hollis Frampton, production document for Public Domain, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

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If Public Domain is enigmatic, its title provides a clue to its secret. “Public domain” refers to artifacts that are no longer protected by copyright. Copyright is regulated in the United States by the Library of Congress, Frampton’s source for early films (he purchased 125 of them in the early 1970s for incorporation into Magellan).74 The Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress emerged as an accidental by-product of what Frampton calls “the sort of mausoleums guaranteed by a rapacious copyright system.”75 Throughout film history, actual films have been disassembled and recycled for a variety of economic and military reasons. The Paper Print Collection exists because early copyright registration regulations allowed for entire filmstrips to be deposited at the Library of Congress, essentially as long photographs. Thus, ironically, the same industrial capitalist economic logic that has destroyed most of film history has also ensured the survival of some of its earliest documents. The early films that comprise Public Domain would have been originally screened, as in Frampton’s film, without titles, as part of the mixed programs that constituted early film exhibition in the United States.76 The turn of the twentiethcentury spectator’s experience of these films somewhat echoes our own viewing of Public Domain.77 But as happens in all aleatory practice, the random sample is constrained (and enabled) by some form of system. In this case, for the purposes of copyright, early films deposited at the Library of Congress had to be titled, assigned a registration number, and catalogued. In Public Domain, Frampton sequenced the short films alphabetically according to their titles. The fact of their registration (and preservation as history) in the Library of Congress is what affords Frampton both his organizing principle and the existence of the very material he appropriates. This organizing principle is systematic—but also arbitrary, based not only on an accident of copyright regulation but on the arbitrary system of language as well. The multiple levels of arbitrariness and systematicity that are inscribed in the many layers of Public Domain’s history and conception are key to its enigma, stemming from the arbitrariness and system that constitute alphabetical organization itself.78 Public Domain might be considered a metahistory of the Library of Congress. It is “history” because the individual films are past records from the library, and it is “meta” because the films’ arrangement reflexively comments on both the library’s principle of organization (alphabetical) and its encyclopedic historical reach. Although the Library of Congress was originally established in 1800 as a simple reference resource accumulated for legislators, after it was destroyed in

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the War of 1812, the organization reconstituted the collection as a universal compendium of knowledge, a comprehensive summa. According to a statement on the Library of Congress website: “The Jeffersonian concept of universality, the belief that all subjects are important to the library of the American legislature, is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today’s Library of Congress.” 79 In 1870 U.S. copyright law required the deposit at the Library of Congress of two copies of any artifact to be copyrighted. The late nineteenth century, the period that Frampton examines in his essays on photography and the invention of cinema, also saw the most intense development of the Library of Congress. The current building opened in 1897, just after Edison’s Kinetoscopes and the public premiere of the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe.80 The reach and system of the Library of Congress invoke a wealth of epistemological forms apposite to Frampton, incorporating both summa and catalogue logics. It is first a library, a collection of books—a summa of language.81 The Library of Congress is also an archive, containing not just books but also an inventory of objects such as films, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and manuscripts, and other language artifacts.82 Schematically, the library can be seen as an institution that organizes language, and the archive as the institution that collects and organizes things. The Library of Congress also functions as an alphabetically organized encyclopedia insofar as knowledge is classified through its subject headings, that lattice of knowledge organization that functions as a grid of intellectual longitude and latitude orienting researchers and that has its modern roots in the original Encyclopédie (whose full title is Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des metiers: it is both encyclopedia and dictionary). The fact that the interpretative key to Public Domain is an extra-filmic production document is significant for Magellan and its aspiration to complexity. Unlike Zorns Lemma, which has a strict matrix visibly organizing arbitrary images alphabetically on-screen, Public Domain has a hidden principle of organization. The fact that the secret to the film lies in a document outside it is emblematic of Magellan as a project that begs to be read not just in terms of the films themselves but also in relationship to a paratext, indeed to Frampton’s total production over the 1970s and 1980s: his written essays, interviews, production notes, teaching, correspondence, and his work in photography, xerography, and computers. Though sometimes maddeningly self-referential, Magellan is not a hermetic work. Where Zorns Lemma catalogues Frampton’s personal and phenomenal world, Public Domain points directly to larger contexts of film and social history.

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Finally, it is important not to reduce Public Domain simply to the alphabetical order suggested by its secret document but to respect the quality of enigma that the film carries, its surreal juxtaposition of tableaux—and the desire for understanding and interpretation that it can inspire in the spectator. The Magellan metaphor of exploration extends to the viewer as much as to its author; both, as Frampton maintained, functioned as the work’s protagonist.83

ALPHABETIZATION AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA Public Domain serves as a microcosm of what Frampton calls the interesting “interferences between ways of classifying things” that occur in the intersection of systems and knowledge. Alphabetization as an organizational principle of encyclopedism that is linked to the contradictions of Enlightenment thinking is central to Frampton’s work, especially with its multiple serial forms. The alphabet takes language and makes it into a machine with letters as interchangeable parts. For Frampton the encyclopedia’s organizing principle is the arbitrary nature of alphabetical arrangement, a contradiction he found productive: The encyclopedia does a rather odd thing: namely it proposes to arrange all areas of human knowledge according to the first letters of their names. In order for something to become knowledge in the encyclopedia, it first has to be nameable. . . . The encyclopedia takes many disparate, disjunct things and groups them together, not even as they are related in language, but as they are related to the precedence of the graphic signs that constitute their names.84

The alphabetical organization of the encyclopedia is often recognized as one of the specific innovations of Diderot and d’A lembert’s Encyclopédie, although they were influenced by the alphabetical organization of Ephraim Chambers’s earlier Cyclopedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Science, . . .  the Whole Intended as a Course of Ancient and Modern Learning (1728).85 Robert L. Fowler points out that although alphabetically organized encyclopedias became dominant in the West only after the Encyclopédie, alphabetization as a principle of organization goes back as far as the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.86 Languages that use alphabets are semiotically arbitrary insofar as things are named and coded using what Frampton calls the “graphic signs” of letters. Letters, in turn, have another order: the

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conventional sequence of the alphabet. The alphabetical reorganization of the named things of the world in the encyclopedia “groups together” what he calls “disparate, disjunct things.” The impetus for alphabetically organized encyclopedias emerged from a larger epistemological crisis that attends the advent of the Enlightenment: the rise of empirical observation and the erosion of stable conceptions of the universe, whether divinely or philosophically derived. Paolo Cherchi argues that the “collapse” of Renaissance and Baroque encyclopedia culture, “which was essentially tied to the notion of an immobile, unchanging world, brought about the search for a new taxonomy, in which the alphabet supplanted logic.”87 The rise of empirical observation and the proliferation of facts mandated alphabetical organization because encyclopedic organization by category or idea was inadequate to the complexity on display.88 Such a move did not go unchallenged. Coleridge mocked the Scottish authors of the Cyclopedia when he wrote, “To call a huge unconnected miscellany of the omne scibile [all that is knowable], in a[n] arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an encyclopedia, is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian bookmakers.”89 Kenner deepens this critique and is highly skeptical of the alphabetical principle; for him, the alphabetically organized encyclopedia is “a feat of organizing, not a feat of understanding.”90 Kenner links the need for alphabetization to how decontextualization of information from the world— the invention of the fact—contributes to undermine understanding of the world: “Nothing is more absurd than the very conception of a fact, an isolated datum of experience, something to find out, isolated from all the other things that are to be found out.” 91 For Kenner, ultimately, “the first thing that the alphabetical arrangement does is plunge the entire work into absurdity.”92 Absurdity may indeed prevail, but, unlike Kenner, Frampton relishes the disjunctive potential of alphabetization, its potential to privilege the reader’s agency to investigate and potentially disrupt traditional hierarchies of knowledge. The alphabetical principle of encyclopedic organization activates the reader and even democratizes knowledge. Cherchi argues that alphabetical organization “required the active collaboration of the reader[,] who was forced to reconstruct his knowledge as he moved from one article to another.”93 Alphabetization also allowed the reader’s attention to move in formerly unexpected ways. Arnar expands upon how the Encyclopédie used cross-references (which would be mimicked by the alphabetically organized index) to guide the reader: “Although organized alphabetically like a dictionary, the Encyclopédie employed extensive cross-references to establish

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continuity among articles. Using cross-references to compare and contrast ideas, the ideal reader would begin to make juxtapositions. The audacious system upset traditional hierarchies, endowing readers with the capacity to discover knowledge themselves.”94 This reminds us that Frampton named the spectator as the protagonist of Magellan, who would be invited and empowered to explore the cycle’s inventory of human perception and consciousness, both challenged and enabled through Magellan’s fragmented—yet structured—system of organization. Magellan seeks to incite epistemological desire in its spectator, though it is a daunting dare. Public Domain produces an experience of precisely what Frampton calls “disparity” and “disjunction” that invites a spectator’s epistemological desire. What I see in the film is a seemingly arbitrary collection that nonetheless hints at a hidden systematicity; before knowing the “secret” key to the film, I sought and desired principles of organization and meaning (whether I was looking at theme, camera angle, etc.).95 The film’s basic impulse remains collection and classification, which are both enabled and confounded by alphabetization; as Frampton says, “You start with the idea that you can pin down or collect or classify and expose all human knowledge according to the alphabetic letters of its name.”96 One might imagine, for example, what it would be like to read an encyclopedia without knowing the names of the entries. As Frampton says, “Aside from a few principles, an encyclopedia like Britannica is extremely incoherent.”97 Frampton used alphabetization as a principle of film organization as early as 1966 in Manual of Arms, his first released film. Here, alphabetization operated not only as a dialectically fragmented yet structured way to portray phenomena but also to buffer the projection of his own subjectivity in his art. Manual of Arms is a collection of fourteen portraits of friends and artistic colleagues organized serially by each person’s last name (beginning with Carl Andre and ending with Joyce Wieland). Each portrait is stylistically different; Frampton describes seeking to make “portraits that had to do with the kinesics of the people involved. . . . The gestures that I made with the camera and in editing had to do with my understanding of the people.”98 For example, Robert Huot is filmed by a moving camera that swings or cuts to a bright light (and ends when Huot stands up and crosses the path of the light), while in the portrait of Larry Poons, persistent superimposition is used to animate a stationary Poons. Frampton buffers the immediacy of the personal portrait through the film’s alphabetical structure, which provides a dispassionate principle of presentation. In his program note, Frampton further

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frames the film as the “physiognomic & locomotor evidence related to the lens by 13 artists and an historian.”99 Portraits of friends become depersonalized as their actions become evidence that is “related to the lens,” a passive-voice formulation that displaces Frampton’s active work in constructing the portrait. Nonetheless, despite the alphabetized order of presentation, Manual of Arms operates as an encyclopedia of Frampton’s intimate personal connections—as well as an extraordinary collection of mid-1960s avant-garde New York artists working in and across painting, sculpture, dance and performance, photography, and film. Perhaps the most overt example of alphabetization in Frampton’s oeuvre is Zorns Lemma, whose principal middle section arranges hundreds of one-second shots of what Frampton called “word-images” (most are shots of signs in New York streetscapes) in alphabetical loops, arranged first by their first letter, then by their second letter, and so on. In 1972 Frampton stated his rationale for this organization: “I alphabetized them, which was the most random way I had of handling the material. I felt . . . I would not be tempted personally to use my own bad taste, you see, to make up little poems or what have you.”100 Alphabetization also brings a mathematical dimension to organization as A B C D parallels 1 2 3 4, and the title of the film, Zorns Lemma, invokes set theory via mathematician Max Zorn. Frampton tells an anecdote about Hebrew scholars who would list a series of numbers very fast and then bet their audience that they could repeat the sequence exactly. Their secret code was a textual phrase for which each letter had a numerical equivalent. The combination of mathematics and alphabetization increases the systematicity of organization. One can imagine, for example, a mental inventory that could be amorphous or even categories that are unnamable and felt. But the alphabet pins things down once everything gets a name that allows it to be put into a sequence. As Frampton says, one of the main purposes of alphabetization for him is to supersede what he calls “thumbprint composition,” to avoid his own “bad taste.” Like other minimalist artists in this period, he embraces systems-based principles over subjective choices, displacing artistic choice onto systems that are more often than not alphabetical or numerical. Surprisingly, references to systems theory, cybernetics, and figures like Norbert Wiener do not arise in his writings or interviews, even though Frampton was in milieux where it was in the air; for example, Artforum editor Jack Burnham wrote The Structure of Art (1973) while publishing essays in the magazine, and at SUNY Buffalo, Gerald O’Grady took a keen interest, making it part of the curriculum at the Center for Media Study.101

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If Frampton looked to systems to buffer “thumbprint composition,” he controlled aleatory procedures; even random operations need to be managed. Artificial Light is another film involving repeated sequences of material that could have simply used a random principle of organization. To maintain the appearance that the film is not structured through “thumbprint composition,” Frampton describes needing to intervene in the system he initially sets up: “Simply attempting to keep an apparent progression from developing was probably a better control than assigning them each a number and taking the numbers out of a hat. As always happens with every elementary use of chance operations, that would have produced ‘clumps.’”102 In other words, systematicity and randomness are rarely pure.

“MIND OVER MATTER”: BENTHAM, DESCARTES, AND ENLIGHTENMENT AMBIVALENCE The impurities and absurdities of the Enlightenment’s top-down systematicity occasionally emerge in Frampton’s Magellan as the oppressive assumptions of that period’s colonial project. As noted above, in the 1978 Magellan Calendar, in Straits of Magellan, the one-minute films made in imitation of the Lumières’ actualités are named “pans,” short for “panopticons.” Frampton’s allusion to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon (and Michel Foucault’s reading of Bentham’s device in his essay “Panopticism”) signals his understanding of visual forms as an arena of potentially oppressive power.103 The character of the shift from “daylights” to “panopticons” and the ambivalence it expresses, linked to Frampton’s sense that the short films of Straits of Magellan began to “organize themselves—to my discomfiture,” is caught in a dense and fragmentary fabula, “Mind over Matter.” The text has seven parts, each containing fantastic, often grotesque characters, a mathematical equation, and complex language play with characteristic extended diction and historical allusion. Written over three years in multiple cities (the fiction ends with the note, “Paris/San Francisco/Ponce, 1976–78”) its fragmentary (and global) composition may contribute to its disjunct nature. (Ponce is in Puerto Rico, where Frampton filmed much of the Cadenzas and Mindfall.) This text contains two invocations of Bentham’s panopticon within what I argue is a dark metaphor for Magellan that invokes the intertwining of systematicity, accumulation, and violence that occupy the colonial shadow of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage.104 The seventh and concluding section of “Mind over Matter” describes a “becalmed” “barge” on whose decks a surreal, Beckettian tableau of modern

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abjection is depicted: “the stern rail is crusted with shit and vomit.”105 The barge is a prison ship, which can be read as a figural condensation of Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet (which captured numerous Indigenous persons during its voyage) with Bentham’s prison. In the fabula, the barge is being escorted by battle cruisers and guarded by a nuclear bomb: “Somewhere beneath us, a thermonuclear device that may be armed and exploded by remote control is our only warden.”106 The panopticon is named as the choice of punishment avoided: “the colony seems more distant, now, than the panopticon we were offered as an alternative.”107 This complex concatenation seems to replace the fear of visual policing that was meant to invite submission in Bentham’s panopticon with the contemporary but equally ominous threat of nuclear obliteration (whose logic of self-policing is mutually assured destruction [MAD]). The architecture of the panopticon as a figure of containment and surveillance, meanwhile, is replaced by the colony, here presented as an invisible point at the edge of an ever-receding horizon of expansion, perhaps a disavowed scenario of violence and control. Like the panopticon, the cyclical temporal structure of Magellan, what Frampton likened to an architectural sculpture in time, allows for a simultaneous containment and expansion of Frampton’s aspirations for his project, all subject to Enlightenment logics.108 Magellan’s voyage in 1519–1522 was a figure of both the powerful drive behind European expansionism and the ultimate limit of Western exploration: the expedition came full (global) circle in its circumnavigation. Frampton was certainly cognizant of the colonial and imperialist nature of Magellan’s voyage, describing him as “an evangelist of European commercial imperialism,” who was after “big bucks” and “pepper or cloves.” 109 He further understands the religious power dynamics at play; as Frampton says, Magellan “was also the bearer of the true faith wherever we went: he got hacked up in the Philippines for exactly that reason.”110 But for all this, Frampton retained an investment in what he called the Enlightenment spirit of “investigation and speculation,” admiring its “intellectual force.”111 Its rational aspirations are articulated in Diderot’s entry “Encyclopedia,” in his own Encyclopédie: To collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.112

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Although Frampton’s Marxism acknowledged the economic and political drives behind Magellan’s voyage, he felt a kinship with the high-minded intellectual mission of Enlightenment encyclopedism—even as he did not fully comprehend how the racism of colonial expansion would delimit who would be defined as part of the “human race.” “Mind over Matter” captures the dark side of the Enlightenment project, including the top-down logic of the summa—its push to totalize, to define, to reduce. The narrator describes the contents of the ship and the purpose of the voyage: i have not mentioned our cargo: a small box, or casket, bolted or welded amidships, made of quartz and bronze. By night it is lit, blindingly, from underneath. Inside, there is nothing more than a double handful of greyish pellets. They are all that is left of the brain of René Descartes, exhumed on the suspicion that it might still contain the germ of a truly complex thought. The outcome of the inquisition is still to be revealed; but the transportation of that relic is the secret motive of our voyage.113

If we read the becalmed ship as the Magellan project, this description of its cargo points to the heart of Frampton’s ambivalence to the project: the limits and arrogance of Cartesian thought, whose parameters and logic have circumscribed Frampton’s own investment in modernist investigation.114 The urge to totality weighs Magellan down like the quartz and bronze box containing the remains of Descartes’s brain. Descartes, whom Kenner calls “the arch-mechanic,” is the idealist villain to Frampton’s materialist leanings.115 The more complexity Frampton seeks for Magellan, the more expansive and ambitious the project becomes and the more uncomfortable questions about the Magellan metaphor arise.116 When the narrator states, “The outcome of the inquisition is still to be revealed,” it can be read as an admission of uncertainty—and certainly ambivalence. When it continues, “but the transportation of that relic is the secret motive of our voyage,” it seems an acknowledgment of complicity. At the end of the fabula, the narrator reveals that the prison barge is merely in Chesapeake Bay; somehow the narrator steals a helicopter and makes for Maryland, passing over the Library of Congress on the way, ending in a pastoral scene that is resonant of Frampton’s own retreat (in the early 1970s) to rural New York. Perhaps the weight of the Magellan project sparked this final fantasy of escape.

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THE INVENTORY: ENCYCLOPEDIC ACCUMULATION AND OBSERVATION Frampton’s materialism comes into play in a second reference to Jeremy Bentham in “Mind over Matter” that is less Beckettian and more Borgesian and points to another manifestation of encyclopedism. Here, the narrator describes a “practitioner of forensic medicine” who is faced with the autopsy of an impossible corpse that contains a seemingly random but certainly fantastic collection of 5,040 artifacts (e.g., “A ruby-encrusted Renaissance lady’s dagger, lost from the Vatican, lay horizontally on the left side in the ninth intercostal space, while a Cellini bishop guarded the prostate”).117 Among the collection, “The frames of Jeremy Bentham’s spectacles straddled a renal vein.” 118 The forensic pathologist concludes, “The nameless deceased was, in a word, a walking museum.” 119 The corpse-as-museum recalls another encyclopedic collection of fantastic objects: the cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer, that proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often composed of objects that explorers pilfered in their travels during this era of colonial exploration. Arnar calls these cabinets “a physical manifestation of the encyclopedia.”120 More akin to a catalogue than a summa, cabinets have an associative logic, since the meaning and status of the objects was not yet understood or possible to categorize. Cabinets preceded and confounded the modern separation of art and science because aesthetic principles were as likely to be applied as scientific principles of organization; items might be arranged in the cabinet by shape, color, and texture rather than by genus and species or object function. In the passage in “Mind over Matter” where Bentham makes his return through the frames of his spectacles, Frampton emphasizes that the corpse-as-museum is also a mix of art and science: “But not all are outright works of art. . . . I found the tiny porcelain dish (soon to be returned to the Panthéon in Paris) into which the Curies distilled the first trace of radium nestled behind a tonsil.”121 Like the encyclopedism of the Wunderkammer, the inventory is aligned with the catalogue rather than the summa and seems to offer a more open and playful set of options, emphasizing, to recall Arnar’s distinction, “diversity, plenitude, and particularity” against the “totality, completion, and synthesis “ of the summa.122 Yet here too the epistemological frameworks that underlie the activity of creating the inventory can undermine its apparent openness.

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Frampton had a text ready to hand that almost literally functions as an inventory of the world: Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the Magellan expedition’s circumnavigation of the globe. Frampton often refers to Pigafatta in interviews and even points out that the replacement image for the letter A in Zorns Lemma was Michael Snow turning the pages of “the Old French version of Antonio Pigafetta’s diary of the voyage of Magellan.”123 Pigafetta’s account is a diary or logbook and is thus a history organized chronologically, one thing after another. But it is dominated less by events than by lists, by inventories: of animals, foods, clothing, and customs of peoples encountered on the voyage; of transactions between the ship and these peoples, including lists of gifts exchanged between Magellan and various kings he met in the Philippines; musical instruments; weights and measures; buildings; body markings; and accounts of sexual practices, sacrifices, and burial rituals. There is a fascinating alternation of anthropological observation with rough narrative. (“We baptized 800 people; I fell into the sea and needed to be rescued.”) At several points, Pigafetta lists words of various peoples encountered on the voyage, a riot of nouns, verbs, and modifiers that takes up many pages of the diary. A sample paragraph of Pigafetta’s diary (written just after the death of Magellan) shows its highly disjunctive shifts of topic and tone: In that island are found dogs, cats, rice, millet, panicum, sorgo, ginger, figs (bananas), oranges, lemons, sugar cane, garlic, honey, coconuts, sugar, and meat of all kinds, palm wine, and gold. And it is a large island with a good harbor with two entrances, one to the east northeast, the other to the west southwest. And it lies in 10°, 11′ of north latitude. And 159° in longitude from their point of departure. And it is called Zebu. And before the Captain General [Ferdinand Magellan] died, they had news of the Moluccas. This people plays a violin with copper strings. 124

We are not so far from Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia,” closer to the spirit of inventory or catalogue since there is no pretension to a closed rational system, as in the case of Wilkins’s impossible new language. But in another sense, Pigafetta fulfills the logic of extractive capitalism, providing a list of commodities, where to find them, even where to land to carry them back. An important quality of Pigafetta’s diary is its difference from earlier exploration texts. As Laurence Bergreen suggests, Pigafetta departed from Marco Polo and Pliny, breaking “with a tradition that reached back to antiquity” insofar as

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his writing emphasized observation rather than attempting to conform to the versions of the world handed down by “revered figures of antiquity” like Ptolemy and Aristotle: “Instead of embellishing timeworn legends about the world, he would present phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes. And he would test the legends against what he actually saw and experienced.”125 We can recast Bergreen’s point as a contrast between the top-down summa and the bottom-up catalogue or inventory. Rather than frame his account of the voyage top-down to conform to classical canons, Pigafetta’s observational method emphasizes, bottom-up, the “diversity, plenitude, and particularity” of the inventory/catalogue, though this information could then be mobilized for a utilitarian purpose.126 Frampton’s investment in observation as a method comes from his early tutelage under Pound. In several of Frampton’s early letters, it is clear that part of his sense of what is modern about art is linked to an emphasis on observation. In a 1958 letter to Reno Odlin, Frampton considers the idea that arts devolve because they are slavish to tradition, through “accumulation of error, one generation transmitting its wobble . . . to the next.”127 Frampton lists a number of, at first seemingly unrelated, historical figures committed to observation: Agassiz insisted on precise notation of anatomy. Brancusi was a master of anatomy; Lewis did portraits in the style of Holbein. Pound reading the stuff for himself, 1900 circa. At that moment, Oxford became obsolete. Frobenius, who got about trekking into Africa and observing. He is modern, a method and point of view as of 1958. If we are to have an art of dance in this century, it will have to do the same thing: the aspirant to glory will be obliged to go back to observation.128

Frampton’s list of figures who “go back to observation” is worth reviewing. All have some connection to Pound, Frampton’s primary influence in 1958, the year that Frampton spent visiting the poet at the asylum at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Louis Agassiz was a biologist whose pedagogy of observation is captured in the “parable of the sunfish” that opens Pound’s ABC of Reading.129 In the parable, a student is challenged to describe the fish instead of relying on abstract or received “textbook” understanding. Frampton links Agassiz to Constantin Brancusi through anatomy, the observation of the body, although there is also a connection between direct observation—the Greek root of autopsy, autoptēs, means

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“personal observation”—and the sculptor’s insistence on “direct cutting” as a method to remove figuration and representational illusion in favor of an emphasis on form and material. In “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Frampton states that the fundamental photographic act “is a complex ‘cut’ in space and time,” linking sculpture with photography.130 Frampton also sees direct observation in the paintings of Wyndham Lewis, a potentially strange claim given the abstraction of Lewis’s early Vorticist paintings. But the invocation of Hans Holbein’s portraiture makes more sense, as Lewis’s late work, including his 1939 portrait of Pound, evokes Holbein’s style. Frampton finally invokes Pound directly, stating that he was “reading the stuff for himself, 1900 circa.” In 1900, according to Pound’s autobiographical account in “How I Began” (1913), he had begun his university education at age fifteen, reading “nine foreign languages” and “Oriental stuff in translations”—his self-learning (and unlearning) meant he had little need for Oxford.131 The last reference is to Leo Frobenius, whose Erdlebte Erdteile Frampton had been tasked by Pound to translate into English in 1957. As developed in the next chapter, Frobenius was an early ethnologist who undertook several expeditions to central and eastern Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century and who celebrated African art in advance of its embrace by modernist European painters and sculptors in the first half of that century. On one level, Frampton’s interest in these figures who emphasized empirical observation underlines the standard modernist desire to sweep away static convention to be open to the new. But on another level, many of the figures whom the youthful Frampton sees calling for openness to new information from the world were ideologically tainted by racist and reactionary politics, chief among them Pound’s infamous anti-Semitism and support for Italian Fascism. Agassiz was controversial for his adherence to human polygenism, a “discredited theory that humans of different races are descended from different ancestors” and are thus distinct species.132 Agassiz used photography to document slaves in 1850, ostensibly to examine physical differences between European and African people, but as Brian Wallis argues, “They were meant to prove the superiority of the white race. Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory of ‘separate creation,’ the idea that the various races of mankind were in fact separate species.”133 Lewis’s early support for Hitler (later retracted) and general intolerance made him a political pariah. Frobenius had an essentialist theory of

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culture, including a racist conjecture that a lost white civilization of Atlantis predated African culture and was responsible for the cultural developments his ethnographic study documented. In short, all the figures posited as celebrating open observation remain dangerously limited, their observations contained within the prisons of larger epistemological frameworks that closed off meaning. The nexus of Pound’s intellectual circle betrays a fatal, if familiar, search for a new world always already riven with the old world’s cultural hierarchies and racist divisions. Extending this point to the inventory, we can see that the apparently open enumeration of things remains circumscribed by systems it seeks to elude, connected to historical logics and epistemes with disturbing political resonances. Photography is an observational technology whose history is rife with ideological residues. As Wallis concludes of Agassiz’s photographs, they “call into question the supposed transparency of the photographic record” and “help to discredit the very notion of objectivity.”134 Indeed, in the same 1958 letter where Frampton celebrates open observation, he betrays teleological thinking when he concludes, “The modern movement should be movement toward something. Not just ‘movement,’ random agitation.”135 While this example illustrates the dangers of presuming that the open nature of the inventory can escape the ideological forces behind encyclopedic systems, it also shows the distance that Frampton’s Magellan project came from his 1958 devotion to Pound and his aesthetics. George Derk argues that the concept of metahistory that Frampton developed for the Magellan project “functions in opposition to the excesses of modernism as well as to the troubling political manifestations that arose in conjunction with it.”136 The highly evaluative tone of Frampton’s early correspondence with Pound contrasts with the openness that characterizes his interviews and writings in the late 1970s and early 1980s (though Frampton retained a sharp standard of what he considered the best art). I think this was a genuine dilemma with which Frampton wrestled in the Magellan project. He seeks, as with all modernists, the new but is confounded by the seeming inevitability of being wrecked upon the shoals of the old and its epistemological and political legacies. Frampton’s Magellan, rooted in its historical namesake, threatened to remain an Enlightenment project attempting to redefine essential limits. However problematized, Magellan still relies on a claim to self-consciousness perpetually

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attempting to end around its own foundations. But the intensity of this dilemma is also what makes the full aspiration of the Magellan project a fascinating set of contradictions. Magellan’s voyage seems a fitting, complex emblem for the problem of remaining circumscribed by old ways of thinking, even as one attempted fresh-eyed observation of the world. As an explorer, Ferdinand Magellan sought the new, but he also had enormous presumptions (many inaccurate) about what he would find. In the early 1970s, Frampton frames Magellan as an explorer, comparable to Lumière in film history, embarking on a grand project of epistemological expansion. By the late 1970s, in “Mind over Matter,” Magellan seems figured as a becalmed prison barge, and perhaps it is no surprise that the fabula ends in Washington, D.C., the site of Frampton’s own early prison of Poundian prejudice. Despite his exhortation to “make it new,” Pound’s episteme was closed.

MINDFALL VII While the colonial context of Magellan is not explicitly addressed in the films, its most direct allusion in its films comes in Mindfall VII. Brian Henderson reads the film in relation to Frampton’s sense of the conflict between the Western explorer and the territories he encounters. Mindfall was filmed in Puerto Rico, the site of Christopher Columbus’s second landfall in the so-called New World, with imagery of both lush rainforest and colonial-era buildings. The soundtrack is dominated, meanwhile, by twentieth-century industrial sounds; their sharp contrast with the images of nature and history is part of Frampton’s experiment with vertical montage, whose highest goal in Eisenstein’s theories is intellectual montage, the creation of ideas from image and sound fragments. Henderson elaborates on possible meanings in these conjunctions of sound and image: At the start of a cycle concerned with exploration, the moment of a European’s first glimpse of a new world may be suggested. If so, then the industrial and communications sounds against the images of an exotic, possibly “unspoiled” world speak perhaps of the first confrontation between Western technology and the new land . . . and perhaps confrontations between the West and the Third World generally.137

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The conclusion of Mindfall VII seems to be a direct commentary on Frampton’s relation to this colonial context. In the last minutes of the film, there is an increasing number of shots of colonial architecture and three shots of painted folk sculptures that seem to depict figures from the colonial past, one of a black man with a red cap and two shots of white faces with black mustaches and gold crowns. Next are two shots of woven frond walls filling the screen, in front of which a small boy rapidly walks—one of the only times we see a human figure in the film. The soundtrack is now silent, and the final shot of the film is anomalous in all of Mindfall I–VII: a twenty-second-long take of Frampton’s shadow on a white wall. The shot starts showing his whole body, camera bag on his shoulder; the framing becomes tighter as he moves in to a close-up of the shadow of his head, with the edges of the camera he has pressed to his eye sharp against the softer outline of his hair. For Henderson, “The filmmaker acknowledges the complicity in this confrontation of himself and his cinematic technology. . . . The fused shadow of filmmaker and camera, Western man and his technology become one.”138 This is a figure of implication, Frampton literally casting his shadow on the film in a historical site rife with colonial legacy. Even as Frampton was cognizant of the force of cultural paradigms and epistemological systems, he remained committed to attempting to escape the prison ship of his own preconceptions. In a striking passage from an interview in 1972, early in Magellan’s composition, Frampton says: I have all the time the sense that there are perilous random seas that surround all our discourses. We really are on little rafts, and maybe we make it to the Fiji Islands and maybe we don’t, but in trying to bring back something of the quality of the journey, we have got to talk about more than the raft, you see? If there is not something of the quality of the random seas as well, then you have essentially falsified it, right? You have, in the phrase of an old friend of mine, snipped off all the necktie ends to make it look as though the suitcase closes neatly. And that’s something I’m more interested in now as I’m perhaps older or more confident or less reticent or something like that, in getting a sense of that into my work.139

When Frampton writes this as he begins the Magellan project, he self-consciously senses a new maturity that will allow some “quality of the random seas” to enter the work, here through a gesture of openness that is different from the strident

Three frames from a twenty-second sequence at the end of Hollis Frampton, The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall VII, 1980 (original in color). Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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imperative to observation that the Pound-infused Frampton of 1958 cannot recognize as limited by aesthetic and ideological agendas. Rather than just describe the “raft,” Frampton seeks to “bring back something of the quality of the journey,” navigating the infinite cinema. Although Frampton seems to fully identify with the role of “explorer,” as discussed in the next chapter, he also sought models of art that encompass precolonial cultures, perhaps to attempt to evade the legacies of Eurocentrism that were so central to his intellectual formation.

chapter 5 Archaeology Millennial Allegories of Art, Representation, and Politics in the Camera Arts

I would rather . . . approach this thing that I am making, which is a cycle of films that I have called Magellan, to approach it as a kind of archaeological enterprise, as a sort of new stone-age kitchen midden, as a garbage heap.1

I

n this chapter, I continue to investigate Frampton’s metahistorical sense of art and tradition, using George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things to add an archaeological and anthropological context and millennial time frame. Kubler’s historiography of art, influential for New York minimalists such as Ad Reinhardt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson, productively synthesizes Frampton’s sense of modernism’s simultaneously formal and historical bearings. Kubler adds a generally unremarked upon but crucial dimension of Frampton’s art and writing: an ambitious (and sometimes problematic) anthropological perspective on art and human culture. This perspective underlies two archaeological allegories for cinema Frampton wrote as he was beginning to work in earnest on Magellan in 1972 and 1973. The first is a story that opens his essay “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” about the discovery of an “imaginary relic,” a massive collection of photographs in a sphere called Atlantis.2 The second, “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi,” is a fabula for an exhibition catalogue at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1973 that reports on the discovery of a collection of protofilmic reels of ideographic images. Both stories present utopian cultures that express the “historical necessity” of art making through the creation of either photographs or film-like images. A third allegory, written later in the 1970s, presents a more critical image of the archaeology of the archive: Edward Weston’s accumulated negatives figured as a pharaoh’s tomb of ascetic modernism. Through this archaeological perspective, Frampton situates the history of film within larger historical and cultural

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frameworks of art, representation, poetics, and politics, all connected to his metahistorical project for film and the “camera arts,” which encompass all time- and imagebased media. I end the chapter by linking this perspective to Frampton’s increasingly explicit materialist Marxist politics and aesthetics in the late 1970s, in which the work of the artist is understood as a form of cultural labor undertaking a social task.

THE SHAPE OF TIME If T. S. Eliot’s sense of history and tradition inflected Frampton’s understanding of the work of the modern artist, George Kubler’s 1962 volume, The Shape of Time, provides an even wider and perhaps more critical perspective, both temporally and culturally, for Frampton’s metahistorical ambitions. I have not been able to find a direct reference to Kubler in Frampton’s writings and interviews, but the web of biographical and bibliographic connections among Kubler, Frampton, and the New York art scene form a fascinating matrix that makes Kubler’s text appropriate to consider in relation to Frampton’s sense of history.3 The Shape of Time was an influential text for many artists and critics and coincident with Frampton’s artistic development in the early 1960s when he was experimenting with painting, sculpture, photography, and, eventually, film in New York. Kubler is perhaps best known for his influence on Jack Burnham (an editor at Artforum who refers to Kubler in his book The Structure of Art [1973]) and conceptual artists Robert Morris (who cites Kubler in his MA thesis on Brancusi, a key artist for Frampton) and Robert Smithson (who cites Kubler in several essays).4 In Frampton’s CV, he mentions Morris as a colleague; both taught at Hunter College and were active members of the Art Workers’ Coalition (1969–1972). Both Smithson and Frampton published essays in the same 1971 special issue of Artforum on experimental film.5 Carl Andre and Frampton’s 12 Dialogues date from October  1962 to September  1963, when The Shape of Time was published. In Andre’s collected writings, the two artists mentioned most often in the index are Frampton and Smithson—although I have not found a reference to Smithson in Frampton’s writings and interviews, perhaps reflecting some professional or personal distance.6 Kubler was an art historian specializing in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, and he taught at Yale; Frampton wrote “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi,” an allegory featuring precedents for film in an archaeological dig of artifacts in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, for a catalogue for an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1973.

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In the end, it matters less where these ideas originated than that they were circulating widely within intellectual and artistic discourse in the 1960s and 1970s. Kubler offers a theory of art history that expands beyond the “mind of Europe” and provides a sense of the larger intellectual context in which Frampton’s thinking about art took shape. Moreover, the cultural parameters of Kubler’s theory of art underscore Frampton’s own sense of the importance of art for culture at large, partaking of the same urgency of “historical necessity” he identifies in the Abstract Expressionists—for Kubler, art responds to cultural needs not only at the elevated level of high art but also from the more holistic sense of art and culture found in the archaeological midden. Kubler’s theory of art history helps provide an explanatory frame for how art and culture are linked, embedding art within a larger theory of “the history of things,” including science.7 Frampton persistently decried the separation of art and science, rejecting “a repulsive little cartoon in which the sciences are cold and unfeeling and the arts are warm and emotional”; rather, he admired the passion and aesthetics in mathematics and computer science and rejected scientists’ mystification of art.8 Kubler agrees: “Science and art both deal with needs satisfied by the mind and the hands in the manufacture of things. Tools and instruments, symbols and expression all correspond to needs, and all must pass through design into matter.”9 Kubler’s sense that science and art respond to human needs drives the dynamic nature of his theory and the necessary relation of science and art to culture. Ultimately, for Kubler, the history of art is a formal series of cultural problem-solving operations (echoing Frampton’s sense that art is driven by historical necessity): “Every important work of art can be regarded both as an historical event and as a hard-won solution to some problem.”10 But Kubler distinguishes between the making of art and the making of tools; science and art are not identical and they address different problems. Science is a form of “useful invention” that provides “new objective interpretations,” while art and “aesthetic invention” deal with human “sensibility” and “perception,” enlarging “human awareness directly with new ways of experiencing the universe.”11 Art, unlike the tool, provides ways of solving human problems of how to perceive and understand the world. Cinema’s ability to image the world and to reorder, through montage, moving images and sounds of the world helps us negotiate new forms of perception and experience. While Frampton was hardly unique in considering how cinema reorganizes time, space, and consciousness, what he offers is a grand but also humbly partial sense of the immensity and the radically

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utopian possibilities of organizing human consciousness through the moving image. Kubler’s global and millennial parameters of art and history provide an appropriately scaled lens; as noted earlier, Frampton once speculated that “a time may come when the whole history of art will become no more than a footnote to the history of film.”12 Kubler begins his book with a section titled “The History of Things,” in which he argues that we know the past through its artifacts: “The only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men. . . . Such things mark the passage of time with far greater accuracy than we know.”13 In his essay “For a Metahistory of Film,” Frampton echoes Kubler, emphasizing the importance of art: “Typically, all that survives intact of an era is the art form it invents for itself.”14 Frampton goes on to describe an effectively Kantian view of the purposeful purposelessness of art for the cultivation of critical consciousness and perception: As one era slowly dissolves into the next, some individuals metabolize the former means for physical survival into new means for psychic survival. These latter we call art. They promote the life of human consciousness by nourishing our affections, by reincarnating our perceptual substance, by affirming, imitating, reifying the process of consciousness. What I am suggesting, to put it quite simply, is that no activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended, and it has dwindled, as an aid to gut survival, into total obsolescence.15

Cinema can serve this function of disinterested aesthetic activity (wherein its very capacity to be defined as art derives from its proclaimed lack of usefulness) because, according to Frampton, film is a relic of what he calls the “Age of Machines,” superseded in utility by electronic arts, whose advent he dates back not to video but to the invention of radar in 1941 (roughly coincident with Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon [1943]).16 Despite its lack of everyday utility in the age of electronic media, Frampton acknowledges that cinema still possesses a different kind of function, a connection to the lived world: “The cinema . . . performed prize-worthy functions: it taught and reminded us (after what then seemed a bearable delay) how things looked, how things worked, how we do things . . . and, of course (by example), how to feel and think.” 17 The photograph and home movie, though lacking the

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immediate gratification that video and digital camera playback screens provide, had long showed people memories and acts as social record. Film’s mimetic qualities maintained instructional and educational functions, showing how things work. Educational cinema (and Hollywood) modeled “how to feel and think.” To these brute uses, Frampton contrasts art’s capacity to nurture humanity’s “psychic” survival by promoting “the life of human consciousness.” Art “nourishes our affections,” our ability to make connections, see relationships, and deepen our emotions. By the phrase “reincarnating our perceptual substance,” Frampton means that art takes what we see and hear and otherwise perceive and re-presents or embodies that work of human consciousness in the medium of the artwork. This is the root of aesthetics, the interaction of human perception with the object, that which is outside us but always mediated by consciousness. Finally, art has a fundamentally reflexive function in “affirming, imitating, reifying the process of consciousness.” By putting the process of consciousness into concrete, iconic form and by simply affirming that act of reflection, art contributes to humanity’s ability to understand and mobilize the work of consciousness for our “psychic survival.” In summary, if a holistic sense of cinematic history encompasses both film as art and film as tool, then Frampton has a clear sense of how film as art is, in Kubler’s terms, one of those “aesthetic inventions [that] enlarge human awareness directly with new ways of experiencing the universe.”18 The second way Kubler’s theory of history and art resonates with and illuminates Frampton’s is a shared concentration on form as the central focus for understanding art—but form always understood as propelled by cultural imperatives. Kubler’s historiography emphasized art as a “system of formal relations”; he sought to “draw attention to some of the morphological problems of duration in series and sequence” and, in so doing, to present “shapes of time,” according to the title of his book.19 What Kubler called “form-classes” generated a variety of series and sequences of cultural production over time—some open, some closed, some recurring, some interrupted, many lost.20 For example, consider the chair less as an object than as a class of forms that respond to the human need to sit. The chair’s appearance and design are less a matter of style than a complex response to a cultural need; as Kubler says, “We may always be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.”21 Importantly, the form of things can retrospectively serve for the historian as a symptomatic “portrait” of a culture. The chair is a form that recurs in many cultures—though not all (and Kubler’s is not a universal theory of culture). A functionalist chair, whether Shaker or

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Bauhaus, reflects a culture that sought purity against the weight of history, while the curlicues of a Louis XIV chair are doing different, more performative, cultural work. From what Kubler calls a “rubric of visual forms” will emerge a “shape of time” that corresponds to a “portrait” of a “tribe, class, or nation,” indeed any kind of “collective identity.”22 The photo series that Frampton completed with Marion Faller, Rites of Passage (1983–1984) literalizes this notion, arranging a series of twenty mundane commercial cake decorations to narrativize the passage from birth to death, the details of which reflect the American bourgeois myths and cultural values that attend that narrative. Magellan was a more ambitious and complex venture performing similar work, and it encompassed Kubler’s sense of the comprehensiveness of how the “history of things,” which includes “both artifacts and works of art” united “under the rubric of visual forms,” must include “all materials worked by human hands under the guidance of connected ideas developed in temporal sequence”—even cake decorations.23 Both art and science, indeed all human-made things, add up to an image of a culture that becomes “a visible portrait of the collective identity . . . given to posterity”; i.e., “a shape in time.” 24 As discussed in the introduction, Frampton compared Magellan to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, seeing it as “a work of sculpture that exists in time rather than space”—a shape in time capturing, like Tatlin’s conceptual work, “a number of different kinds of cultural shapes impinging upon each other and interfering with each other” as a revolutionary project.25 In many ways, Kubler’s approach to art history is familiar to us now. The idea that we can examine form for its symptomatic capacity to illuminate culture no longer induces howls that we are reducing art to mere sociology; the idea that the curlicues of a Louis XIV chair are doing cultural work at all is legible to us. As Pamela Lee notes, The Shape of Time is interdisciplinary, multicultural, and, particularly at the time of its publication in 1962, “enlarged the scope of aesthetic experience” by examining art in relation to larger “material culture.”26 But if Kubler seems familiar now, it is important to remember what constituted the dominant approaches to art history when Kubler was writing—and Frampton was beginning to become immersed in the art world of New York—in order to respect Kubler’s innovation and to see shared resonances in Frampton’s sense of art and history. Both Kubler and Frampton critiqued major art historical trends in the 1960s, including the “great man” theories of artistic genius that drove much

Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton, Rites of Passage (1983–1984): plate 5 (car), plate 7 (bridal couple), plate 17 (rocking chair), plate 20 (cake only). From the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Courtesy the Estate of Marion Faller and the Estate of Hollis Frampton. 5.1

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contemporaneous biographical criticism and iconographic analysis. Rather than celebrating great artists, both placed the concept of authorship within its relation to the larger culture and chain of prior historical events. Such a move illuminates our understanding of Frampton’s work as a site of creative dialectic exchange between himself as artist and the cultural moment he occupied. Kubler acknowledged the importance of what he called “talent” and “temperament” but insisted that “genius” was “a phenomenon of learning rather than of genetics.”27 The impact of an artist’s talent depended on what Kubler called a “favorable entrance” into a “sequence” of “linked solutions” to cultural problems; in other words, it was about being in the right place at the right time.28 Artists had to hope that their particular talents met a cultural need in the historical period in which they lived. When Kubler uses the term “tradition,” he refers to a history of artifacts made by artists—and remembered by a culture—in response to felt cultural needs. Talent will be invisible in a cultural moment whose needs and imperatives are unfitting and untimely to what an artist’s talent offers to that culture. Frampton, too, was highly critical of the cult of genius (and, like Kubler, traces it back to what the art historian called the “romantic agony of the nineteenth century”), favoring a conception of authorship that, in the earlier tradition of Eliot, saw artistic creation as a dialectic between the artist and the culture.29 Indeed, Kubler’s vision of artists’ relation to tradition places the artist even more at the mercy of history and its “chain of prior events”: The artist is not a free agent obeying only his will. His situation is rigidly bound by a chain of prior events. The chain is invisible to him, and it limits his motion. He is not aware of it as a chain, but only as vis a tergo, as the force of events behind him. The conditions imposed by these prior events require of him either that he follow obediently in the path of tradition, or that he rebel against the tradition. In either case, the decision is not a free one: it is dictated by prior events of which he senses only dimly and indirectly the overpowering urgency, and by his own congenital peculiarities of temperament.30

Here, Kubler figures the sense of historical necessity as a “force of events,” a relation to tradition that, whether obedient or rebellious, is “dictated” by a “chain of prior events.”

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Kubler also cites Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” essay and, like Eliot, erodes the image of the artist as a “free agent obeying only his will” in favor of the force of culture and the past driving an “overpowering urgency” in the creation of art.31 Writing to Reno Odlin in 1964, Frampton describes his “allergy to loose use of the word ‘genius.’ . . . Near to madness, sez the Dictionnaire des Iddees Recues, and to call a man genius in the past few hundred years is to abdicate a certain aliquot of responsibility towards the man and his work. The genius is ‘beyond the pale.’ ”32 The “responsibility” lies in situating an artist in relation to their culture, not in making them “beyond the pale” of cultural analysis. In addition to resisting the “great man” theory of the genius artist, Frampton and Kubler critique another dominant mode of art historical discourse in the 1950s and 1960s: iconographic and iconological analysis. This mode of criticism was determined to find symbolic meanings in art and sometimes wrote art history to suit the meanings sought. For Kubler, iconology is “devoted to the extraction of conclusions concerning culture” but at the expense of attention to form and limited by a bias toward explaining cultural “continuities” rather than “breaks and ruptures,” which, he says, “lie beyond the iconologist’s scope.”33 Furthermore, Kubler is suspicious of iconology’s exclusive focus on the “Greco-Roman tradition,” which betrays the Eurocentric tendency to apply a limited conceptual grid to global cultures removed from its sphere. Frampton shares Kubler’s critique of the art establishment’s then go-to mode of criticism when he satirizes iconographic analysis and its tendency to overlay meaning over form in one of the photographs in (nostalgia): This photograph of two toilets was made in February of 1964, with a new view camera I had just got at that time. As you can see, it is an imitation of a painted Renaissance crucifixion. The outline of the Cross is quite clear. . . . The roll of toilet paper stands for the skull of Adam, whose sin is conventionally washed away by the blood the crucified Savior sheds. The stairs leading up to the two booths symbolize Calvary. I’m not completely certain of the iconographic significance of the light bulbs, but the halos that surround them are more than suggestive.34

Frampton’s stark photograph is closer to a setting from a Beckett play than a “painted Renaissance crucifixion,” rendering the analysis hermeneutically—and humorously—excessive. Indeed, throughout Frampton’s oeuvre, the avoidance of

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5.2

Hollis Frampton, Untitled (two toilets), 1964 from The (nostalgia) Portfolio, 1971. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

symbolic meaning is thorough, reflecting his modernist adherence to form and material. A third way that Kubler critiques orthodox art history in the 1960s is to reject the biological metaphors that he saw reducing the actual complexity of art history to linear, evolutionary, and sometimes tautological shapes of time; e.g., the simplistic life-cycle model of birth, flowering maturity, fading decay, and inevitable death of art movements and styles. Instead, Kubler used metaphors from mathematics and physics that name energy as the basic force that drives art: “We are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind of energy; with impulses, generating centers, and relay points; with increments and losses in transit; with resistances and transformers in the circuit.”35 Unlike the linear time of biology, historical time is “intermittent and variable,” full of “events and the intervals between them,” and the “web of happening that laces throughout the intervals between existences.”36 In a line that Frampton would have been proud to write, Kubler concludes,

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“Michael Faraday might have been a better mentor than Linnaeus for the study of material culture”: rather, the pioneer of electrical theory than the founder of biological taxonomy.37 Frampton similarly uses metaphors from physics, making energy fundamental both as metaphor and substance of not only art but consciousness as well. Film and video share a “thermodynamic” of energy transfer: “The procedures of most of the arts amount to heat engines; film and video first entrain energy higher up the entropic scale” through photons and electrons.38 In his 1972 essay “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” he takes a welter of diverse phenomena, including narrative and film generally and everything from Mount Fuji to Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . (1946–1966), and abstracts them into “stable patterns of energy determining the boundaries of a characteristic sensible ‘shape’ in space and time.”39 All are temporal phenomena that take a shape— resolutely stable in the case of Mount Fuji, ephemeral in the case of projected film—and function, to use Kubler’s terms, as “the transmission of some kind of energy.” Frampton goes so far as to define human beings as “semi-stable patterns of energy,” explicitly connecting the energies of matter and the substance of art to the literally electrical work—the brain waves—of consciousness.40 Indeed, as early as 1964, Frampton dismissed the idea that artists mystically “transcend” the material world: “We are familiar with the fallacious notion of transcending, in art, the materials of art: fallacious on two counts, first because the pigment never becomes the flesh of the madonna; and second because it assumes that the material of art is ONLY paint. Is not the material of art, in good part, the energy of human thought & affection?”41 In a statement that is a rebuke to Greenbergian modernism, Frampton locates the “material of art” less in “pigment” and “paint” than in what he calls “the energy of human thought & affection.” For through the lens of science and physics, thought is material, electrical brain activity. Looking forward to the art historical imperatives he seeks to perform for film, he asks, “When that thought is entirely defined and perfected in the work, are we to believe that thought has transcended itself? Well, it has completed itself. Joyce does not transcend the page, he establishes a new norm for the page.”42 Like a Kubler cultural problem-solving operation, a great artist like Joyce, akin to a mathematician solving an equation, “completes” the problem and allows the art form to continue to be new. Frampton often called cinema a metaphor for consciousness, and Magellan specifically was meant to chart the contours of consciousness. Kubler’s expansive

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sense of art history as a matrix of pathways for energies over time provides important terms and parameters for this metaphor and for how the energies of art and consciousness can persist within culture through what he called the “web of happening,” the circuits of aesthetic series and sequence that branch out in response to human needs being articulated and met within culture.43

UTOPIAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ALLEGORIES The final way in which Kubler’s theory resonates with Frampton’s is its assertion of an archaeological perspective on human art, opening art history to a millennial time frame.44 Kubler approached art from his perspective as an archaeological art historian specializing in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts. Kubler’s long view—including the idea that art forms and civilizations can appear and disappear according to the vagaries of history—is echoed by Frampton, whose precocious reading in Ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, and Sanskrit, and his general encyclopedic erudition, primed him for a millennial perspective on art, seeing patterns in art and culture over thousands of years. Frampton was openly critical of the notion of “movements” within art history, seeing them as the limited constructs of art critics. For example, in a 1977 interview with James Broughton, he compares the artifice of Cubism as a critical construct with that of “structural film,” a film “movement” with which he was associated through P. Adams Sitney’s influential essay and of which he was critical.45 The time frame of most art movements is simply too short. One finds instead throughout Frampton’s writings a concern for a long view of history, which also imports a half-ironic, half-wistful sense of things being lost in history, including his own work. There are strong resonances between Kubler’s vision of art as form-classes appearing, disappearing, and returning (as early cinema does in Magellan) and Frampton’s sense that his work is bracketed within larger cultural frameworks outside of his control, including his fear that an incomplete Magellan would be a failure.46 Archaeological references and metaphors abound in Frampton’s writings.47 As discussed earlier, his catalogue entry on Michael Snow for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative argues, “If the Lumières are Lascaux, then we are, now, in the Early Historical Period of film,” saying that knowing Snow “is like knowing the name and address of the man who carved the Sphinx.”48 The cultural mosaic found in Ezra Pound’s poetry is the most important (if also the most problematic) early

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inspiration for Frampton’s anthropological and archaeological perspective. Christine Froula argues that Pound’s poetry was innovative for its broad global and historical frameworks, “in its inclusion of fragments of many cultures and many languages, its multiple historical lines, [and] its anthropological perspectives.”49 As early as April 1956, in Pound’s correspondence with Frampton, he gave advice on how “to save time in study of Chinese [language].”50 Pound asked Frampton to undertake a massive task, the translation of Leo Frobenius’s seven-volume book, Erdlebte Erdteile (1925–1929), an ethnography of African culture that amounted to nearly thirty-two hundred pages in the original publication. The question of Frampton’s progress on this translation project remains open. While his biographical “Chronology,” published just before his death in 1984, states that he “completed” the translation, in a 17 May 1958 letter he admitted, “Frobenius has advanced about 1/4 part of a millimetre.51 No evidence of a completed translation exists. Frobenius (1873–1938) was a German ethnologist whose research on Africa embodied the cultural contradictions of Western anthropology. On the one hand, Frobenius is lauded as “one of the first Europeans to try to reconstruct the history of pre-Islamic Africa,” motivated by a critique of “the West”; his historical collections and writings inspired twentiethcentury Pan-African advocates like W. E. B. Du Bois and Léopold Senghor.52 On the other hand, the history he reconstructed was invested in a nostalgic conception of past primitive cultures that, tainted by deep European racism toward Africa, still believed in the “race-power” of white peoples. As historian Suzanne Marchand suggests, Frobenius’s attention to African culture “provided the anticolonial movement, longing for liberation from western tyranny and Eurocentric history, with the energizing form . . . of myth on an epic scale,” but that myth was infected by the “distorted contents” of “his neo-romantic search for an unspoiled black Atlantis.”53 Marchand contends that Frobenius’s primary contribution was his material approach to history, one that was compatible with Frampton’s and Kubler’s embrace of the full “history of things.” Frobenius was dedicated to a history that enlarged ethnological study to a global scale outside the limits of a “Mediterraneancentred tale.”54 In his search for a “universal cultural history,” Frobenius collected “novel forms of historical evidence, including myths, songs, photos, drawings and all manner of artifacts and works of art” and crucially mobilized them “to create innovative forms of historical reconstruction.”55 Kubler considers all human products as material culture just as Frampton’s metahistorian must attend to

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everything produced on film, in order to write a Shape of Time or a “Metahistory” that can see the cultural needs and solutions being articulated through things and film. Pound adopted Frobenius’s term “paideuma,” which became important to Pound’s poetics as “the root ideas of a culture going into action.”56 As Pound scholar Tony Tremblay argues, Pound’s sense of the term is essentialist: “Pound used the word to imply the more mystical sense of a submerged complex of ideas of any given period. . . . [For Pound, paideuma was] the template of culture that people carry inside of them.57 George Derk, in his essay on the relationship between Pound and Frampton, argues that Frampton’s sense of history seeks “not to err as his predecessor had, and instead to crystallize history as a dynamic, complex process”; for Derk, “Frampton’s entreaty for a rigorous historicism, one based in both critical and theoretical traditions, presents itself as a possible remedy to Pound’s ramshackle approach.”58 If Frampton takes anything from Frobenius, it is not the essentialist theory of culture in paideuma but the grounding of historical conceptualization and reconstruction in film’s vernacular products, its archaeological middens.59 As noted above, in 1972–1973 Frampton wrote two allegories for cinema steeped in archaeological metaphors: a story at the start of his essay “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” and “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi.” In both cases, the stories imagine the discovery of artifacts that point to cultures devoted to the making of images, indeed cultures dedicated to art; it is the meaning of “art” that each allegory explores and expands that is instructive. In Kublerian terms, these collections of cultural artifacts articulate voluminous and mysterious image-making projects that have more speculative than instrumental value (like Magellan itself). These are metahistories that chart imaginary shapes of time. I argue that these impossible archaeologies evoke dreams of culture for Frampton that are impossible under the conditions of capitalism, a framework emerging from what he called his “theoretical Marxist leanings,” which increasingly preoccupied Frampton’s politics through the 1970s until his death.60

ATLANTIS “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” was a review for Artforum of two exhibitions of early photography in London. Frampton contrasts the two shows, one called “Masterpiece,” which featured photographs that emulate other arts, and one

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called “ ‘From Today Painting Is Dead,’ ” which “troubles itself not at all about the dignity of art” but rather “assumes instead that photography is a technology, designed for making whatever image the user pleases, without excessive fuss.”61 The latter exhibition, which he prefers, emphasizes photography’s relation to science and ordinary usage, echoing Kubler’s sense of art serving cultural functions. The review begins with a story about the discovery of Atlantis, an “enormous sphere floating in the sea.”62 (That Frampton invokes the legend of Atlantis could be another echo of Frobenius, who revived the myth, which extends back to Plato, in relation to the Yoruba in West Africa.63) In the story, initial excitement with the discovery fades to dismay when investigation finds that the sphere contains “nothing” but a vast collection of apparently banal photographs: “They have found . . . nothing. Or rather, less than nothing: they have found only photographs.”64 Frampton’s sarcasm was deeply felt; throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was highly aware of how photography was largely disregarded in the art world. (In the story, “Respectable institutions flatly refuse to have anything to do with the dusty mess.”)65 The Atlantis discovery is thought worthless for years until a scholar (“an obscure doctoral candidate”) in Rochester (the site of the George Eastman House Museum of Photography and Kodak’s headquarters) “stumbles upon a hypothesis” that the archive was constructed by a society dedicated solely to the creation of the archive itself: Our scholar postulates an Atlantic civilization that expended its entire energy in the making of photographs. During its palmiest days, the whole citizenry united in the execution of a great project, much as medieval towns had built their cathedrals or the men of Ch’in their Great Wall. But the Supreme Artifact of Atlantis was vaster than either . . . and incomparably more sophisticated. Briefly described, it consisted in nothing less than the synthesis, through photographic representation, of an entire imaginary civilization, together with every inhabitant, edifice, custom, utensil, animal. Great cities were built, in full scale and complete to the minutest detail, by generations of craftsmen who dedicated their skills to the perfection of verisimilitude: these cities existed only to be photographed.66

Frampton describes a simulacral society dedicated to making images as artifacts in which everything is constructed to be photographed—a prescient vision of our

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experience of contemporary social media. These artifacts are initially seen as an accumulation of worthless and seemingly meaningless fragments insofar as the meaning of most ordinary photographs is taken to be so obvious as to escape the “deep” meanings we typically ascribe to art. It is not until the overarching hypothesis is proffered—that the images are intentionally constructed as images—that the fragments attain meaning and a possible order as an inventory of the Atlantis civilization. In Ken Eisenstein’s words, the story is “a fervent fantasy of the archive.”67 In Kublerian terms, this fantasy is linked to the cultural needs that underlie photography: simulacral desires for preservation, stopping time, and creating substitutes for experience and the world. Taking a cue from Borges, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” tells a fabula in which mysterious phenomena—and the meaning of the allegory itself— become clear only when a new context of understanding is introduced. Not uncoincidentally, this is also how much conceptual art works: a seemingly banal object becomes legible through the information provided by the gallery didactic. But here, Frampton applies this logic to an entire image-making technology and to an entire simulacrum that comprises a world. Later, in the review section of the essay, Frampton notes, “Literally everything has been photographed . . . that is, since 1835,” when William Henry Fox Talbot exposed the first paper negative.68 Photography creates an encyclopedic inventory of everything, and the problem with everything is that it makes it difficult to ascribe value to anything. Familiar as he was with Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Frampton posits an Atlantis of photographs too copious to have the value of uniqueness—at least until its key is discovered, which restores the photographs’ aura; i.e., once it is understood that the images are all that remain of the civilization that made them, they are unique.69 It is a perverse realization of André Bazin’s famous dictum of the ontology of the photographic image: Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.70

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The culture of Atlantis literalizes Bazin’s assertion by making the model into the being, the ontology, of the culture itself. Frampton is less interested in Bazin’s aesthetic sense that the photograph “has the irrational power” to “bear away our faith”; indeed, without the interpretative key, the photographs are dismissed as a dusty mess.71 Rather, he is interested in the brute fact that photography and image making is so pervasive and so historically important. Both Benjamin’s and Bazin’s essays are themselves metahistories of how the photographic image, through its reproducibility and its indexical and iconic qualities, respectively, rewrites the narratives of art and cultures of image making. The conclusion of Frampton’s fabula stages a larger allegorical conflict within the camera arts between science and art: “And finally, as a crowning touch, the Atlantic masters fabricated a critical tradition to accompany the images: a puzzling collection of writings that is gathered into the so-called Atlantic Codex. It is precisely the opposite of its subject: the photographs are everywhere copious, exact, assured; the Codex is unrelievedly sparse, vague, and defensive.” 72 Here, Frampton is commenting on the terse nature of what until then comprised theory and criticism on photography; as he sardonically notes, “The text often lapses into nonsense.” 73 In his other essays on photography, Frampton points to the laconic theorizations of early “masters” like Paul Strand and Edward Weston. Of Strand’s writings, Frampton observes, “Three early essays contain, as it were, the Analects of Paul Strand; later items do not modify appreciably the views expressed.” 74 His later essay on Weston is structured around quotations that Frampton takes from Weston’s encyclopedia article, “Techniques of Photographic Art” [1941], published in Encyclopedia Britannica; he posits a “Weston Codex” that he warns will give rise to “a mean and frigid academicism.”75 These terse “analects”— philosophical extracts that attain the gravity of proverbs—attempt to articulate aesthetic principles that can defend photography as a modern art, but Frampton seeks to complicate photographic theory by insisting on its larger cultural valence. In his essay on Strand, Frampton proposes a framework for aesthetic analysis that separates an artwork’s “deliberative structure” from its “axiomatic substructure.” 76 The structure is “what is apparent . . . [its] elements and operations”; formal analysis can unpack its meanings. The substructure, meanwhile, “consists of everything the artist considered too obvious to bother himself about—or, often enough, did not consider at all but had handed to him by his culture or tradition”; these meanings can be unpacked through cultural analysis and, for unconscious meaning, ideological analysis. Frampton takes issue with what he

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sarcastically labels an apparent “golden age” of art history, “a time when art concerned itself with its structure merely: what art itself was seemed clear enough.” Instead, he asserts that “every single work of art assumes an entire cosmology and implies an entire epistemology,” an approach to art that, he says, “had occurred to no one.” Frampton seeks to widen the implication of photography (and other camera arts like film) through the assertion of a cultural, archaeological framework. This framework presumes a dynamic theory of culture: as he says of the “axiomatic substructure,” “Axioms are eternal verities—subject, as we have begun to see, to change on very short notice”—subject, in short, to the vagaries and contingencies of history. Frampton adds a parenthetical addendum to the claim that every artwork assumes a cosmology and implies an epistemology: “(I take it this is the Goldbach’s Theorem of analytical criticism).” 77 In mathematics, this theorem is called Goldbach’s Conjecture: “that every number that is greater than 2 is the sum of three primes.” 78 We might interpret Frampton’s analogy as positing that any artwork is composed of other “primes”—indivisible cultural elements—and it is the critic’s job to figure out those elements and raise them to awareness. Significantly, Frampton’s assertion of art’s epistemological and cosmological implication is based on a scientific postulation, which echoes Frampton’s conclusion of the Atlantis story: What is the meaning of the Artifact? . . . The answer rests, finally, upon the decipherment of two words, both hopelessly ambiguous, that appear on nearly every page of the Codex. Barring the chance discovery of a Rosetta Stone, we may never understand them, since they defy contextual analysis. The first of these is science. And the second is art.79

Frampton brings science and art together but also playfully asserts that they are “hopelessly ambiguous.” It’s worth noting that Goldbach’s Conjecture is a famously unsolved problem in mathematics; it is a theorem that “holds” for numbers up to 4 x 1018 but has not been definitively “proven.”80 Frampton sought to complicate claims to epistemological certainty, partly through the elegance and paradoxes of mathematics. For Frampton to conclude this allegory of photography with the intersection of science and art—or the unsettled disposition of the one in relation to the other— points back to the contrast he draws between the curatorial principles underlying the two exhibitions he is reviewing: photography as art versus photography

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as technology. Frampton’s preference for the show that incorporates photography as a technology underlines his expansive sense of photography’s origins and legacy as a chaotic and vernacular symptom of the cultural image-making impulse. Frampton still bemoans the lack of cultural value afforded photography in the art world but would not want to follow the path of early photographers who sought to mimic painting.81 Dedicated to photographic illusion, he admires the sophisticated ambitions of the Atlantis architects who “dedicated their skills to the perfection of verisimilitude.”82 Crucially, they also democratized their creation in terms of both production (“this was a masterstroke—the people of the fictitious culture itself were represented as the makers of the Artifact”) and collection (“there being no apparent qualitative difference between what is saved and what is discarded”).83 This profusion remains a challenge, an index of what I discuss above as the inventory’s open-ended nature. In the Atlantis allegory, Frampton inserts a theoretical “Codex,” imagining a field of writings—perhaps his own suggestive, allusive texts—that might dialectically capture the complexity of photography’s functions within culture.

“A STIPULATION OF TERMS FROM MATERNAL HOPI” While “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” concerns itself with the simulacral power of the still photograph, “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” is an even more elaborate and poetic allegory about film and language. Where the Atlantis story is an illustrative prologue to a review in Artforum, the entire text of “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” was first published as Frampton’s contribution to a catalogue for an art exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in which his films were curated by Annette Michelson.84 Frampton’s story takes the guise of a scientific report on an archaeological find from the eighth or ninth century CE: film-like strips of images were found in “granite vaults (immediately dubbed ‘archives’ by the sensational press)” that contain “three caches of proto-American artifacts,” including seventy-five thousand “reels” of strips of a “transparent substance.”85 These strips have square frames of 32 mm dimension that contain not images but “hand-painted pictographs or glyphs” that “clearly constitute a language,” which is named “]N[.”86 If the Atlantis allegory was a commentary on the cultural value of photography through the

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tension between art and technology, then in the allegory of “A Stipulation,” Frampton explicitly, if playfully, explores film as language, mobilizing linguistic terminology to connect them as doubly foundational to a culture.87 Elements of “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” are symptomatic of blind spots in the film and art world’s constructions of indigeneity in the early 1970s. Just as anyone using the myth of Atlantis risks importing the racism that infected its nineteenth-century revival, so a fictional archaeological “discovery” identified with a living Indigenous culture may be read as disrespectful, especially in light of the continuing history of anti-Indigenous racism.88 Frampton’s use of an Indigenous people for his allegory, however celebratory, appropriates elements of Indigenous culture for his own uses. The tale is a mishmash of anthropological references, naming the people in his story “Hopi” but locating them in what is now southern Mexico and inventing a “Mixto-Athapascan psycholinguistic community.”89 Frampton may have chosen the Hopi for his allegory given their history of resistance to cultural assimilation; as Steven Leuthold states, “The Hopis have consciously guarded themselves and their traditions against cultural assimilation.”90 However positive and relatively informed the portrayal (Frampton shows some awareness of matrilineal Hopi culture and its linguistics), he is still projecting his own conceptual concerns onto an imaginary Hopi archaeological fabula, betraying tinges of salvage ethnography (albeit salvaging an imaginary archaeological find) and elevating Indigenous “otherness” to potentially mythical proportions. Like other artists in this period, Frampton seeks epistemes other than what he understands as “Western” culture. For example, Frampton was likely aware of the 1966 Navajo Eyes project, led by Sol Worth and John Adair, in which 16 mm cameras were given to Navajo people to look for “differences between the Navajos’ visual patterning of their world and non-Navajo filmic conventions,” part of a larger structuralist anthropological search for visual coding other than a “Western” perspective.91 Despite these blind spots, Frampton’s story remains worthy of analysis for revealing his desire for a poetic cinema that could be imagined outside Indo-European language structures and in a precapitalist, nonpatriarchal society. Like most projections, it tells us almost nothing about the Hopi but much about the projecting subject and the cultural milieu of which he is symptomatic. When Frampton was writing in the early 1970s, the attempt to understand cinema as a language was the major project of advanced film theory and semiotics, with structuralist linguistic terms ascendant in the growing field. For example, Christian Metz published the essays that comprised Film Language from 1968 to

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1972, and his Language and Cinema was published in French in 1971. Frampton had essays by semiotic linguists like Roman Jakobson and Boris Eichenbaum in his files, and his interest in contemporary film theory made him much more cognizant of the field than other experimental filmmakers who were intimidated by or indifferent to specialized academic language.92 “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” is full of technical linguistic terms (“inflextional structure,” “proclitic and enclitic,” “euphony,” etc.), and the pictograms are figured as letters surrounded by brackets (e.g., “]XN[ = Heliotrope”), evoking (though not strictly following) the ways that phonemic and phonetic notations are marked in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).93 Frampton takes from semiotic film theory some basic principles of the film/ language relation, including its emphasis on the limits of understanding film as a language. For example, he states that “it is doubtful that a one-to-one dictionary between English and ]N[can ever be constructed,” partly due to the dynamic and performative nature of the artifacts, which are evidence of “a speech-and-stance language, with each component modifying the other. ”94 In other words, rather than a one-to-one translation of image to word or phoneme, meaning emerges from a performative and dialectical “cluster” of images; “the semantic unit . . . is not the single glyph” but rather requires multiple images to create meaning: “A cluster of two or more pictures . . . denotes the limit of a significance; where there are three or more, the images serve as points defining a ‘curve’ of meaning,” a formulation that evokes how the illusion of movement in film is created when a sufficient number of frames have similar but slightly different images.95 Frampton was then fully immersed in the montage theories of Eisenstein (himself influenced by linguistics), which insisted that meaning in film emerges dynamically and dialectically from collisions between disparate shots. Thus, on the found reels, unlike typical photographic filmstrips, “There is seldom any obvious resemblance between consecutive pictograms.”96 The dynamic nature of film, its basis in montage and time, is emphasized throughout Frampton’s writings, where he takes pains to distinguish cinema from the still photograph. In “A Stipulation,” the “language was made up entirely of verbs, all other ‘parts of speech’ deriving from verbal states. A ‘noun’ is seen merely as an instantaneous cross-section through an action or process.” 97 Just as Frampton would later describe Weston’s photographs as a collection of brute “nouns,” the individual photograph can be seen as a single static “cross-section” from a filmstrip, which is only fully articulate when in the process of projection, moving

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through the film projector. In the “Metahistory” essay, Frampton reverses the chronological history of photography (c. 1835–1839) being invented before cinema (c. 1895); rather, “A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of an infinite cinema,” another “instantaneous cross-section.”98 In “A Stipulation,” Frampton playfully mobilizes linguistic metaphors to extend his investigation of the specificities of film and photography articulated throughout his writings. If Frampton is riffing off contemporaneous semiotics, his interest in linguistics extends back to his early years as a poet and his learning of ancient and nonWestern languages. Pound’s influence is clear when the narrator of “A Stipulation” notes “the tenuous relationship between the ideograms of the literary Chinese and their corresponding vernacular.”99 Yet in “A Stipulation,” Frampton’s allegory of culture is far removed from Pound’s essentialist approach. Instead, Frampton’s interest in the Hopi emerged from his reading of the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, an autodidact linguistic anthropologist who directly studied the Hopi language and culture while at Yale in the mid-twentieth century. In 1970 Frampton included a footnote in his Film Culture interview with Michael Snow: “I had just then reread Benjamin Lee Whorf’s essay on Hopi, where he discusses the peculiar suitability of that language for talking about certain physical phenomena . . . and had sounded off on Hopi as hinting at ways of controlling some sorts of complex film material. . . . The whole business is still percolating in my brain & presumably will come up again in connection with later work.”100 In a 1971 discussion at the Millennium Film Workshop, Frampton says he was “entranced” with Whorf’s “account of Hopi linguistics” in relation to a discussion of a “Western view of time” and “metaphors for that way of thinking” that are “embedded so deeply in our minds.”101 Whorf is associated with the concept of linguistic relativity, especially the SapirWhorf hypothesis that language structures thought and that different languages structure perception and consciousness differently. Different cultures can have different paradigms, to invoke Thomas Kuhn, another figure on Frampton’s bookshelf. Later, Frampton was reading Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966, published in English in 1970), whose concept of shifting epistemes comports with Frampton’s sense of historical change; Frampton quotes from The Order of Things in his 1978 essay on Weston.102 In Frampton’s 1981 essay “Film in the House of the Word,” he imagines a “celestial mechanics of the intellect [that] might picture a body called Language, and a body called Film, in symmetrical orbit about one another, in perpetual and dialectical motion.”103 He projects this celestial mechanics from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Statement on Sound,” a text that speculates on the possibilities

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of sound and cinema; it is the imagination of an emergent realm of cinema, which is also the task of metahistory. “A Stipulation” finds Frampton superimposing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity onto the debate about whether film constitutes an episteme outside of language, which Frampton understands as the master code of culture.104 In mobilizing these archaeological allegories, Frampton was reformulating his sense of “historical necessity” onto his own need to grapple with the legacy of a “Western view” that limits consciousness. No matter how much we might want to critique his appropriation of (imaginary) Indigenous aesthetics in “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi,” it nonetheless reflected the desire of Frampton and others in this period to seek a perspective outside the “mind of Europe” or “Western” aesthetics. “A Stipulation” is an allegory of an imagined civilization dedicated to art and beauty, restoring the idea of “image,” both mental and material, to poetry as evanescent phenomena. While the opening frame of the archaeological “report” is scientistic in tone, by contrast the meanings evoked in the pictogram language listed at the end of the fabula are lyrical, evocative phrases that Frampton offers as “the few terms that I have thus far managed to decode”: e.g., “]XR[” is “The sensation of sadness at having slept through a shower of meteors” while “]RN[]W[” is “Hypnagogues incorporating unfamiliar birds.”105 Most of the examples evoke light and seeing, though some are inner perceptions, like “Delight at sensing that one is about to awaken.” The closest example of the letters being related to an existing word is “]W[]N[]T = An otherwise unexplained fire in a dwelling inhabited only by women,” which seems to abbreviate an ancient Saxon word, womut.106 The pictograms act as a condensation of image and language, with the force of language dynamizing the image, but this is a language that seems more interested in poetic evocation than communication. Recalling Frampton’s preference for a muse like Venus Genetrix as opposed to the frowning artistic fathers he sought to escape, it is no coincidence that the title of the story stipulates “Maternal Hopi.” Frampton is accurate in depicting his Hopi society as an agrarian matriarchy; within his allegory, ]N[ is a “secret language” restricted to women whom the narrator begins to decipher through “privileged communication with a living female respondent in Hopi.”107 Although Frampton was generally prone to favoring the masculinist codes of the modern artist that were popular in this period, he engaged with feminist film theory (e.g., Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”); was inspired by artists like Yvonne Rainer; and in his 1983 collected writings, Circles of Confusion, the

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selection of photographic plates makes a point to include female photographers, often paired with their canonical male contemporaries.108 He also collaborated with female artists such as those who appeared in his early films (Rosemarie Castoro, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, Lee Lozano, Twyla Tharp, and Joyce Wieland) and his partner, photographer Marion Faller. In its utopian dimension, “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” might be seen in relation to the first goal of the Magellan “Statement of Plans,” imagining a “cinema as it should have been.” As with the Atlantis allegory, Frampton emphasizes the dedication of this utopian culture to art and beauty: “They seem to have spent most of their time and energy in making and using the pictogram rolls, which were optically projected upon the walls”; this civilization set up elaborate architectures of light gathering and projection (mirrors and bottles that formed lenses) to articulate the pictographs on the reels.109 These imagined archives represent the culmination of obscure but resonant cultural imperatives, echoing the utopian ambition of Frampton’s concept of the “infinite cinema.” What Kubler called the “shape of time” provides part of a conceptual topography and a temporal terrain that Frampton’s calendrical cycle in Magellan sought to map.

EDWARD WESTON’S RIOT OF NOUNS In marked contrast to the evanescent archive conjured in “A Stipulation,” Frampton’s 1978 essay “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” presents the archive of ascetic high modernism as a funerary tomb. This third archaeological allegory describes the massive accumulation of sixty thousand 8″ x 10″ negatives produced by Weston as akin to the possessions found in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. Frampton’s main objective in this important essay was to work through the legacy of prescriptive high modernism Frampton admits he had followed but then escaped. In a complex passage, Frampton examines the control structures of this ascetic modernism but points to how these structures generate an inevitable excess that inundates them. Frampton structures the essay, as mentioned above, around quotations from Weston’s 1941 encyclopedia entry “Techniques of Photographic Art.” The authority of the encyclopedia underlines the authority of high modernist discourse that Frampton critiqued: “Conception and execution so nearly coincide in this direct medium

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that an artist with great vision can produce a tremendous volume of work without sacrifice of quality.”110 Photography is a “direct medium” in which the production of negatives consists of the framing and capturing of light from the world. Frampton explores the apparent contradiction between the economical “quality” dictated by high modernism and the “tremendous volume of work” that Weston in fact produced—a sheer volume that Frampton links to any encyclopedist’s aspiration to simulacral comprehensiveness: “A photographer as prolific as Weston enjoys a peculiar and appalling opportunity, that is, to reduplicate the world in a throng of likenesses and possess it entirely.”111 Part of Weston’s strategy, Frampton asserts, is to reject particularity in favor of making Platonic ideals of the world’s contents, “pure” ideals that Frampton likens to “nouns”: It is true, of course, that one cannot photograph all cabbages, but one can photograph one and generate from the negative a potentially infinite supply of prints, happy in the certainty that one will never run out of cabbages. No levity, no mere question of connoisseurship, can be involved in the selection of the precise cabbage to be photographed. It must be undefiled, incorrupt; no verb may intrude to pollute, delete in the slightest from, the fulsome purity of the noun.112

But Frampton asserts that this production of nouns, like the work of language when it attempts to comprehend the complexity of the phenomenal universe, is reductive: The new universe, furthermore, must be, to put it mildly, more manageable than the old one. The noun must be modularized, made compact. By the operation of an algorithm that would seem to derive more from Lewis Carroll than from Procrustes, every noun must be shrunk or stretched to fit within the 8 x 10 rectangle. Were it a question of preserving the physical bodies of things, one might imagine them hollowed, bleached, pickled, and put up in endless rows of little glass jars, limp and folded like one of Salvador Dali’s “cuticles.” But the taking and storing of likenesses is ever so much more compact.

On the one hand, Weston’s compositions capture the confidence of a modernist aspiration to purity and have the photograph’s simulacral benefit of compactness: better to amass 8” x 10” negatives than actual cabbages. On the other hand,

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Frampton asserts that even this gesture of reductive purity contains an excess that exceeds the orderly impulse—and contains a deathly principle. Frampton presents Weston’s oeuvre as a “funerary” archive/inventory that, while comprehensive, is overwhelming and impossible: There is, in the spectacle of Weston’s accumulation of some sixty thousand 8 x 10 negatives, something oddly funerary. It is as if one had entered the tomb of a Pharaoh. The regal corpse, immured in dignity and gilt, is surrounded on every side by icons of all that he will need to take with him into eternity: there must be food to eat, girls to fuck, friends to talk to, toys to play with; trivia and oddities to lend homely verisimilitude to that empty place; earth to walk upon and water to give the eye a place to rest; skies to put a lid on it all; other corpses to remind one that things have, indeed, changed; junk and garbage and rubbish to supply a sense of history; animals living and dead to admire, gawk at, or avoid; vistas to wander through when the spirit is weary. Certain comical perils attend the assemblage of this riot of nouns. Failing the accomplishment of the sorcerer, one is in danger of being inundated like his apprentice.

The assemblage of images, as Platonic nouns of a simulacral world, becomes, inevitably, a riot, a violent assemblage. Part of the problem, Frampton observes, is that, over the course of his career and sixty thousand negatives, Weston’s highminded production of art (“immured in dignity and gilt”) remains circumscribed by the ordinary functions of living, requiring images that simulate the needs, pleasures, and vicissitudes of life. Photography as a “direct medium” in touch with the world can only lead to a “tremendous volume of work.” Notably, in addition to everything else, Frampton insists on adding “junk and garbage and rubbish to supply a sense of history,” perhaps alluding to his own “junk and rubble” period of photographic production in the 1960s, when he felt himself apprentice to the master modernist.113 Weston’s high modernism emphasized the “purity” of its icons, which leads Frampton to compensate with dross. Frampton ultimately links Weston’s contradictory modernist aspirations for photography to the poetic legacy of Pound and Eliot that constituted Frampton’s own initiation to the modernist tradition: “Is Weston, a typical modernist of the generation of the ’80s, like Ezra Pound, ‘shoring fragments against his ruin?’ ”114 But whereas the generation of the 1880s constituted a tradition of modernists grappling

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with the collapse of order in the violence and changes at the turn of the twentieth century, Frampton proposes a more ironic and sanguine embrace of the ruin, proposing to play in its debris. Frampton détournes Weston to present the prospect of an ordered simulacral inventory of the world as a funerary riot of nouns.

CULTURE AND LABOR, OR “FRAMPTON’S LITTLE CONSCIOUSNESS PILLS” Frampton’s imagination of ancient utopian cultures dedicated to art and beauty is part of his wider interest in the social function of art. In a 1977 talk at Harvard University, Frampton alludes to the larger social and political stakes of Magellan as an artistic project that seeks to redefine the spectator’s understanding of the image culture in which they find themselves. He describes film that we “deeply care about”; i.e., experimental film, as a form of “criticism” that is part of “an attempt to understand the world that we live in,” noting that our world “is made up largely of images that come from the culture.”115 Frampton’s sense of the historical necessity felt by the modern artist extends to a larger critical mission in a simulacral culture; as with his Atlantis, if the world we live in is itself made up of images, then critical experimental cinema is its codex for understanding. As he writes in another text from 1977, the work of imagination and speculation in culture is led by the “work of art,” which has two senses—first, as an art object (the work as object) and, second, as a process whereby art performs intellectual and creative labor (work as labor): We live in a culture that really isn’t committed to speculation at all. It’s not committed to philosophical—indeed, not terribly committed to scientific— speculation, so that the arts, among other things, have had to pick up the whole speculative tab for the culture. It is only artists who speculate, who engage in more or less interesting, more or less fruitful, informed, or mad guesses about the nature of the universe.116

If artists are picking up the “speculative tab” for culture in their exploration of what Eliot calls “really new” art, then the imaginative work embodied in the Atlantis story and “A Stipulation” takes on more value. Under contemporary

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capitalism, this speculative work is unnoticed and often disrespected, so Frampton’s fabula must imagine ancient, lost cultures. In the same 1977 interview, Frampton discusses the “enormously large” influence of John Cage in two respects—first, his use of procedures “to reopen the notion of art-making” and, second, “Cage’s thought about the relation of the artist to the spectator.” 117 Cage uses reframing procedures and gestures, including chance operations, to expand and question what constitutes music and sound as art. In 1975 Frampton expands upon the implications of Cage’s compositional procedure of chance operations in “Notes on Composing in Film,” concluding: Cage has derived seminal work from an intentional misreading of the axiomatics that have encapsulated the artist’s task, contending that composition is the devising of ways to recognize, and annihilate, every test for distinguishing art from non-art. This is not to say that there is no such thing as art, or that everything is art; rather, it is to state that there can be no certainty, no final determination, about where we may expect to find art, or about how we are to recognize it when we do find it.118

In his interviews with Scott MacDonald in the same period, Frampton expands on the importance of poetry, “the modernist art that seized me,” as its ability to challenge unity of “decorum,” where decorum is defined as a consistency of appearance or “way of making.”119 Modernist poetry like Eliot’s The Waste Land could “shift decorum in every line,” which also made it “unintelligible” when it first emerged—at least until the culture caught up or was transformed by the poem’s innovation. Frampton points to what Eliot achieves with this formal move: “By shifting decorum, a work could also shift place, time, semantic context; it could drag in whole cultures by the bootstraps.”120 In Kublerian terms, these shifts are responding to a cultural need—here, the weight of modern transformations in culture that brought in multiple cultural registers (vernacular culture and high art) and expanded cultural reference to a global scale. The heterogeneity of The Waste Land—and Frampton’s films—encompasses the full panoply of language and image culture in the twentieth century. Frampton goes on to expand on examples of “violent ruptures in the decorum” of literature (Pound, Eliot, Joyce), painting (Hans Hoffman, Robert Rauschenberg), and dance (Twyla Tharp, Rainer).121 His account of a Rainer performance in which she started to “make noises: little

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mewing sounds, squeaks, bleats” electrified Frampton for breaking the primary rule of dance, to be “mute”: “What was important was not that she made the specific noises that she did, but that that single gesture broke open the whole decorum of dance. But again, what did she have to lose?”122 This last question wrenches the aesthetic question of decorum into the social realm of the art making that Frampton is describing: the period in New York in the early to mid-1960s when he and his fellow artists lived hand to mouth, made and showed art in precarious spaces, and felt they had nothing to lose in radical experiments with the basic materials of their art forms. But by 1980, in his short essay accompanying a catalogue for Patrick Clancy, Frampton articulates a critique that is highly conscious of how modernism has become “commoditized,” fundamentally connected to “the notion of the possessable” and “rites of ownership,” under the conditions of “high capitalism” and “bourgeois support accorded to the standard categories of art.”123 The “theoretical Marxist leanings” that developed in Frampton in the 1970s inflected his late sense of tradition; Frampton at this point sought simultaneously to critique and rescue the modernist legacy through a consideration of “postmodernism”: a genuinely paradoxical arena that confronts acute practicality (how is work to be made at all that cannot command the bourgeois support accorded to the standard categories of art?) and an intellectual optimism and utopianism rendered daily more unlikely in the teeth of immanent social and economic collapse (how may we define an artistic theory and practice that shall at once serve and enforce the growth of a society, an intellectual and artistic climate, in which we imagine we should prefer to live?) that, properly entertained, takes on the dimensions of serious dialogue.124

What is important for me here is that Frampton is both practical and utopian. His “intellectual optimism and utopianism” is grounded in his persistent concern with the practical world of being an artist, including the political economy of the art world. In his many essays, interviews, and talks, Frampton’s voice is both downto-earth and highly speculative, just as his films and photography demonstrate both craft and conceptual brilliance. This dialogue of practicality and utopianism bears on the second element of Cage’s importance for Frampton: the relation of art and artist to the spectator,

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what he calls Cage’s “social thought about art, which I have always found very humane and congenial.”125 In relation to art production, Frampton admires Cage for objecting to “telling other people what to do.” Instead of writing music that dictates notes to be played by an orchestra, for example, Cage uses modes of composition that give agency to the musicians or audience and engage chance operations. Frampton adapts this framework to film production, underlining the difference between artisanal and industry modes of production between experimental and Hollywood film: I have never made a film, and most avant-garde filmmakers have never made films, they were not willing to make themselves. The [film] industry still seems to work like a symphony orchestra, if not like a Detroit assembly line, in that making a movie consists mostly in telling other people what to do—and finally comes down to telling a spectator how to feel. Well, in general, I don’t want to live like that. As an artist, I can’t and don’t know how to live like that.126

Frampton links this shared resistance to “telling other people what to do” to a disdain for cultural valuations that separate art from other forms of cultural labor, that make artists into elites who claim “sanctity from other working people”: “I am very much troubled by any idea that sets art apart, utterly apart, metaphysically apart into an existential category that has nothing to do with other kinds of work.” 127 Yet how do we square this “humane and congenial,” anti-elitist approach to art with the opacity and difficulty of many of Frampton’s films, especially those in Magellan? Frampton’s sense of art’s social function was ultimately circumscribed by the parameters of political modernism in the film and art worlds in the late 1960s and 1970s, a theoretical matrix Frampton imbibed from colleagues like Annette Michelson at Artforum and then October magazine, in which Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan figure prominently. Frampton’s Marxism is found in references in his writings and interviews to filmmaker/theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov but also Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This political dimension was bound up in an avantgarde politics of form that fundamentally sought to challenge rather than “communicate” with a viewer. Frampton insisted that the protagonist of the Magellan cycle was “the spectator” and often emphasized the participatory relation of

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film and viewer. Here the question of art’s connection to “working people” involves understanding film viewing as a form of cultural labor: the “work” by the spectator would be rewarded with the expansion of consciousness that avant-garde film promised.128 But it would be hard work. Stan Brakhage articulates the suspicion that many avant-garde filmmakers had about “communication” in his 1973 interview with Frampton. Brakhage calls it “a very dangerous word” that he associates with authoritarian politics, as communication seems to impose meaning bound up in “standard cliché visions”: “I don’t really mean that I want to communicate with other people in that sense of getting my message all the way over, or I’d have maybe tried to become a politician. That’s what makes certainly a dictator—that absolute insistence on total communication.”129 For Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker shares an alternative vision of the world but through showing and not telling them what to think about that “sight”: “I wanted to share a sight. That’s not the same as telling ‘them’ about that sight.”130 Their contemporary Ken Jacobs shared this distaste for “standard cliché visions” but organized many of his films and performances as a didactic retraining of the spectator that confronted them with what Jacobs called an “indeterminate cinema”: “I hoped that an indeterminate cinema would force the viewer to actively reflect on what they see on the screen and not just be a passive receiver of images, but make decisions and judgments. I want to give the viewer as much freedom as possible to reflect on what they have seen.”131 Jacobs’s political passion exemplifies the contradiction in forcing the viewer to have freedom of vision and reflection. For both Brakhage and Jacobs, and indeed many experimental filmmakers, the need to challenge the viewer presumes that “standard cliché visions” create a “passive” viewer who, like the subject of ideology, must be shaken out of their complacency to become active and hence politically engaged viewers.132 Although the construct of the “passive viewer” has since been questioned on both psychological and political grounds, avant-garde filmmakers like Brakhage, Jacobs, and, to some degree, Frampton were all symptomatic of these presumptions of the political modernism that was endemic to the period. I argue that Frampton has a less strident approach to spectatorship that combines practicality and utopianism. In his 1972 interview with Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, which took place after Frampton screened his films to the highly engagé cadre of UK structural-materialist filmmakers and theorists in London, Frampton playfully articulates his modest sense of the political effects of avantgarde film. He rejects a didactic approach: “I find moral pointing suppositious. I

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do believe that every work of art implies an entire epistemology, it also implies a moral constellation. But I would feel I were committing a sin of pride, in forcing my footage to gargle out something like, ‘Workers of the World, Arise, or even Love One Another.’ ”133 He acknowledges being pleased that after the screening of his films, some viewers reported feeling alert to their own consciousness versus a habitual “passivity” toward the image. He humorously but sincerely outlines what he calls “valuable civic functions of works of art” in providing clarity for the viewer’s consciousness but resists overstating the spectator effect: But if a man can carry that kind of lucidity out into the street, and keep it for an hour, you see, then we would have Frampton’s Little Consciousness Pills, and life on this goddamned planet would improve by some miniscule [sic] fraction. I do in fact believe that that is one of the valuable civic functions of works of art, that they do tend to provide intimations of permanent clarity and order in the mind, and that they have thereby a rejuvenating, restorative, curative, nourishing function within society.134

For Frampton, this clarity of consciousness was not connected to what the viewer thinks but how. In his interview with Brakhage, Frampton interjects, “If your own eye insists upon your absolute right to feel different, then it must also confirm the absolute right of others to feel different.”135 Frampton invited and appreciated this work by the spectator but seemed more sanguine about its effects than Brakhage, Jacobs, and others of the period did. One consequence of this emphasis on how rather than what the viewer thinks is that it does not dictate the political “content” into the artwork, which made Frampton’s films seem apolitical compared to the more explicitly revolutionary films emerging in the many New Wave cinemas of this period. In a letter to Peter Gidal, Frampton admits some frustration with this complaint: “I’m bored stiff by it. I’m weary of being run numbers on by people who don’t think I’m political enough,” adding, “I have 43 arrests for demonstrating on my blotter, and 9 trips to hospital.”136 Like other artists of his generation, he locates politics in action outside his art. Frampton was actively involved, along with colleagues like Carl Andre and Robert Morris, in the Art Workers’ Coalition, whose major accomplishment was the New York Art Strike against War, Racism and Repression on 22 May 1970, which closed several art institutions in the city. But as Anna Chave notes, “The A.W.C. drew a distinction between the politicizing of artists, which

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it urged, and the politicizing of art, which it did not.” 137 Chave argues for the importance of using historical and contextual analysis to find the political dimensions of minimalist art, an approach that is also illuminating for Frampton’s seemingly apolitical work. The practical side of this materialist sensibility led Frampton to constantly be aware of the basic needs of artists and of the boundaries of the political economy in which they worked, including its structures of distribution and exhibition. An amusing example of Frampton performing a materialist analysis of the political economy of film viewing was his calculation of the amount of gas consumed for a single drive-in screening of Apocalypse Now—he calculates 390 gallons for 250 people to drive about seven thousand miles—which led him to assert the “notvery-secret affinities” between the film, petroleum, and automobile industries.138 One of Frampton’s lasting interventions into the political economy of the film and art world was convincing the Museum of Modern Art (New York) to pay film rentals to artists (in lieu of the cultural capital habitually offered), a consequence of his persuasive letter to Donald Richie, the museum’s curator of film, that detailed the many forms of labor being remunerated. Frampton was prepared to refuse a retrospective at the most prestigious venue for experimental film at that time.139 The utopian side of Frampton’s sense of art is found in his hopes for spectatorship’s rejuvenating function. But film viewing is also work, a form of spectatorial labor that can be linked both to Frampton’s sense of his films as participating in a tradition of modernist poetics that has “been advancing steadily since Symbolist poetry” and a broader politics of perceptual transformation. In his 1972 interview, Frampton says: If you are to enter into any kind of contemplative relationship with any work of art, or really into any phenomenon at all, you yourself must reach out and do work, and merge with it. And in proportion as you are willing to do that, of course, the experience can be rich; in proportion as you are not willing to do that, the experience can be one of blankness and complete paucity. . . . You have to bring a lot to it, as any independent workman would expect to bring his own tools to a job. So that was something I was interested in emphasizing: the amount of perceptual work that must be done in order to “get at” the work of art.140

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When Frampton uses the metaphor of the viewer as independent workman, the tools he imagines the spectator will bring to the job are knowledge about art and knowledge about film. Frampton rejects the idea that artworks should be already accessible to any viewer but suggests that with enough work, understanding can be earned.141 This figure of the workman is also part of Frampton’s class identification with blue-collar workers, whose golden age in American culture corresponded with the 1950s and early 1960s. Chave points to a pattern in minimalist artists like Andre, Morris, and Frank Stella adopting working-class style and interests.142 Frampton’s self-styled biography—in Susan Krane’s words, sometimes “apocryphal . . . but telling nonetheless”—highlights his employment in abattoirs, steel mills, burlesque shows, and photo labs: “I grew up on a dairy farm; I have worked in a slaughterhouse; I worked in steel mills while I was in college. They’re old stomping grounds of mine.”143 Frampton’s retreat from New York City to small-town Eaton, New York (population under five thousand in 1970), paralleled that of other artists who found relief from the expenses of New York City as well as space for studios and gardens. (Gardening was a particular labor of love for Frampton and his partner, photographer Marion Faller.) In his 1978 essay on Edward Weston, Frampton catalogues artist types. Some are saints and heresiarchs and heretics, but “for the rest of us who toil upon the sands and seas of art, we are just Workers, and our myth is still ‘under construction.’ ”144 Frampton was sincere in his identification with the worker, and he perhaps brings a different set of workman’s tools to the “construction” than do other artist types. Frampton consistently emphasizes the importance of labor at a material and individual scale in his writings. “A Lecture” is one of his earliest texts, used for a class at Hunter College in 1968. In it, he rebuts several conceptions of what a filmmaker does, including “communication”: 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 simply 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.

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But don’t you enjoy cutting flesh and bone? he asked them. I can’t teach men who don’t enjoy their work.145

The filmmaker, like the surgeon, must enjoy the manual process of building a ribbon of film just as the viewer must “reach out and do work” to “‘get at’ the work of art.” In a nonmystifying way, there is an emphasis on the basic material work of the artist and viewer. In the early 1970s, as part of his polemical desire to raise film to the stature of literature and visual arts, Frampton expected viewers to see films multiple times and bring knowledge to bear on interpretation in the same way that readers of James Joyce and William Carlos Williams, or viewers of Marcel Duchamp, or listeners of John Cage would be expected to devote time and learning to their artwork. In later years, especially in relation to the viewing of Magellan, Frampton realized that the demands on the viewer were impossible: “I think it offers to the spectator the possibility of a posture that’s so active in relation to the work that it borders on the utopian or it is utopian.” 146 He gestures to bringing its viewing to a human scale: It posits for the spectator a kind of willingness to see the thing through and a resourcefulness in reading and certain taste for the chase that has been suggested certainly as a goal for film, but I don’t think it’s ever been pushed this far. In that sense, it’s utopian. Obviously the successful utopian project—for instance, I think Finnegans Wake [is] an entirely utopian project—produces its own spectator, so to speak. It breeds a new genetic strain that has learned from the work how to read the work. . . . There is now a readership for that book and that readership has learned from that book how to do it, finally. It simply is something that takes time. One has to be pretty relaxed about it.147

Frampton understood the social dimensions and political economy of viewership and did not presume that anyone would see Magellan in its utopian format of calendrical film projections: “The last thing I would think about imposing on anyone is some ecclesiastical duty, as it were, of marching off to somewhere every day for a year to see what is typically two minutes of film.”148 Frampton was interested in then-emerging videodisc technology that could make Magellan as accessible to a viewer as a book is to a reader and saw a continuum between film and electronic media across the camera arts, all united in their aesthetic

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transmission of the energy of consciousness. Higher-resolution video formats led him to concede, despite “radical and in some ways painful translocation, . . . rather than consign the work to another of those ruined formal gardens, I’d consider finishing Magellan in video rather than not finish it at all.”149 It is perhaps in this sense that we can see Frampton embrace what he calls Cage’s “humane and congenial” approach to the social dimensions of art against the ascetic purity of modernist masters.

chapter 6 The Constellation

Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre (“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book”) —Stéphane Mallarmé, Azure: Poems and Selections from the Livre

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he last chapter of this book takes up the metaphor of the constellation. Not coincidentally, it is also the most speculative chapter insofar as it attempts to understand two of Frampton’s never completed Magellan films, the multipart films called The Large Cloud of Magellan and The Small Cloud of Magellan. Speculation is appropriate as a method to the provisional nature of the constellation as both a star formation and a figure of how we make meaning. In this chapter, I analyze a Frampton text from 1964 in which he invokes the constellation as a conceptual figure that emerges from one of the sculptural installation projects that was a precursor of Magellan. I take up the hermeneutic challenge by following a chain of intertextual allusions—significantly, from both language and mathematics—to speculate about the films that might have emerged from the production notes Frampton left behind. The speculation I undertake on these notes is analogous to the general method of interpretation any spectator might have undertaken had Magellan been completed. This method foregrounds several key elements of Magellan and Frampton’s art in general: an orientation toward process and radical ambiguity; a tendency to hermetic intertextual virtuosity; and, finally, a play among historical references that points outwardly from Magellan to, first, a larger history of modernity heralded through the project’s namesake, Ferdinand Magellan, and, second, a history of art and consciousness signaled through the central modernist artist invoked in this chapter, the symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé.

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That Mallarmé’s symbolist poetics were generative for Frampton is no surprise. What may be surprising is Mallarmé’s interest in cinema, as Christophe WallRomana’s historical contextualization reveals. The idea of the cinematic functions as a unifying idea for both artists and is central to the parallel tensions within modernist aesthetics that emerge in Frampton’s and Mallarmé’s final, never completed works. Mallarmé was part of a larger movement in poetry at the turn of the century that proposed to concatenate multiple and apparently disparate media and forms with one another. This concatenation culminates in Mallarmé’s utopian and incomplete project, usually called Le Livre, which would have included elements of text, music, theater, dance, light show, advertisements, and perhaps cinema itself. As Wall-Romana puts it, one aim of the work may have been “the cinematic projection of a poem for an audience.”1 Robert Fernandez, a translator of Mallarmé, describes it in terms that seem to describe Magellan as well: “The Livre manuscript appears to conceive of a world-making book in all of the impossibility of its true realization.”2 The impossibility of Magellan is echoed in these scholars’ sense of Mallarmé’s project as well: “Any textual edition of the Livre, as Mallarmé knew, could only be a flight from its intended material context of performance and participation, or a theft of that context.”3 The only option to this “impossible realization” is acknowledging “its state as a work-in-process, to be explored and experimentally treated.”4 Just as Mallarmé’s notes suggest that Le Livre was meant to be experienced, so Frampton insisted that Magellan could only be comprehended through the spectator’s experience of the films (themselves “performed” by the projector).5 My dilemma in this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, is that in the absence of so many of the proposed Magellan films, I am left with the conceptual scaffolding of the project and, ultimately, only a speculation about Magellan comprehended as a whole. A proposed solution that this book offers is to examine not simply films (as “products” of Frampton’s process) but all of the evidence in Magellan’s middens: letters, diagrams and notes in production files, allusions in his interviews and writings—in short, any product of Frampton’s consciousness that seems to bear on Magellan’s meaning. This is a historiographic problem that is not specific to this project, as many scholars have grappled with how to engage with projects left incomplete by artists.6 The incomplete nature of these projects keeps them in constant motion, coalescing in our consciousness as we sort through their shards, or in T. S. Eliot’s words, “fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

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Although previous chapters have considered Frampton’s sense of the relation of film to other arts, this chapter is perhaps the most synoptic of Frampton’s oeuvre, partly from its consideration of Magellan’s origins in a multimedia sculpture project and partly from the connection I trace to Mallarmé’s Le Livre as a multimedia spectacle. I end the chapter by taking up Mallarmé’s idea of film as déroulement, as elaborated by Wall-Romana, in relation to the final medium with which Frampton engaged during his life—computer languages and design— examining the final extant film in the Magellan cycle, Gloria!

FERDINAND MAGELLAN: MAPPING AND NAVIGATING STRAITS AND CLOUDS In his production files, Frampton collected extensive research material on the historical figure of Ferdinand Magellan, whose voyage was literally concerned with mapping and constellations along with other figures of navigation at the heart of the Magellan project. When Magellan set off to circumnavigate the earth, he had access to state-of-the-art European navigational aids and systems.7 Sea and star navigation each raise problems of mapping. At sea, navigators use the sun and stars as guides to map a grid of latitude and longitude over the earth (though longitude was the tough one in Magellan’s time).8 In the sky, the drawing of constellations, or star patterns, is another form of mapping. A variety of sea and star maps have been drawn by different cultures; contemporary sea and star maps have been systematized and a variety of naming systems used; e.g., Johannes Bayer’s and John Flamsteed’s designations for the stars.9 To state the obvious, mapping and navigation are as historical and cultural as they are scientific or objective. Three major natural phenomena are named after Ferdinand Magellan—one on the sea (the Straits of Magellan, which is a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific traversed by Magellan’s fleet) and two in the stars (the Large Cloud of Magellan and the Small Cloud of Magellan). Frampton named three films planned within the Magellan Calendar after these phenomena, and all are multipart films composed of short films screened over the course of the year’s screening cycle. The films in Straits of Magellan are one-minute long; 49 of the intended 720 films of Straits of Magellan were released. The Large Cloud of Magellan and The Small Cloud of Magellan were planned as fourteen- and ten-part films, respectively, of unknown length. As I discuss below, elaborate production notes exist but we have no film material.

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Strictly speaking, the Clouds of Magellan are not constellations but irregular dwarf galaxies. On the one hand, they share with constellations their status as stellar bodies that are named and understood to be composed of parts. On the other hand, whereas constellations are named patterns composed of discrete points that seem to outline iconic figures— e.g., the Big Dipper—the Clouds of Magellan are shapes characterized by their amorphousness. Antonio Pigafetta describes them in his journal of Magellan’s voyage: “The antarctic pole does not have a star of the sort that the arctic pole has, but there can be seen there a cluster of many small stars which resemble two clouds.”10 On earth, clouds obscure the heavens; in space, the Clouds of Magellan are the heavens, and they signify its immensity and shapelessness. Here, again, although Frampton seemed to equate Clouds of Magellan with a constellation, it contains as much obscurity as clarity. The hermeneutical ambiguity in the constellation is further dramatized in their use for navigation. Laurence Bergreen comments on the “celestial navigation” systems used by Pacific Islanders, which contrast sharply with Western systems and embody different epistemological perspectives: “Instead of relying on instruments, they developed a so-called star compass, a mental construct in which points along the endless, undifferentiated horizon were determined by places where stars and constellations rose and set.”11 The Western system of latitude and longitude attempts, top-down, to place the navigator on a grid as if observed from the heavens, now literalized in Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation that uses data from satellites above the earth.12 The Pacific Islander sidereal navigation method started, bottom-up, with the navigator: “The island navigator assumed that his proa [boat] was stationary, and the reference points on earth and in the sky were on the move. His reference point was the vessel, not landmarks, not even the stars.”13 Pacific Island navigation is at sea level, navigating from the perspective of the boat using stars, the ocean, and a combination of practice and lived knowledge handed down through generations. The navigator lined up constellations on the horizon with horizontal star maps; over the course of an evening’s voyage, as the constellations rose from the horizon, a different set of celestial marks would be adopted for reference.14 Bergreen notes similarities in terms of how space was divided (“island navigators subdivided the horizon into thirty-two segments, just as European compass bearings did”), but the perspective was inverted: “Rather than rely on terms equivalent to north, south, east and west, the island system named the points after the star or constellation. Unlike the European system, the thirty-two segments migrated with the stars, resulting in

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irregular bearings.”15 Yet for all their apparent irregularity, the Pacific Islander system was as successful as the Western system, as evidenced by the fact that Magellan’s fleet kidnapped islanders to help them navigate the Pacific, an emblem of the colonial violence enacted during his voyage. Bergreen concludes, “In the preliterate societies that Magellan encountered, the island system of navigation worked as well as, if not better than, the flawed European system, which still lacked the ability to determine longitude accurately.”16 The contrast between top-down and bottom-up perspectives is apposite for Frampton’s thinking about Magellan. For example, he frequently had recourse to the metaphor of the labyrinth, the experience of which is radically different from above or within. Even in his conceptualization of Magellan as a calendric cycle, Frampton was careful to preserve the importance of bottom-up experience of the films in time as distinct from (though inflected by) one’s sense of the whole. In his 1976 interview with Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, he addressed this contrast explicitly, revealing that in the “grand design” of the cycle, “there is a two dimensional map or diagram of the whole thing which, when seen from a distance with all its construction on a hexagonal lattice and with various kinds of coding marks (colors, numbers and so forth) . . . that notation, or map, is a very large rendering of the human eye.”17 But Frampton is more interested in “the local level,” where the spectator “sees the film locally in time”; this is where “the real, fictive structure of the film with whatever equipment and tools one has” is invented, “the actual concrete intellectual space within which the film transpires.”18 Frampton has a top-down plan (albeit constantly being modified), but he does not want the project reduced to this abstract conceptualization; rather, it is in the dialogue between the “distanced” and “local” experience of the films that the “the actual concrete intellectual space within which the film transpires” is realized.19 This presents an obvious problem when the never completed status of many films makes local experience of them impossible.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S CONSTELLATIONS Constellations are like any number of phenomena whereby humans construct meaning out of patterns found in random singularities that they observe in nature. Nature makes stars; people make constellations.20 What is special about the constellation? First, the points of light in the sky that are corralled into meaningful shapes are in fact immense suns and stellar

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formations; the shift in scale from the actual object to its point of light perceptible to our consciousness is one of the largest imaginable—if it is indeed not beyond imagination—and thus inextricably tied to the immensity of imagination itself. Second, constellations have tended to be connected to colossal cultural structures: myths and transcendental forms (e.g., Greek gods as figures in the sky) that signal the reverberation of imagination through a larger social and narrative network. Importantly, these cultural projections shift since European, Chinese, Indian, and Indigenous constellation systems differ; no constellation of meaning signifies alike. Moreover, constellations and their cultural, mythic referents can be thought of in both static and dynamic terms. Stars and myths appear immutable and stable but are fundamentally dynamic, mutable; stars too are born and die, in time frames beyond our comprehension, while cultural constellations change through history. Third, constellations have some important practical use for navigation, helping to orient us in relation to the shapes in the sky. For people literally needing to find their way by observing the stars, the stakes of making connections between individual imagination and shared cultural narratives can be life or death. In short, the cultural dimension of the constellation has epistemological and political consequences. For example, in many Pacific Island cultures, the reparative work of postcolonial cultural healing has often come through the transfer of knowledge of star system navigation from elder to younger generations.21 Although the figure of the constellation has a long history and a massive critical literature in poetics and hermeneutics, I will start by examining terms offered by Frampton’s own words that connect to the familiar conception of the constellation as a figure of open meaning making. In 1964 Frampton wrote to his friend Reno Odlin about research related to his planned sculptural installation, Clouds of Magellan, meditating on the nature of the constellation. I provide the quotation in full, as its broad cluster of concerns maps a range of aesthetic and hermeneutic concerns relevant to the Magellan film project: Chanced upon an article on the Clouds of Magellan, together with a star map of the southern hemisphere naming the constellations. Their names were unfamiliar and thus diverting, no more outlandish than those in our own hemisphere I suppose, but carrying less mythological burden and more of the zoo and the business district. The old puzzle came to me, of how the ancients drew their lines between the bright dots and came up with pictures of a crane, scorpion, bear, or just triangulum. God knows how long

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a man must stare at something before it stares back, but in a few moments I had my lever. A constellation is an “image.” The image may be nothing more than a roughly isosceles triangle, but there it is. But that image is not a whole and literal DRAWING, it is a group of elements that we construe meaningfully, as we construe the letters b-i-r-d, a constellation of unrelated sounds, as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayers. Or, a-b-c-d-& e as the alphabet, our name for an arbitrary grouping of a small number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of the sounds a human throat can make. . . . I think you will follow this line without further periphrases, . . . With constellations in the sky, some of the elements (stars) are very near, others very far away. Though they seem points, they are in reality suns or clouds of gas etc. of enormously varying magnitude, velocity, heat, &c. Some of the elements in a configuration are merely the apparent spaces between them (e.g. where is Orion’s left buttock). From any given point, they appear to form a flat pattern. We know the planes are tipped, the vertices separated by distances beyond our reckoning. Some large and bright stars, e.g. Fomalhaut, are outside any constellation. IS THIS sufficiently coherent to follow? Any single consciousness’s image of the world, [is] a constellation of points of varying weight, at varying distances from the center of gravity of that consciousness.22

Central to this quotation is the question posed by the “old puzzle” of how we see the image of a bear in Ursa Major or the hunter Orion in a field of multiple stars. As Frampton says, the constellation is an image, but there are different kinds of images. One he calls “a whole and literal DRAWING” akin to a representational image that iconically resembles the bear or Orion. By 1964 Frampton was well into his photographic endeavors and had started experimenting with film in 1962, so the idea of a “literal” image is likely photographic. But Frampton also compares the constellation to an arbitrary, symbolic code akin to written or oral language, whereby the letters and sounds of “b-i-r-d” are “construed” as “the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayers.” Stars, like separate letters and sounds, morphemes and phonemes, have minimal meaning by themselves (though there are exceptions, like Fomalhaut, a lone star). But we can form meanings in constellations from a group of stars, just as we form

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meaningful words from letters and sounds. Thus, as a sign, the constellation as image is both iconic and symbolic. The signifying units, the “elements,” are points of light that form two-dimensional patterns to the earthbound observer looking into the sky. In actuality, they are stars and clouds of gas with literally astronomical magnitudes of three-dimensional distance, velocity, and scale—indeed, they are four-dimensional, since the limit of the speed of light means that some points of light are residual, their origin star having long been extinguished.23 Seeing the stars that form Ursa Major as bear-shaped or seeing the mythological figure of Orion in the heavens requires both a sense of iconic resemblance but also arbitrary choice, as within the total visible star field, certain stars are chosen to form the outlines of the figure and others are ignored. As important as the points of light are the spaces in between, the intervals between the signifying units; as Frampton observes, “where is Orion’s left buttock”? Frampton states a condition of constellations that is central to the meaningmaking enterprise of art: “God knows how long a man must stare at something before it stares back.” At what point in our act of contemplation do we seek an order—an arrangement of meaning, a shape in the stars—that suggests a consciousness, cosmic or otherwise, behind these points of light staring back at us? Is it that we self-consciously make meaning from what we perceive? Or do we think we find meaning, patterns, and coherence staring back at us, already formed, within the visual or conceptual field? Similarly, in examining a work of art, whether it is abstract or photographic, to what extent do we make meaning from the visual data? Or do we think we find meaning, perhaps the intentions of the artist or the order of the noumenal world, literalized in the photograph? Or are other affective or perceptual registers separate from the activity of meaning making equally important?24 Frampton’s letter on the constellation concludes by invoking the consciousness contemplating a field of stars as a “center of gravity,” the ground from which this “single consciousness’s image of the world” forms a “constellation” out of “points” that are of “varying weight . . . [and] distances.” This connection reminds us of the central importance of consciousness as a field of inquiry for Magellan and its aspiration to explore “film art as a model for human consciousness.”25 The work of forming constellations of meaning also describes what would happen as the spectator watches films through the Magellan Calendar. While watching films over the course of a year, the spectator attempts to make meaning of films that range from one minute to several hours in length, guided by the calendar’s

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organization. Each film can be thought of as part of a collection of “points” of “varying weight and distances.” “God knows how long a man must stare at something before it stares back”—at what point does Magellan begin to stare back at the spectator? Even if we are staring at an incomplete project, staring at the spaces in between, staring at Frampton’s left buttock? Simultaneous with the quest to find an order, the figure of the constellation invites ambiguity and contingency. Another reference to the constellation in Frampton’s writing comes in a letter to Stan Brakhage dated 2 September 1972, wherein Frampton reacts with pleasure to Brakhage’s words: “Am positively reeling with bursts of new ‘stars’ seeking constellation.” Frampton is stimulated by new ideas, which need to be processed and ordered into constellations. But the pun on “seeking consolation” also suggests part of what is behind the search for constellation: the search for the affective security of order. The sculptural installations that inspired Frampton’s musings on the constellation dramatize some of the hermeneutic questions of contingency that arise with the constellation’s challenge of making or finding meaning. Clouds of Magellan and Straits of Magellan were two sculpture/installation projects, never completed, that Frampton described in detail in his letters to Odlin in 1964. Each installation was to have consisted of a series of complex constructions or constellations he called “didactic hoaxes,” a term Frampton uses, seemingly inspired by Duchamp, that set up perceptual games involving illusion (a hoax) that were also instructive (i.e., didactic). (Odlin suggests the term evokes “speculative realities.”)26 Clouds of Magellan was “to consist of a double cloud of didactic hoaxes, their elements separated and cast about in space, but all 24 or 25 of the hoaxes or constellations in the SAME cubic space. So that one may never at one time be able to see all of one hoax without turning around; so that one may have to look THROUGH an element of one to see another at all, &c.”27 A key component is the simultaneous dispersion and interconnection of elements: the viewer could not see all the hoaxes at once, but some could only be seen by looking through another one. This component is expanded in the plans for the sculptural Straits of Magellan (discussed in the introduction). The installation was to have consisted of three panels—two opaque, one transparent (a set of “straits”)—suspended in a room of didactic hoaxes: “a transparent slab or frieze about 40” high and 120” long, suspended between two opaque slabs the same size, and parallel to both of them. So that one sees one of the opaque ones always

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through the transparent slab, but [it is] impossible to see all three parts at same time, and impossible likewise to back off more than a yard from any of them. PiXrs on all 3.”28 Frampton describes the nature of the “PiXrs,” which include photographic slides and projected images whose light is “sprayed” into the space by a rotating disc of lenses. Frampton attends in detail to the materiality of the installation parts, which included “aluminum (an opaque, shiny substance that can be machined, made into simulacra of real objects, crumpled, etc.) and linen (which may be folded, pleated, torn, frayed-out, varnished into shape over armatures &c).” A complex set of “peepholes” would have opened out and closed down views of the piece such that it would be “impossible to see all three parts at same time” and “impossible likewise to back off more than a yard from any of them.” It needed to be experienced in parts, over time, in time. Frampton thus inscribed into the original conception of the Magellan project the impossibility of comprehension, in the sense of “comprehension” connoting an understanding that encompasses a totality. The constellation is thus a useful figure in relation to Magellan because it is a way to think about a massive whole without succumbing to the dangers of totality, including the risk of creating static, closed, reified meaning. He seeks comprehensiveness without the presumption of completeness. Frampton wants to preserve excess, to preserve the materiality of the world and of the medium. The constellation is also a way to think about avoiding an arbitrary conception of language by attending to its mimetic possibilities. An appropriate cautionary tale for how totality threatens understanding is Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” a frequent reference point for Frampton. It features a character whose memory and perception are “infallible” and infinite: “He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.”29 Yet for all the “richness and sharpness” of Funes’s mental experience, he was, the narrator assures us, “almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort” and prone to “senseless” catalogues and classification systems.30 At the conclusion of Borges’s story, the narrator summarizes the epistemological predicament presented by Funes: “With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the

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teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”31 Pertinent to the constellation is the narrator’s assertion, “He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.” 32 Funes sees all the stars in the sky, not just those selected for meaningful patterns in constellation form. To form constellations is to think, to navigate the dialectic of the simple/meaningful and complex/imponderable. Constellations are human patterns of order, fallible visual projections onto the matter of the world. Both Borges and Frampton share an engagement in art that brings us to the brink of a precipice from which we catch a glimpse of the complex totality and plenitude of the world. The constellation serves as a metaphor for those moments that manage to register among the plenitude and that register both in visual, phenomenal form and as language. Frampton’s interest in the constellation is finally linked to film itself, a medium that allowed for the building of “images” from “a group of elements that we construe meaningfully.”33 The construction of patterns from the points of light in a constellation is comparable to our perception of film itself as a moving image. When a film is projected, the strip of film is stopped briefly in front of the projector bulb at a normal rate of twenty-four times per second; moreover, a shutter flashes each still image several times per frame. The images flashing on the screen are still images; the illusion of continuous movement occurs through perceptual processes in our mind. The film object—the strip of film—is almost meaningless until it is “performed” by a projector and perceived by a spectator.34 The art of film is a play of immaterial light in a spectator’s consciousness, starting from a calculus of a curve based on the points of light mapped on the filmstrip from the constellation of points of light flashed on the screen and developed—through the manifold possibilities of montage of both image and sound—multiplying exponentially the articulation of constellated points of light and sound. In short, the moving image is to the still images on a strip of film as the constellation is to the points of light in the sky. Film appeals to Frampton because of its capacity for montage in consciousness—from basic perceptual activity to the dynamic construction of meaning from extraordinarily diverse points and fragments. Video and digital cinema are part of the continuum of Frampton’s expansive sense of “‘photo-media’ imagery” encompassing his compound term, “photo-film-videocomputer”; in digital projection, rather than film frames, an immense constellation of pixels is presented to the spectator through the additive process of digital light processing (DLP) projection.35

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A CONSTELLATION: CLOUDS OF MAGELLAN PRODUCTION NOTES In Frampton’s files, there are production notes on some of the incomplete films that provide clues to help imagine their process, structure, and ambition. In this section of the chapter, I survey the fragmentary remains of the two constellation films, The Large Cloud of Magellan and The Small Cloud of Magellan, treating these enigmatic clues as stars that might be constellated, connecting a set of documents, notes, images, allusions, intertextualities, and speculations.36 There is no extant film imagery, and we have no records indicating what the Clouds of Magellan films would look like; the “local” cinematic experience that Frampton seeks for the viewer is lost. The speculations below from these documents expand centrifugally into notional aspirations and condense centripetally into the minutiae of Frampton’s materials and method. I hope that this thought experiment of constellating a set of speculations from clues in the surviving documents will invite the reader to retrieve some sense, necessarily tentative, of these never completed films. In the Magellan Calendar, The Large Cloud of Magellan has fourteen parts and The Small Cloud of Magellan ten parts; these twenty-four parts were distributed in a semiregular pattern on specific days of the Magellan Calendar.37 A cluster of three other multipart films would condense around each Cloud, in the same pattern throughout the calendar year; as with so much of Magellan, the ordering is palindromic (see fig. 6.1). On the outside of the palindromic sandwich would appear two “pans” (short for “panopticon”) from the series of 720 one-minute films that constituted Straits of Magellan. The next layer is a Path/Bridge/Garden mirrored by a Garden/ Bridge/Path (both were twenty-four-part series and never completed). Directly bracketing the Clouds film are sections of Magellan: At the Gates of Death, the first from The Red Gate, mirrored by The Green Gate (both twelve-part series, completed). Although little exists in the production files about Path/Bridge/Garden and Garden/Bridge/Path, the extant film The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I includes imagery that Frampton shot of a garden featuring a bridge and a path, which suggests there was at least eponymous imagery for this film series. As discussed earlier, Cadenza I is part of The Birth of Magellan and invokes an origin story: the Garden of Eden. If the same imagery were to be used for Path/Bridge/Garden, it would have been conjoined with Magellan: At the Gates of Death, continuing the birth/death continuities that recur throughout Magellan.

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Excerpt from Magellan Calendar (version 1 December 1978), “Day 000 to 005 1– 6 Jan,” the start of Straits of Magellan. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

6.1

Frampton writes a suggestive note on one production document: “crossword pattern parity mat[rice]s derived from words in Magellan texts.” I will discuss the many “matrices” in the production notes below, but first we need to ask, What is a “Magellan text”? One possibility is that he was going to use Antonio Pigafetta’s diary in the film. Another possibility stems from a set of notes in the “Clouds of Magellan: Notes” production file, a set of photocopied index cards with ideas for separate films. On the first note Frampton writes, “[film = a portion of CLOUDS (?)]”; here and elsewhere in the production files a common notation recurs, “# (CLOUD),” a classification mark for an eclectic grouping of films. All of these notes describe ideas for film that have some connection to different manifestations of language. There are five samples in the file. One reads, “‘DICTIONARY’ i.e., a set of images defined in terms of other images within a closed set”; on the same sheet is written, “a film that ‘works like’ a dict’y.” A film that worked like a dictionary would continue the encyclopedic dimension of Frampton’s

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condensation of film and language. Another card simply includes a possible title in all caps: “DOMAINS OF A TEXT.” The third has the notation “language CLOUD = silent; people speaking into burn-in cartoon balloons, thinking in dotted balloons,” perhaps imagining a film that pictured the thought balloon conventions of speech in print cartoons. The fourth seems to suggest a sound film: “# (CLOUD) A brief lecture on language delivered in Pig Latin.” 38 The final idea for a film seems to illustrate a philosophical idea: “# (CLOUD?) Short narrative film of Aristotle’s first parable on causality.”39 Note that it also possible that these ideas for films were part of an earlier conception of Clouds of Magellan; as stated on the Magellan Calendar, it was “subject to change without notice.” Aside from this file of eclectic notes, a more sustained and coherent—if no less enigmatic—set of production notes points to Frampton’s use of computer programming to undertake a set of permutational tasks. The bulk of the production notes for Clouds of Magellan consist of what Frampton called “matrices” (see fig. 6.2). There are twenty-four spaces on each side of the matrix, one side numbered and the other lettered. Frampton broke down each matrix into quarter matrices, each twelve-sided; each twelve-by-twelve matrix was further to be arranged in twelve “layers,” effectively forming a three-dimensional cube with x, y, and z axes. There were to be 225 of these quarter matrices, each in twelve layers. Twenty-four is a key number for film, whose standardized rate of sound projection is twentyfour frames per second (fps). In Zorns Lemma, Frampton linked the number twenty-four to language in the central “word picture” section by using the twentyfour letters of the Roman alphabet instead of the twenty-six letters of English, condensing I/J and U/V. In the Clouds matrices, J is removed from the letters, continuing this pattern. The use of letters and numbers in mathematical and scientific notation is common; for example, the Flamsteed designation system for constellation naming uses a combination of letters and numbers. That there are 225 quarter matrices is significant; there are also 225 squares on a Scrabble board, a game of chance featuring a conjunction of alphabetical and numerical systems. In his matrix files, Frampton also nicknames the matrices as “Crosswords,” another game with letters and numbers. The quarter matrices were grids with spaces that were meant to be filled in differently for each matrix. For example, quarter matrix #1, layer #1, has a few dots filling squares of the grid (see fig. 6.3). Within the Clouds of Magellan files, Frampton left a document titled “Mapping instructions,” which call for rolls of dice—chance operations—to fill in spaces of

Full matrix for Clouds of Magellan. Production document, “Magellan: Matrices” file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

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the grid, with different conditions for the twelve layers of the quarter matrix (its manifestation as a three-dimensional cube). For layer #1, the instructions are clear: Layer #1 = cast 4 dice >2 white dice control ROW (across) >2 red dice control COLUMN (up & down) MAP their sums. If the resultant position is empty, fill it. If it is full, empty it.

Dice are also used for the “mapping of subsequent layers,” layers #2 through #11, but the instructions take on increasing complexity: A) if a die reads 1 map on layer 7 only B) if a die reads 2 thru 6, map on layers 2 thru 6

6.3 An example of one of the Clouds of Magellan quarter matrices filled in by chance operations. Production document, “Magellan: Matrices” file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

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C) Role of doubles goes on strike layer plus layer 9 D) Role of triples goes on strike layer plus #11 E) Role of double ones (snake eyes) goes on 9 (doubles) and 10 (snake-eyes) F) Role of triple ones goes on layer 8 plus layer 11 (triples)

Given this complexity, Frampton probably intended to use computer algorithms to generate the twenty-seven hundred quarter matrices seemingly required for Clouds of Magellan.40 In one production note, he asks, “Is there a program to find and mark redundancies in quarter mat[rice]s?”41 Frampton was often concerned with the ways in which random procedures generated redundancies and seemed to want each matrix to be singular; he may have needed computers, first, to generate the matrices and, second, to rule out redundancies. Frampton wrote on one note: “Battery for C of M [Clouds of Magellan] must be exhaustive.” Yet, with the quarter matrices in the production notes, he did not get far, completing twelve layers for only matrices #1 and #2. The most substantial set of matrices completed is what are called the “static, established” layer #12 grids; he filled all 225. Layer #12 grids have internally symmetrical patterns of dots (see fig. 6.4). But in the quarter matrices he filled out for matrices #1 and #2, the layers #1 through #11 seem to have random patterns. Frampton highlighted instructions for how these patterns were to be “classified” according to eight categories (presumably after spaces had been filled or emptied); at the bottom of this production note, he has written and circled, “try to find + name characteristic ‘constellations’” (see fig. 6.5). Here, the central hermeneutic game of the constellation reappears: each randomly generated grid of data points presents an opportunity to “find” and “name” a constellation that can be classified and ordered according to patterns that emerge from the parameters and principles of the game. One possible approach to classifying these grids of data points might follow the allusion in the fifth classification category to seki, a term from the East Asian board game Go.42 Seki is “a Japanese term [敊] for an impasse that cannot be resolved into simple life and death. It is sometimes translated as ‘mutual life.’ ”43 Like a stalemate in chess, it is a point of pause, where one can neither live nor die. This is appropriate to the Magellan cycle, which has a cyclical structure in which The Birth of Magellan and The Death of Magellan overlap and endlessly return. Borges wrote a series of poems on games, including one on Go. Borges describes the Go board as a “labyrinth” and “a map of the universe”: “Its black and white variations / exhaust

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6.4 An example of one of the symmetrical layer #12 Clouds of Magellan quarter matrices. Production document, “Magellan: Matrices” file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

time.”44 As I seek to comprehend the incomplete Clouds, I am also at a seki, an impasse, though I am attempting to maintain “mutual life” for the concept of the film and the speculative spectator. At the top of the full matrix production document for Clouds of Magellan was a master template for each matrix + layer (see fig. 6.2). This template had a number of blanks to be filled in; the last was “constellations,” with six blanks indicated: a), b), c), d), e), and f). Frampton uses the terms “mapping” and “territories” to describe the filled-in spaces on the matrices; the navigational metaphor of Magellan’s voyage is continued in the constellations populating the Clouds of Magellan production document coordinates.45 The category “Spin” on the template is both a visual and mathematical parameter in relation to rotational and reflectional symmetry. The abbreviations “CW” and “CCW” above refer to clockwise and counterclockwise. Frampton elsewhere in the Clouds notes lists a parameter as “dexto— + laevoratory.” In optics, “if the light rotates clockwise as it approaches

Instructions to classify Clouds of Magellan quarter matrices as “characteristic ‘constellations.’ ” Production document, “Magellan: Matrices” file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

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an observer, this is known as dextrorotation (rotation to the right); if it rotates counterclockwise, then it exhibits levorotation (rotation to the left).”46 Although we have no clear sense of what the Clouds films would have looked like, it is tempting to speculate that these constellated grids with optical parameters pointed to abstract imagery. One possibility, though likely too literal, would have been for Frampton to animate these matrix sheet grids, forming a set of possibly animated constellations. Each extant quarter matrix is on a template sheet, with numbered “matrix #” and “layer #” and a centered 12″ x 12″ grid, on a hole-punched sheet of paper, a typical format for animation sheets. A more likely possibility is that the grids were instructions to indicate visual parameters for the computer animation of the grids. One of the software programs Frampton designed with the students of the Digital Arts Lab at SUNY Buffalo was IMAGO: in his description, “a computer language that includes functions to perform film or video animation, and implements many that are possible only to painting.”47 Frampton died before his computer lab could generate much imagery.48 Another clue to the visual elements suggests that the films would utilize both black-and-white and color. In the production notes, Frampton presents several grids that indicate parameters titled “elements” of “color” and “B/W” (black-andwhite) and “operations” of “aspect” and “hue” (see fig. 6.6).49 For “hues” he crosses out “RGBCMY” in favor of the sequence “MRYGCB,” which would correspond to the color parameters for film: magenta, red, yellow, green, cyan, and blue.50 But as he elaborates on elements of color and black-and-white, he uses terminology from both film and xerography. On the bottom half of the page, he mentions, for “B/W aspects,” “Xerox” parameters like “isodensity,” “screener,” and “edge reduction” and then uses film terms for “color,” “normal,” “neg[ative] straight,” “b/p [bi-packed] neg[ative] masked,” and “hi.con [high contrast film stock] highlight masked.” Frampton was an early pioneer in Xerox art, participating in the conference “Explorations in Color Xerography: The Electrostatic Print as a Creative Medium” at Colgate University in 1979 and completing several series of Xerox art, including By Any Other Name (1979), a serial artwork that performed combinatory language operations on food label titles: a label for Blue Boy Chili Beans would be color-xeroxed and titled “Chili Bean Brand Blue Boys.” The final trail of breadcrumbs I follow has to do with the recurrence of the number six in the Clouds of Magellan production notes. The lists of “elements” and “operations” number six, while Frampton presents six blanks indicated for the “constellations” on each matrix template: a), b), c), d), e), and f). The standard die

Notes on color and black-and-white, including terms from film stocks and xerography, in Clouds of Magellan quarter matrices. Production document, “Magellan: Matrices” file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives. 6.6

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that would be used to follow Frampton’s “mapping instructions” for the matrices have six sides. Another clue that the matrices were instructions for purely abstract forms of light play using computers is the following instruction: “On final notation: separate lines into 6-bit binary numbers and translate to decimal 0– 63.” On the 24″ x 24″ full matrix worksheets, Frampton had further segmented the quarter matrices into rows of six binaries that could have translated to decimal numbers and possible digital imagery.51 Within the larger Magellan, hexagons are prominent, appearing within recurring swirling imagery in Magellan: At the Gates of Death but also as a diagram that appears in multiple sizes in the production files. The “Sixth Dream” in The Birth of Magellan in the Magellan Calendar is named Hexachordum Apollinis: “Divided in six arias, Hexachordum Apollinis is generally regarded as one of the pinnacles of Johann Pachelbel’s oeuvre.”52 Finally, in Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” a reference that appears often in Frampton’s essays and interviews, the rooms in the story are hexagonal, forming a honeycomb of knowledge. I described this section of the chapter as a thought experiment, in which I use procedures of association and cross-reference to speculate on possible parameters of a never completed film from clues left in the production files. All these clues leave us suspended, between words and numbers, language and mathematics, chance and determination—at an impasse. These ambiguities also characterize another of Frampton’s touchstones, Mallarmé’s farsighted poem Un coup de dés.

UN COUP DE DÉS The presence of chance operations involving dice, an encounter with a mysterious constellation, framed within a metaphorical narrative of a mariner on a fraught sea journey—all conjure allusions connecting Frampton’s Magellan to another modernist masterwork, Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) (1896). Alex Ross describes “an almost theatrical scene” in the poem: After a shipwreck, a poet, or Master, bobs with his head above water, holding a pair of dice that he hesitates to roll (on what surface we do not know), even though the act would generate a “unique Number” in which some cosmic secret might be hidden. The Master vanishes, and in his wake a siren

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rises, beating her tail against the rock that caused the wreck. She seems to bring about a mystical transmutation: in these indefinite regions of the wave wherein all reality is dissolved At the end, a constellation of seven stars shines overhead—either the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper, both of which can be glimpsed in the layout of the final pages.53

Frampton brings Mallarmé and Magellan together in numerous ways. Ferdinand Magellan was another mariner who vanished during a journey. (He died on the island of Mactan.) Magellan’s sea voyage into “indefinite regions” yielded the naming of two quasi-constellations, the Large and Small Clouds of Magellan. Frampton evokes Mallarmé through wordplay with two titles in the Magellan Calendar. The last film title in The Birth of Magellan is MAGELLAN IS BUT POORLY ARMED. This translates into French as “Magellan n’est que mal armé,” which translates back into English, “Magellan is none other than Mallarmé.”54 In a production note dated “Paris, 9/11/76,” Frampton indicates the “opening burn-in title for Magellan mal arme” is “the die is cast,” underlining the connection to Un coup de dés. Another note suggests the last burn-in title would be “ ‘what the monument’ (now do you understand what the . . .?),” a humorous underlining of symbolist ambiguity and an undercutting of modernist monumentality characteristic of many late Magellan films.55 Second, Frampton titles one of the films in the multipart The Birth of Magellan, Master Magellan in the Hall of Mirrors. Throughout his journal, Pigafetta referred to his captain as Master Magellan, echoing the Master of Mallarmé’s poem. In the archive of film material shot for Magellan but not released, Frampton wields his Bolex in a funhouse mirror.56 Frampton refers to Mallarmé often in interviews and to Un coup de dés in two of his writings.57 First, in a dialogue that he wrote in 1963 with Carl Andre, Frampton gave some examples of artists linking poetry and painting. He mentions Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and “Mallarmé’s Coup de Dées (you can push around type on the page the way you can push pigment paste around on canvas),” referring to the importance of the layout of the text on the page, including variations in font size, margins, and letter density.58 One of the central innovations of Mallarmé’s poem is its insistence on the importance of the material substrates of language, both sound and graphic marks. Mallarmé, in his preface to Un coup de dés, first compares the “blanks” in page layout to “a surrounding

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Film still from unreleased production footage, perhaps intended for a film title indicated for The Birth of Magellan, “Master Magellan in the Hall of Mirrors,” date unknown. Image prepared by Emily Davis. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives. 6.7

silence,” but he also acknowledges the empty space as image.59 “Type on the page” and white space are part of the visual articulations of the page. Word and space, or as Mallarmé calls them in the preface to the poem, “Le texte et le papier,” alternate, playing out in visual sequence, almost like a series of film frames separated by a shutter. Mallarmé says the poem is both available as “a simultaneous vision of the Page” and in the “ ‘spacing of reading,’ reflecting ‘the mobility of writing.’ ” We can see the page, but when we read, it involves space and text in motion. The words might be seen as falling onto or from the page. Crucially, within Un coup de dés, these aural and visual elements of language are as important as the meaning of language. But the space as image and language as type are not simply aesthetic phenomena. They also express thought; as Mallarmé says, they are “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes.” The visual layout of the page and its sonic dimensions inflect the meanings of the poem’s words and language functions: prismatic, fleeting, variable. For Frampton, a filmmaker interested in how

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the space/time of the illusionist film image and language circle each other, Un coup de dés is a critical intervention in modernist art and thought. A second reference to Mallarmé’s poem in Frampton’s writings occurs in his essay on Edward Weston, where Frampton comments on the relation between photographs, text, and white space in publications: “In fact, most of the photographic images we see are not photographs at all, but halftone reproductions accompanying text, indentured servants in the house of the word, usurping that white space of the page which Mallarmé was at such terrible pains to establish as an equivalent to the emptiness of blue air occasionally traversed by the projectiles of spoken utterance.”60 Words are marks on a white page; spoken utterance is a projectile in the emptiness of blue air, a reference to Mallarmé’s famous 1864 poem “L’Azure.” In his long biographical interview with Scott MacDonald, Frampton describes several early lost or destroyed films. One had the title Clouds Like White Sheep, in the description of which he invokes Mallarmé’s “azure”: A huge film in black-and-white negative, all clouds and skies that dissolved from one to another; phrases—typewritten “poetic” phrases—were superimposed. The phrases appeared in different places in the frame. I had it printed on color positive stock—all in Mallarmé azure—a monochrome blue film—very long, fifty minutes. Then I lost the print on the subway.61

Frampton’s title Clouds Like White Sheep is also a line from Charles Trenet’s song “La Mer” (1946), which evokes several poems by Mallarmé. Trenet’s line “les anges si purs” evokes Mallarmé’s sonnet “Ses pur ongles,” while the reference to “Bergère d’azur infinie” evokes “L’Azure.”62 For Frampton to invoke a popular song and connect it to a monument of modernism is entirely in keeping with other such gestures in Magellan, as discussed earlier regarding the inclusion of early film in the spirit of Eliot’s and Joyce’s use of vernacular material in modernist literature. Finally, in a 1980 interview, Frampton describes the trio of films intended for the end of The Death of Magellan, “an Alleluia, a Gloria, and a Hosanna,” each of which was to have a “dominant color.”63 He says that “the Alleluia is blue and Mallarmé figures rather largely in it.”64 Although Clouds Like White Sheep is lost, Frampton seems to have remade at least a one-minute version of it that presents a staccato of single-frame clouds in an azure sky (through without poetic phrases). Fittingly, it is the first of the forty-nine one-minute panopticons released as Straits of

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Magellan: Drafts and Fragments. Through this constellation of references, Frampton’s first (lost) film might be part of his last (lost) film. If this cloud of allusions to azure possibly condensed into a realized film, the other component of Clouds Like White Sheep, its poetic phrases, may have been displaced to two other never completed films in Magellan, given the titles Common Knowledge and Ludus Luminos, Ludus Chromaticus in production notes, both of which open up other suggestive constellations around Mallarmé. The Common Knowledge file shows pages of text from an elaborate personality test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.65 Frampton conducts operations of erasure to the pages, partially blocking out phrases in the manner of redacted text. Ludus Luminos, Ludus Chromaticus (which is listed in the Magellan Calendar as the “Second Dream” in The Birth of Magellan) has thoroughly redacted text photocopied in several generations to create increasingly abstract blocks of text. The final pages of these production notes resemble Marcel Broodthaers’s version of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1969), which, in obliterating language, emphasizes the visual qualities of text placement on an empty surface.66

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Film still from the first panopticon in Hollis Frampton, Straits of Magellan: Drafts and Fragments, 1974 (original in color). Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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Excerpt from production document, Common Knowledge file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

Excerpt from production document, Ludus Luminos, Ludus Chromaticus file, date unknown. Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton and Anthology Film Archives.

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FRAMPTON, SYMBOLISM, AND MALLARMÉ The last line of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés is “All Thought expresses a Throw of the Dice.” Magellan too proposes to serve as a grand metaphor for “All Thought,” for consciousness itself. The throws of the dice that populate the matrices in Clouds of Magellan generate part of the “Thought” expressed in the work (however enigmatic and perhaps unknowable it may be). The line from Mallarmé’s poem captures the tension expressed in the hermeneutics of the constellation discussed earlier in this chapter: Is meaning found or made when we find a shape in the stars? There is a contingency to this meaning—“a Throw of the Dice”—that involves both chance (what is called in the full title of the poem hasard) and structure. All chance is bounded by structure, just as the one-in-six odds of a standard die are embodied in the configuration of its six-sided structure. This play between hasard and structure, between contingency and limits, drives the contribution of symbolism to Frampton’s intellectual formation. Earlier, I followed the work of Federico Windhausen in discussing the influence of literary critic Hugh Kenner on Frampton. Kenner’s writings on symbolism in relation to Pound’s poetry provide useful historical parameters for Frampton’s sense of this aesthetic movement. In his “Notes on Poetic Error,” Kenner states that symbolism “was the experience Western poetics needed, during the late 19th century time of crisis, to rescue it from the didactic and pedagogic supposition that a man about to write a poem was merely clearing his throat to utter graceful remarks.”67 The tired convention of portentous, “poetic” instruction was upended by symbolism’s emphasis on the materiality of language, what Kenner calls the “Symbolist notion that a poem should seem not to have come from an author but from the secret forces of language.”68 This is also how the constellation appears to make meaning from natural phenomena. These “secret forces” promised a kind of impersonality to poetry. Kenner contrasts the thematic purposiveness of nineteenthcentury poetry against a symbolist poem produced as though by the operations of physics or chemistry, “much as supersaturated fluids will produce spectacular crystals.”69 Kenner proposes an effect of symbolist poetics that would have been crucial for Frampton’s sense of bringing modernism to film (and an alternative to the priority on expression in Brakhage’s Romantic approach): “the valid Symbolist discovery, that poems are not statements ‘about.’ They are not the productions of a man with something to say.” 70

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Frampton, like Kenner, describes symbolist poetics as an analytic tool that allows the artist to articulate a medium’s abstract qualities: “Symbolist poetry began as an attempt to discover the inherent control structures within language, just as action painting was, at least in part, an attempt to discover the inherent control structures within painting.” 71 Here, Frampton links symbolist poetics to visual art through the shared modernist analysis of the parameters of a medium— ultimately, a gesture of abstraction. But Frampton also suggests a problem: that knowledge of these control structures opens possibilities whose unboundedness threatens unintelligibility: “The experiments suggest that the inherent control structures are so rich, massive, and powerful that one begins to understand why people began to write poems ‘about’ things and to paint pictures ‘of’ things—as an effort to limit the choice among those control structures and their actions, to whittle painting down to intelligibility or a small set of intelligibilities.”72 This tension between infinite formal possibilities and the desire for even minimal intelligibility is expressed by Kenner as “the Symbolist trap,” the now familiar problem of its “aestheticism” and what he calls “the contrivance of self-contained sterilities.” 73 Kenner looks to Pound’s poetry for a way out of the trap, praising the complexity of Pound’s work: “It entailed preserving the Symbolist insights—that poetry is economical, that it is impersonal, that its formalities are self-justifying—while delivering English poetics from . . . aestheticism.”74 For Kenner, Pound’s “life-work was to restore a poetic of meaning, of poems to be completed by experience, not poems cutting themselves off from experience in order to survive amid clamor.”75 I hasten to add, as is obvious in the case of Pound’s famously challenging poetry, that such “meaning” and “experience” would still defy conventional norms. But the delivery from aestheticism was found in a form of reference that could provide intelligibility without simple didacticism. When Frampton speaks of the legacy of the symbolists in relation to modern English poetry, he focuses on how Pound and Eliot broke with the unity of “decorum”: One of the striking things about The Waste Land, which apparently made it unintelligible at first, is that it tends to shift decorum in every line. Of course, the possibility that a poem could look a different way in every consecutive line turned out to be a tremendously powerful tool for composition. By

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shifting decorum, a work could also shift place, time, semantic context; it could drag in whole cultures by the bootstraps. It might be reasonable to trace this tendency in Eliot, Pound, and, indeed, even Joyce (Ulysses is, among other things, an essay about shifts in decorum) to the symbolists.76

Frampton admires symbolism for its ability to be massively synthetic with radically heterogeneous elements, shifting “place, time, semantic context” and even dragging in “whole cultures by the bootstraps.” These elements create a field of cultural reference that allows for an importation of “meaning” and “experience” that, rather than being familiar or didactic, are new and synthetic, shifting context on a dime (as discussed above in relation to Frampton’s admiration of Yvonne Rainer’s innovations in dance). Frampton sees symbolism as the movement that paves the way for his major influences in poetics—Eliot, Pound, and Joyce—artists who reveled in massive allusion, using collage strategies to incorporate language fragments from poems, songs, advertisements, conversation, and even other languages. Similarly, Frampton would incorporate found footage, sound, language, and animation into his films (and writings), often shifting decorum forcefully. In other words, symbolism’s synthetic and analytic modes not only invite the massive heterogeneity of culture to enter art through its breaks with decorum but also open up massive creative possibilities—“the abysmal intricacy of language”—through its investigation of an art form’s parameters. Ultimately, what Frampton wants to do is transfer the symbolist legacy to the comparatively new medium of film; as he says, “Well, film inherits all of that.”77 But Frampton brings symbolist aesthetics, and its specter of high modernist unintelligibility, to a different historical environment than modern English poets: the New York visual art world of the late 1950s through early 1970s. On one level, many of his films explored the materiality of film through abstract elements that would be familiar to visual artists. But even his modernist compatriots within the art world largely ignored experimental film, such was the overwhelming dominance of representational narrative and documentary in defining film’s “intelligibility.” As Paul Arthur put it, “As an occasional contributor and hanger-on at Artforum, it became almost possible for me to hear the rapid page-turning in the magazine’s prime constituency occasioned by articles on avant-garde film.”78 On another level, Frampton felt alienated from the visual world because, as a photographer and filmmaker, he was “a committed illusionist in an environment that was officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion.”79 As discussed in chapter 1,

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Frampton’s investment in illusion is not related to representation; in fact, he says the photograph is highly abstract in its mapping of light onto the two-dimensional surface. More than most, Frampton had a keen sense of the materiality of photographic processes from working for nearly a decade in an industrial photo lab; he sees behind the photographic surface (or film screen) to its construction and history.80 Rather, Frampton insisted on the “plausibility of the photographic illusion” as an axiomatic quality of the medium in terms of the force of the photographic illusion in consciousness to point to “real” concrete phenomena, to index the world and its dynamic energy. But the shifts in decorum that Frampton celebrated among symbolist poets were resisted in the visual arts world, and even in the film world, faced with Magellan’s challenging unintelligibility. This element of dynamism is also key to why Frampton settled on film as his medium after attempting painting, sculpture, and photography: he was frustrated with their static nature. Notably, although Frampton said he abandoned poetry, he continued to write; as Lessing’s Laocoön (a frequent Frampton reference) asserts, poetry is an art of time (where painting, sculpture, and photography are arts of space). Even his still photography tended to take serial form. Frampton’s interest in the constellation underlines that he was seeking a medium that allowed for the building of “images” from “a group of elements that we construe meaningfully.”81 Film appeals to Frampton because of its capacity for montage, both in the materiality of the form and in the consciousness of the viewer: the dynamic construction of meaning from extraordinarily diverse points and fragments. The performative element of cinema, its movement in time, makes energy its key aesthetic element, and cinema is capable of “witnessing” the energy of the world, including its contingency. The danger that Kenner and Frampton identify within symbolism of an arid formal aestheticism, of “self-contained sterilities,” seems averted by attention to the concrete materiality of form and by asserting cinema’s dynamism and capacity for mimesis of the world’s energy. This appreciation of cinematic dynamism is another parallel between Frampton’s Magellan project and Mallarmé. Christophe Wall-Romana has established that Mallarmé’s poetry, especially Un coup de dés and his final (unfinished) project, Le Livre, was highly influenced by cinema.82 Mallarmé begins in earnest on Un coup de dés in 1896, a significant year for film in France with the popular emergence of the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe. Wall-Romana’s research into the relationship between poetry and cinema in this period underlines the

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extensive written discourse on cinema at the time as well as Mallarmé’s close connections to the many artists and critics pondering the cinematic effect. In Wall-Romana’s research, he isolates what he calls Mallarmé’s “sole statement on cinema” in his collected writings, a response to a survey by someone “asking prominent writers whether they favored illustrating books with photography.”83 Of the twenty-four authors surveyed, only Mallarmé mentions cinema: “I am in favor of—no illustration, since all that a book evokes must take place in the viewer’s mind; but if you use photography, why not go straight to the cinematograph, whose unreeling (unfolding) [déroulement] will replace, images and text, many a volume, advantageously.”84 Mallarmé is not interested in a static photograph somehow illustrating language—unnecessary in any case, as the mind will furnish what language evokes. Here again we have a rejection of simple representation on the model of the static photograph. But Mallarmé seems to suggest that we leapfrog over the static photograph in favor of cinema, to embrace its quality of déroulement, the dynamic unfolding and unreeling of the moving image that can “replace” images and text. Wall-Romana’s translation of déroulement as “unreeling” and “unfolding” is apt for considering Un coup de dés in relation to cinema.85 The phrases on each line of the poem can be analogized to film frames, units of visual articulation, as Mallarmé varies the size of font and phrase length. Examined as a purely visual text— concretized, for example, in Broodthaers’s version of the poem—the poem seems early on to wind its way down the page, its watery subject mimicked in the rivulets of phrases that zigzag down the page. Later pages show a general trajectory of text cascading from the top left of the page to the bottom right. As Alex Ross points out, the final pages resemble the constellations referenced in the poem, the Septentrion, or Big Dipper.86 Mallarmé’s separation of photography and cinema recalls Frampton’s counterintuitive claim that, while the invention of the Cinématographe in 1896 chronologically followed the invention of photography in 1839, cinema did not evolve from the photograph: The relationship between cinema and still photography is supposed to present a vexed question. Received wisdom on the subject is of the chicken/egg variety: cinema somehow “accelerates” still photographs into motion. Implicit is the assumption that cinema is a special case of the catholic still photograph. Since there is no discoverable necessity within the visual logic of still

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photographs that demands such acceleration, it is hard to see how it must ever happen at all. . . . There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema film strip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.87

Frampton insists that the still photographic image is an “isolated frame” from what he calls the “infinite cinema” generated by “a polymorphous camera [that] has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focused upon all the appearances of the world.”88 The infinite cinema too operates as déroulement. Mallarmé’s insight about cinema as déroulement also helps address the problem of mimesis and representation in symbolist poetics. As an artistic movement, symbolism is usually defined by its investment in artifice over realism; if symbolist art is autonomous, it need not refer to reality as a mimesis or representation of reality. Wall-Romana, echoing Kenner, points to the limits of this characterization, noting that symbolism “has been too often characterized as breaking with reality effects and perception altogether, in a show of indifference toward the social sphere and the real world.”89 Against this indifference, WallRomana suggests, “The cinepoetic aesthetics Mallarmé sketched out engages with the social and the experiential aspects of reality: reading a book, playing music, attending a kinesthetic spectacle, communing with others in performing the political rites of the secular socius.”90 Wall-Romana presents a rich proposition for how cinema expands Mallarmé’s sense of poetry: “Cinema enacted modernity’s resolve to embrace technology, and as a new mediation between artifice and life it presented an unexpected solution to symbolism’s resistance to mimesis.”91 What is the nature of this “new mediation” that cinema presents as a “solution to symbolism’s resistance to mimesis?” It is less that art mimics reality than that what Frampton calls the “thermodynamics” of the cinematographic process asserts dynamic presence and the energy of the world in the image.92 When cinema unreels or unfolds on the screen, it is immediately present for the perceiving subject, in time. Its images may be representationally recognizable or not, but it is their immediacy and presence that mimics the dynamic energy and temporality of reality. Moreover, for Mallarmé, cinema has a capacity for contingency, for a throw of the dice. It may be this performative element of cinema’s déroulement that so appealed to Mallarmé. Wall-Romana argues that cinema influenced his final, never realized project, Le Livre, which seems to have been conceived as a highly technical media spectacle, “the cinematic projection of a poem for an audience”: “The

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imaginary realm of poetry emanating from the two-dimensional page was theoretically expanded by Mallarmé to a four-dimensional performance involving three-dimensional space plus time, in which the page would be projected through a mechanical light-source.” 93 Wall-Romana describes how the addition of extra dimensions to the book, especially time, was key to the expansiveness of Mallarmé’s conception of the work, and the key influence of cinema: Cinema may have evoked for Mallarmé a potential integration of the artwork with sensorial experience and performance, across page (2-D), folio (3-D), and reading time (4-D). In his single reference to cinema, Mallarmé characterized this principle of integration as “déroulement”—unfolding, uncoiling, unreeling, or unscrolling: a new topology for text and images.94

The “new topology for text and images” provides “sensorial experience and performance,” all enacted first on the pages of Un coup de dés and then, Mallarmé hoped, as possible electrical light projections of text in his project for Le Livre. Most importantly, déroulement is dynamic and performative, enacting the movement of the world. In 1980 Frampton discussed the limits and possibilities for Magellan’s exhibition.95 Recognizing the utopian nature of the calendrical screening structure, especially for 16 mm theatrical screening, he was hopeful that new laser-disc technology might provide adequate image quality for moving-image work, hoping that spectators might access Magellan as easily as they could a book on a bookshelf. Wall-Romana suggests that Mallarmé, almost a century earlier, was also reconceiving the nature of the book as “a new idea of the literary work as a material book, as volume, read in space and time as a kind of performance by the reader.”96 Wall-Romana suggests that cinema is crucial to this new conception but out of ancient cultural materials, calling on “all of the Greek etymons of chronophotography and cinematography—time (chromos), light (photos), movement (kino), and writing (graphy).”97 Finally, as with Frampton’s project, it would be actualized in the work of the spectator, or what Wall-Romana calls “the kinesthetic of reading”: “What drew Mallarmé to cinema may well be the sudden possibility of an actualization of the kinesthetic of reading. The blindness and insight of cinematic déroulement inspired in Mallarmé a new sense of rhythm and (dis)continuity that he endeavored to graph as an intermittent pattern of blanks and text in Un Coup de dés.”98 Cinema actualizes a new mode of reading.

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Poetic language presumes and indeed requires an active reader interacting with the text less to “understand” it than to enact it—just as the constellation requires a stargazer to project shapes onto points of light. As Wall-Romana argues, Mallarmé sought for his readers a combination of “a direct engagement with material experience”—the sonic textures, say, of the words—and “la comprehension multiple.”99 The challenge of this form of reading also opens up the question of what “comprehension” might mean—and indeed with capacious works like Un coup de dés or Le Livre, or Frampton’s Magellan, the simple gesture of attempting to grasp a completeness from that which is impossibly multiple and fragmented is important in itself.

GLORIA! Both Mallarmé and Frampton were interested in the materiality of the media with which they worked: poetry (words on a page) and film (images on a filmstrip). While he was working on Magellan, Frampton engaged with the materiality of another medium, computers at the Digital Arts Lab, which he established with Woody Vasulka at SUNY Buffalo. Frampton and his students wrote graphical and sound-imaging software, writing code on computer monitors and on an oftenforgotten material: continuous form computer paper for dot matrix printers.100 This paper had the equivalent of film sprocket holes on both edges of the paper; the sprockets were detachable through perforations along the edge of the printable paper. The paper Frampton used was perforated at intervals that would allow the massively long scrolls of paper to fold and unfold, lending another resonance to déroulement for Frampton’s practice at this time. Two paper computer scrolls in Frampton’s production archive bear examination.101 The first is the Magellan Calendar itself, a fifteen-page scroll printed in 1978. The document is titled “: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR FOR MAGELLAN” and given a version code; e.g., “VERSION 1.2.0 = 1 DEC 78.” Every line in the file is numbered, following the conventions of computer code: LIST 0000 0001 ...

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0728 0729 DONE

The intact calendar could have been unfolded to form a circular loop of paper to simulate the film cycle. The second scroll is more unusual: an extraordinarily elaborate fairground horoscope printed on fourteen-inch-wide spreadsheet computer paper. The horoscope is the classic fiction we project onto the stars. It literalizes the idea that we find meaning in the stars, that indeed our future is inscribed in the movement of planets and stars—the heavens—and must be read through its dynamics. Frampton gave prominence to his birthday in the Magellan Calendar. There are only six days designated in the Magellan Calendar when pans would not be shown: the two solstices; the two equinoxes; on leap years, 29 February; and his birthday, 11 March. The “logic” of the horoscope is grounded in the birthday, which for Frampton is as important an interruption in the Straits of Magellan as the traditional seasonal ritual days of the calendar. The poem as scroll, undergoing déroulement, like the filmstrip and the scroll of computer code, links the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries (with a longer legacy going back millennia to the Dead Sea Scrolls) and links the materiality of poetry, film, and computer/ electronic arts. Gloria! begins with a short twenty-second early film, A Wake in “Hell’s Kitchen,” before a green screen fades in.102 The green would have been immediately recognizable in the late 1970s as the default screen color of many cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors of the time. Frampton also associates the color with Ireland, prefiguring the Joycean intertext already invoked by A Wake in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which depicts a mischievous corpse from an Irish American part of New York creating havoc by drinking beer while arising from a coffin.103 The tradition of the Irish wake has mourners watch over the body, a custom that, as legend has it, derives from the phenomenon of apparently dead corpses “waking” at their funerals as a result of recovering from lead poisoning (caused from drinking too much stout).104 Both death and resurrection come from the bottle. Immediately after the green screen appears, white text is typed at the bottom of the screen; we read as the letters materialize from left to right. When a phrase is complete, it scrolls up and eventually disappears off the top of the screen.

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6.11

Hollis Frampton, Gloria!, 1979 (original in color). Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

The text begins: “These propositions are offered numerically in the order in which they presented themselves to me and also alphabetically, according to the present state of my belief.” Sixteen numbered statements or “propositions” follow about “I,” “we,” and “she” (e.g., “8. That she gave me her teeth, when she had them pulled, to play with. [A]”). As we discover at the end of the film, this descriptive matrix comprises Frampton’s thoughts and memories of his grandmother. The fifteenth proposition names music played at her wedding; after the sixteenth and last proposition (which refers to her last words) scrolls up, we hear that music over three minutes of green screen, with surprising emotional effect.105 Then, we see a second silent early film, Murphy’s Wake (1903), a two-minute version of the Irish wake story. Finally, over a black screen, we see the final inscription, which does not scroll off the top of the screen but fades out at the film’s conclusion: “This work, in its entirety, is given in loving memory of Fanny Elizabeth Catlett Cross, my maternal grandmother, who was born on November 6, 1896, and died on November 24, 1973.” Not only Gloria! but Magellan as well are dedicated to her.106

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Like the matrices for Clouds of Magellan, the central descriptive matrix for Gloria! has two ordering axes—one with numbers, one with letters. The numerical order of the propositions as they appear is apparently random and chronological, a form of subjective recall, as we are told that they appear in “the order in which they presented themselves,” presumably to Frampton’s consciousness as he remembered his grandmother while writing the text for the film. Meanwhile, the bracketed letters at the end of each proposition offer the alphabetical order of importance, which seems to evaluate and structure the propositions, according to the “present state of my belief”; i.e., after a period of self-conscious reflection upon the numerical series of propositions (perhaps literalizing Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”). It seems that A corresponds to a believable proposition, as most of them clump in the early range of the alphabet (between A to D), and as I discuss below, the propositions further away from A include elements of ambivalence or doubt. Once again in Magellan, a matrix with numerical and alphabetical coordinates presents itself as a means of encoding thought—here, linguistic transcriptions of Frampton’s thoughts on a video monitor, capturing Frampton’s consciousness as it relates to his own formation as a child. Moreover, the metahistorical method of Magellan as a whole is encapsulated in this matrix, with both contingent and ordered patterns playing out in three historical media technologies: film (indexed as historical with the early films, marked by their provenance in the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress), recorded sound (“Madame Bonaparte” is a 1969 recording of a traditional folk song), and computergenerated text on a video screen. Fanny Cross lived from the beginning of cinema in 1896—also the year Mallarmé wrote Un coup de dés—to the birth of the Magellan project, c. 1973. She presides over the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, from the height of what Frampton calls in the “Metahistory” essay the “Age of Machines” to the dawn of the electronic age.107 This matrix is grounded in Frampton’s genealogical relation to his grandmother, just as narratives of birth and death are linked by the principles of genetic continuity and variation. The first proposition reads: “That we belonged to the same kinship group, sharing a tie of blood. [A].” Consistent with his use of systems to buffer subjective expression, Frampton uses both alphabetical and numerical coordinates and the anthropological term “kinship group” to describe his relationship to his beloved grandmother. If we presume that A corresponds to a believable proposition, then the contrast with the second proposition is striking. Rated Y, the proposition furthest from A in the film, it reads: “That others

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6.12

Author’s graph of propositions in Hollis Frampton, Gloria!, 1979.

belonged to the same kinship group, sharing a tie of blood. [Y].” This contrast underlines Frampton’s sense that he and his grandmother were linked by a special bond and were outliers within the extended family, an impression confirmed by biographical details.108 His thought and emotion are decomposed into statements that are numbered and lettered. I have mapped these coordinates as a series of points on a two-dimensional graph to visually express Frampton’s emotional relationship with his grandmother. Read top to bottom, it has the irregular spacing of Un coup de dés; seen at a glance, it could resemble a relatively tightly clumped constellation of stars. This genealogical relationship to his Irish American grandmother is deepened as Frampton links her to a range of literary traditions, including Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce.109 In proposition #7, we are told, “That she read to me, when I was three years old, and for purposes of her own, William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ She admonished me for liking Caliban best. [B].” This proposition has a concrete connection with the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. In The Tempest, Caliban, in an aside, refers to Prospero’s power:110 I must obey: his art is of such power, It would control my dam’s god, Setebos, And make a vassal of him. (I, 2, 378– 80)

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Setebos is referred to twice in Antonio Pigafetta’s diary as the god/devil of the Patagonians.111 Shakespeare read Richard Eden’s The Decades of the Newe Worlde (1555), which included part of Pigafetta’s text.112 But Frampton further develops this connection in relation to his grandmother’s formative role with language; as proposition #6 asserts, with confidence, “That she taught me to read. [A].” In The Tempest, Miranda teaches Caliban to read. Just before Caliban invokes Setebos, Miranda says she regrets her instruction, to which Caliban replies: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you, For learning me your language! (I, 2, 368–70)

In Gloria! Frampton’s grandmother “admonishes” him for liking Caliban best— although she was, in his words, his “Irish Grandma with the style of a drunken sailor” and presumably also taught him to curse.113 Two other propositions— qualified as largely believable by their position in the first third of the alphabet but containing some equivocality—underline the centrality of language in Gloria!114 Proposition # 14 states, “That I deliberately perpetuate her speech, but have only fragmentary recollection of her pronunciation. [H],” underlying both the gaps and continuity between history and memory. Proposition #4 verifies Fanny’s importance to Frampton himself: “That she convinced me, gradually, that the first person singular pronoun was, after all, grammatically feasible. [E].” Although Frampton continues to buffer the expression of subjectivity, he concedes that “I” is at least grammatically feasible, within the structure of language. Frampton claimed that he rarely spoke as a child but that his grandmother taught him to read at age three using a typewriter.115 It is possible that learning “the first person singular pronoun” from her was meant literally. The connection to Joyce is one that Frampton emphasized in his own commentaries on Gloria!116 As mentioned, Frampton brackets the central text section with two early tableaux comedies to represent the story of Finnegans Wake, using early film to prefigure a classic modernist artwork (as Duchamp is invoked in The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I). Appropriately, as the concluding work of The Death of Magellan section, Gloria! is concerned with death and—given the cyclical nature of the Magellan calendar—resurrection. In the field of cinema, early film is resurrected and is animated with remarkable emotional resonance.117 The dedication to his “Irish Grandma” enables another resurrection of sorts, as she is reanimated

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for Frampton and for the audience through the film. The graph that plots these propositions in two dimensions is static, but the film adds the dimension of time, of déroulement, to create an enormously moving effect, constellated from their unfolding positioning over the ten-minute film. While the pixels, sounds, and images each express components of Frampton’s consciousness, it is their capacity to cross-reference that creates ideas and emotions. The shifts in decorum in Gloria! are head-spinning. The early films, on their own, are barely comprehensible, though Murphy’s Wake invokes laughter through the broad humor of the ostensible corpse. But the resonance with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its thematics of life, death, and continuities of culture enliven the simple vernacular films. The music, on its own, is comical, even annoyingly long, as Frampton insists on playing it in its entirety. But after the accumulation of “data” that has been presented, with its reference to Fanny Cross’s wedding day, the caprice of memory gives the film power; as Frampton says in his interview with Bill Simon after a screening of the film, “It’s not easy for me to get through it with a completely dry eye.”118 The constellation is the most generative metaphorical figure with which to approach Magellan as a complex, incomplete, multimedia artwork. The constellation invites an oscillation between making and finding meaning that is invited across all of Frampton’s films but especially across the breadth of Magellan. Whether we are experiencing the emotional coordinates of Gloria! or the perhaps hopelessly opaque matrices and instructions in the production files for Clouds of Magellan, it is clear that the participatory nature of the work invites play and speculation that can encompass fields as diverse as optics, montage, computer science, ocean navigation, Mallarmé, Shakespeare, and Irish mourning rituals, apposite, finally, for an artist who died before his time (and enjoyed a beer or three).

Conclusion Virtual Future Metahistory

Some of it is clear, some of it is in fact made, . . . some of it is very shaky, some of it is blank, perhaps like the maps of the world in Magellan’s time.1 It is probably easiest to imagine it . . . as a work in sculpture that exists in time rather than in space.2

T

he title of this conclusion, “Virtual Future Metahistory,” is a tesseract of temporal planes that captures possible further investigations of Frampton’s films, art, and ideas in the context of the twenty-first century. Metahistory is central to Frampton’s theory of film, an analytical framework that proposes to survey the whole of film’s “irrational natural history” in search of “poetic principles” in film art, which can be extended to all moving images, especially the camera arts.3 Since metahistory was central to the Magellan project, articulated as part of its manifesto, Frampton’s tragic early death at forty-eight from cancer means that even as it looks to the past, it will remain in the future. As I discuss in the introduction, failure was always part of the horizon of possibility for the Magellan project, whether due to the medium of film’s comparative lack of history or the problematics of the utopian artwork. To offset failure, the virtual offers some possibilities for realizing Frampton’s metahistory, to bring past and future into a present state. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “virtual” means “almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition.”4 It is the very figure of the partial, of incompletion. Our sense of what Magellan might be, and the scholarly work to reconstruct its ambition and parameters, will always be “almost,” “nearly” (and perhaps “not even close”). But a secondary definition of “virtual”

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related to computing puts less emphasis on lack and more on emulation: “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so.” I noted in the introduction the importance of the internet and digital tools in this research. There are other possibilities for future scholarship that digital access to textual, audio, and visual resources might extend to Frampton’s work, bringing it into conversation with the work of other artists and theorists and navigating larger intellectual and cultural currents. Magellan is an incomplete work that might not have been fully comprehended even had it been finished. Frampton’s early death, after he had released only a third of the films he planned, creates legitimate challenges to understanding the project and its legacy. Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema acknowledges that a complete understanding is impossible and indeed takes up the benefits of this epistemological position: an opportunity to both find and make meaning from the broad range of Frampton’s artistic, theoretical, epistolary, and virtual texts and projects, linking Magellan to his earlier films and writings but always acknowledging the contingency and limits of meaning. First, the book illuminates breaks and continuities in Frampton’s thought and filmmaking in relation to his earliest thought and practice. By putting Magellan in the larger context of Frampton’s overall work and, crucially, considering it in relation to his artistic works and theoretical writings, we gain an understanding of Frampton’s wider ambitions and intentions, both their refinement over time and their inevitable political and cultural limitations. Second, it is important to begin to put Frampton in the larger context of his own historical period and the larger histories of art, science, and thought that Frampton so copiously references. By starting to widen the frame of reference for Magellan and his late work, we can better understand Frampton’s legacy—warts and all—and the larger histories of film, art, politics, and thought of which he was a part and on which he offers such imaginative insight. The wealth and complexity of Frampton’s dynamic conceptual frameworks—and their important contemporary resonance—more than compensate for the project’s incomplete status. In short, Magellan’s incompletion is, if not less tragic, then not the failure that Frampton anticipated. Magellan was about much more than the films it was to comprise; its achievement lies in its ambition, its insights into the history and theory of the cinematic. Frampton’s reflections on the relationship of modernism to film and his sophisticated sense of the photographic as less a representational than an indexical and epistemological register remain salient, especially

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in a digital landscape rife with images both made and found. There is value in examining the aspiration of the utopian artwork as a reenvisaging of aesthetic traditions, whether considering Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Maya Deren’s Haitian project, or Sergei Eisenstein’s desire to adapt Karl Marx’s Capital.5 Frampton’s systematic and self-conscious approach to his utopian project is laid out in his “Statement of Plans,” where the nine goals of Magellan look both backward and forward in relation to his artistic and theoretical preoccupations. The concept of metahistory remains a brilliant and supple approach to film history that inserts film not only into broader histories of moving image and sound media but also into wider cultural discourses of knowledge and inquiry. Magellan’s meditation on the encyclopedic dimensions of art, especially in our contemporary moment when the internet provides such immediate access to massive amounts of information (and misinformation), provides important lessons about the epistemological implications of top-down summa and bottom-up catalogues of knowledge. The attempt to put the history and aesthetics of film in an expanded millennial time frame were circumscribed by Frampton’s inevitable limitations as a historical subject—especially in relation to the postcolonial resonances of an artistic project named after a central figure in the so-called Age of Exploration (part of the catastrophic Age of Exploitation, whose effects of global colonial violence and environmental devastation we see today). But this wider archaeological and anthropological perspective on film helps us understand film as both art form and medium in relation to wider histories of human representation, simulation, and preservation of images and sounds. Throughout this book, I have argued that a spirit of play, contingency, and experiment is crucial to our critical exploration of the conceptual and material elements of Frampton’s corpus of films, writings, and notes, along with self-consciousness about the work of the spectator in watching the films. The figure of the constellation provides a possible model for how to move Frampton’s legacy into the future. Magellan was not the only project Frampton left incomplete upon his death. Monsieur Phot: A Film by Joseph Cornell (begun 1973) and R (begun 1980) are listed in his CV as “incomplete.” Frampton’s production files contain dozens of ideas for films that might have been part of Magellan. These production notes might even be seen as a set of prompts or directions to be completed by others. This book attempts to constellate a conceptual reconstruction not of the Magellan project itself—that would be the work of artists—but rather of the horizons of possibility and historical limits that the project presented in relation to all of Frampton’s oeuvre. If we understand a concept as preceding a

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realization, then what I project as reconstruction emerges from and is structured by what I argue is the conceptual nature of Magellan itself. The notes, statements, and production documents in Frampton’s files were important conceptual markers for Frampton himself and now for others seeking to understand his legacy. For example, the Magellan Calendar outlines titles for all the planned films mapped out over a calendar year (and then some), and the “Statement of Plans” articulates some of the goals and plans for the Magellan project. Even within the already enormously complex goals of the project, any conceptual reconstruction must grapple with the dynamic, changing nature of Magellan, a work with roots in a mid-1960s sculpture project that grew into a twenty-four-hour film series and then a thirty-six-hour calendrical film cycle upon which Frampton worked for over a decade while also pursuing numerous other artistic, research, and life projects. As an evolving artwork, Magellan requires that we take account of Frampton’s process, charting the contradictions and ambivalences of the work. This book takes as its raw material not only Frampton’s filmography but also his writings, artist statements, interviews, talks, screening introductions, question-and-answer sessions, letters, and other biographical material. In this way, I include Frampton himself as one of the central “texts,” not to genuf lect before the “genius artist” but to outline the warp and woof of an articulate sensibility. Frampton often remarked that the human body replaced itself at the cellular level every seven years, but he also noted that the nervous system was an exception. Here, even Magellan’s nervous system transforms and evolves as the project developed and encountered perhaps impossible contradictions. In this conclusion, I first suggest some intriguing possibilities for virtual projects to be elaborated from the rich range of notes and documents left behind in the Magellan files: films that Frampton imagined as part of his explorations of the moving image and consciousness. Second, I briefly survey the contours of Frampton’s fledgling work in digital media and a range of artists who have taken up and transformed his work.

MAGELLAN: ARTIST’S NOTES Frampton left behind a substantial artist’s archive of film fragments and documentation of films left unmade, planned but unrealized, an archive of circumstantially virtual works. Andy Uhrich notes that Frampton’s archive is divided

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among several “collecting institutions,” the division mainly based on the format of the materials; e.g., finished film elements at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and audio recordings at the Harvard Film Archive.6 My speculations on Clouds of Magellan are based on paper production notes in files housed in the Hollis Frampton collection at Anthology Film Archives in New York. One of the goals of this book is to spark future research on Frampton’s films, writings, and “other work,” as he described his photography, xerography, and experiments in other media.7 Perhaps all artists leave behind documents of their practice, either after their death or upon retirement. The relationship between those documents and the art is complex. Within the art world, traditional conventions have long differentiated artworks from non-artworks or even quasi artworks: the sketch that precedes the painting; preliminary bronze castings; artist’s proofs in lithography; drafts of a manuscript or poem; the “study” that prepares the way for the “work” (e.g., Frampton’s Apparatus Sum (Studies for Magellan: #1) [1972]). Even apparently completed artworks may have different versions and copies. (Frampton revised his 1967 film States in 1970.) These differentiations serve aesthetic purposes and also more literal hierarchies of value, often marked with a price tag; e.g., some film prints have been redesignated as “artist’s proofs” to increase their value.8 Issues of authorship arise, especially in artistic production that involves the division of labor, like sculptors’ and painters’ ateliers/studios or even writers with production studios (e.g., Alexandre Dumas). Architecture is probably the privileged art form here, as many more blueprints are drawn up than buildings are built, sometimes for practical reasons, although there is also the genre of speculative architecture, buildings that were never meant to be built—or, rather, as Frampton put it in relation to another never completed modernist masterwork, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International—monuments that can only be completed “immaterially, in the mind.”9 The documents in the Frampton archive fall into what might be schematized as a spectrum from the auratic/expressive to the informational. Closer to the auratic/expressive side are original letters or sketches, which are unique, have proximity to the artist’s hand, and are also literal utterances or expressions by the artist. These sometimes have art world value or are acquired by collectors and archivists. Meanwhile, bureaucratic correspondence, grant application budgets, or lists of materials carry less auratic/expressive value but can be invaluable for informational purposes, providing context for the analysis and understanding of

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artworks, artists’ biographies, and their social, cultural, political meanings and resonances. Scholars like information but can rarely afford aura. A good example of an informational document is “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” the focus of chapter 2 in this book, which outlined the intentions and goals for the project. It was part of a grant proposal; multiple drafts appear over the 1970s that reflect Frampton’s evolving thought about the project. Attached to this proposal is a “Budget” that provides information about Frampton’s tools and materials; for example, almost all the expenses listed in one budget pertained to sound equipment and supplies, suggesting the importance of experimentation in sound for Frampton’s work on vertical montage. There is a further wealth of eclectic photocopied research material in Frampton’s archive, ranging from articles about the history of perfumes, to publications on neurobiology, to bibliographies on Ferdinand Magellan. Other documents have more aura, or at least enigma. Frampton often wrote notes and questions to himself, presumably as reminders for future thought and work, and as an audiovisual artist and a writer, these notes fed both his art and his criticism. He would write down aphorisms like “Film is a machine made of images, 6/26/75,” often dating them to acknowledge the event of the moment of inspiration. Or he would type a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton’s Optics on an index card: “The changing of Bodies into Light and Light into Bodies seems entirely conformable to the aims of Nature, who appears delighted with transmutation.” Or he would write down an intriguing question: “Does the ‘Visual’ part of the brain recognize time?” Some of these kinds of documents were presented under vitrines at a 2015 exhibition of Frampton’s “other work” at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, although many exist as photocopies of index cards, complicating our sense of what an original document might be.10 Many documents in the Frampton archive are plans for future films. While it is possible that some notes in the archive might have been passed on to assistants as literal instructions, in most cases these are notes for his own making. Although Frampton mainly worked alone, in the artisanal tradition of experimental film production, his work sometimes involved collaboration. At SUNY Buffalo, Frampton and Vasulka’s Digital Arts Lab involved intensive collaboration in the design of computing hardware and software. Frampton employed assistants and students and worked with film lab technicians, writing detailed film printing instructions that have been of great value in recent decades to archivists preserving his films. New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program

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undertook the preservation of six films in Hapax Legomena in 2008 under the supervision of Bill Brand, Frampton’s film archivist, and his former film print supervisor at Filmtronics Lab. Many of the student reports refer to Frampton’s instructions.11 These documents can be mobilized by scholars and artists to activate Frampton’s archive, which can shift from being a place of storage, a repository of dead data, to a living archive, redeployed for art and engagement. Rather than simply be unfinished, Magellan can be seen as virtual, seeking realization, an archive in motion, generative and alive. Here are four categories of documents that function as a survey of the rich possibilities of activating Frampton’s archive.12 The first category I have named “Possible Titles,” a practice that began when he was writing poetry as a youth; e.g., Hapax Legomena was a title for a planned poetry book that became the title for his serial film. In Frampton’s collected writings, editor Bruce Jenkins included a document, “Phrases.Mag,” a computer file (undated) that “represents a diary Frampton kept of idioms and turns of phrase that caught his attention as potential titles or themes for elements of his Magellan cycle.” 13 The phrases are listed chronologically by date, the first titled “Colored people (i.e., nudes painted monochromatic hues) (Eaton, 6 Jan 76)” and the last, “Collecting His Thoughts (Eaton, 8 Aug 78).”14 Some additional notes in the files are not included in “Phrases.Mag”; e.g., “Object lesson,” “# ‘Chance operations’ (surgery),” or “Title (for a very short film): The Soul of Wit.” As Jenkins notes, one title from “Phrases.Mag” was realized as a completed film, More Than Meets the Eye (1979). I call the second category “Production Notes for Film Components.” For example, a note reads, “Corpses: Panning hexagons, NYC sidewalks [as section marker].” This was realized as a recurring image that appears in Magellan: At the Gates of Death. Another document lists “Images for ‘prefaces’ to Straits of Magellan”: • • • •

State fair labyrinth Twyla Tharp +6 @ Minneapolis Video “snow” of various kinds Dark-field cinemicrographs of human spermatozoa, poss. In (phased?) multiple superimposition

Some of these images exist, but it remains unclear how they would have functioned in Straits of Magellan. Several short films that Frampton released in the late

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Film still of superimposed hexagons from panning shot in Hollis Frampton, Magellan: At the Gates of Death, 1976 (original in color). Courtesy the Estate of Hollis Frampton.

C.1

1970s included footage from state fairs, including Procession (1976) and More Than Meets the Eye, which has fish-eye-lensed footage of the fairground ride called the Scrambler.15 In Frampton’s collection of found footage, world’s fairs and expositions feature prominently. There is a large body of footage that Frampton prepared as backdrop for a Tharp performance in Anthology Film Archive’s collection of unreleased films and outtakes.16 More digging in that collection may reveal more. A third category I call “Notes for Whole Films,” which includes several parodic remakes or reworkings of extant films, texts, or artwork. • • • •

“Color TV film made entirely from modulations of color ‘snow’ ” # “A Mirror Going Down the Road” Stendhal’s def of a novel A film of Rimbaud’s sonnet on vowels derived letter by letter from the sonnet itself, using the colors described in the sonnet # (Cloud?) Short narrative film of Aristotle’s First Parable of Causality

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• •

# a mock anthropology film about a painter, in the manner of The Axe [sic] Fight Perform a different act of attrition or obliteration upon every frame of Porter’s Great Train Robbery

In the case of the Stendhal’s definition of a novel, Frampton would likely use the strategy of literalizing a title, with language being illustrated in the film: where in Cadenza I, A Little Piece of String visualizes A Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, here we can imagine a mirror moving down a road, possibly for one of Frampton’s pans. Frampton’s metahistorical impulse is reflected in the détournement of two film classics. In the first, he proposes to adapt Tim Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s ethnographic film The Ax Fight (1975) to an anthropology of painters (perhaps using kinship trees). In the second, he would subtract visual elements from every frame of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), returning to the manipulation of the filmstrip evident in his early work like Heterodyne and Artificial Light. This film idea presages works like Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999) and Martin Arnold’s Deanimated (2002).17 All of these examples articulate highconcept ideas for short films but required imaginative ways to realize them. The fourth category is “Plans for Work to Be Executed,” a unique category I have named after a document in a file in the archive “Magellan: Sheaf of Notes, 1973.” The file contains a thirty-page typed document titled “Plans for work to be executed” that outlines instructions for seventeen separate films, some simple (e.g., “slow hand-held dolly forward over sidewalk, encountering a series of ‘discarded’ objects which imply a narrative”) and others much more elaborate. This category could also include Frampton’s notes on Ludus Luminis, Ludus Chromaticus, discussed earlier in relation to Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, which resemble redacted text on many sheets of paper. Another example I have added to this category is instructions for a performance piece “for a dance” in a file labeled “Non-film notes.” Some documents in this category are so detailed that they function as veritable experimental film scripts, begging to be realized by contemporary artists. The main example in this category is a document titled “Text for a film called Common Knowledge,” a highly developed script that exists in several drafts, including one in a file labeled “Common Knowledge: Final Script.” It is based on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which asked people to answer 566 true or false questions in a personality test.18 Frampton processed the script using mathematical parameters, creating a 432-statement text that begins with the

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phrase “I like movies that are sad” and ends with “I do not always tell the truth.” There are instructions on how the film’s image and soundtracks were to be articulated and juxtaposed; e.g., “[NB] Sentences so marked are to be presented as intertitles. Numbered statements are to be read aloud.” In short, the documentation is likely sufficient for someone to attempt to make a version of the film. Frampton’s documents served him as part of his highly ambitious and eclectic creative and research process and fed into his theoretical writing. One striking example is an outline for a film titled “film for Knokke-le-Zoute”: “Analogous to David Hilbert’s address to the 1900 Math Congress, stating the (then) unsolved Grand Problems. All theorems to be stated as FILMS, or segments of a film.” Frampton evokes the historical example of Hilbert’s highly influential speech, which outlined what he considered the major questions facing mathematics.19 Magellan too proposed to state the Grand Problems of Film, but in the note, Frampton specifies that the theorems be in film form: films as theory. Frampton elsewhere called for the generation of a Principia Cinematica, echoing Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica: After a century, nevertheless, it is still true that no one knows even how to begin to write the sort of thing that film through its affiliation with the sciences might expect of itself, that is a Principia Cinematica, presumably in three fat volumes entitled, in order: I. Preliminary Definitions; II. Principles of Sequence; III. Principles of Simultaneity. The wish for such a thing is somewhat like the wish of a certain aphorist who said—I believe the last of his aphorisms, or at least the last that I have read—that he would like to know the name of the last book that will ever be published.20

The idea that films do the work of philosophy has been actualized in the emergence within cinema and media studies of the subfield of film philosophy, itself emerging from the classical film theory that Frampton was immersed in during the production of Magellan.

FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE! Brian Henderson concludes his foundational essay on Magellan with a speculation on the importance of computing to the project:

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Perhaps Frampton’s Bayreuth was, in effect, the computer. (He was still preparing it when he died.) That is where the last stages of the film were to be generated, and the film as a whole ordered and assembled. Perhaps even from that utopic site portions of the film, or copies of the whole, were to be dispatched to farflung [sic] sites of local exhibition. Quite probably the computer functioned in senses we do not yet know, in part because Frampton knew, better than we do, both the computer and the requirements of Magellan’s completion. He knew that the various technologies of realization, developed annually, might alter the execution—or even the structure of the whole. It was there, within and through the computer, that the work was ultimately to achieve its ideal realization.21

Keith Sanborn and Uhrich have documented the limited computer capacity of Frampton’s experiments in the late 1970s and early 1980s; as Frampton himself makes clear in “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” his interest is primarily in using it as a tool for filmmaking, even as he was clearly engaged with it as a form, part of film’s “elastic, eclectic, polymorphous-perverse” continuum.22 Nonetheless, Uhrich points to how Frampton’s computer research is related to his larger desire to explore the relation of language and the image. Referring to IMAGO, the computer software Frampton codesigned, Uhrich suggests, “Considering that Frampton spoke often of an image-machine that would counter the machine of language, in a very real sense, IMAGO, as a computer program that generated and processed graphics and video signals, is a literal realization of that concept. In IMAGO, the image on the computer monitor could be manipulated by the precise control of language.”23 Computing’s manipulation of data for the creation of images and language is part of what we recognize today as the capacity for digital convergence. Uhrich concludes, “For Frampton, the digital not only bridged the gulf between the arts and sciences but represented a dialectical merging of the word and the image in a way unachievable in the photochemical arts.”24 The capacity of digital tools to activate the archive is still being explored, although Uhrich concluded that without the original hardware, there would be little chance of reconstructing or emulating the DAL programs. Despite this setback, Henderson’s insight that “Frampton’s Bayreuth was . . . the computer” may be insightful for the future adaptation of Frampton’s work by artists and theorists of “the infinite cinema” insofar as powerful contemporary digital tools may help activate the remains of Frampton’s work. Lev

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Manovich’s Language of New Media looks to Frampton’s films, especially Zorns Lemma, as early examples of the use of filmic matrix structures akin to the database (and Frampton planned even more elaborate matrix structures for Magellan).25 Meanwhile, to engage with Frampton’s archive, new digital technologies facilitate the collection, sharing, and synthesis of currently dispersed archival materials, in addition to the online databasing of this material, secondary writings, and contextual material, for interactive re-presentation and analysis of this material. On the one hand, the layered, multidimensional nature of database structures, with the almost infinite capacity promised by the internet, allows the researcher to restage perhaps boundless recombinatory permutations of research material. This allows the artist’s legacy to be alive, if transformed. On the other hand, is there a limit to how the researcher plays with these recombinatory possibilities? Is there a responsibility to an artist’s thought, style, and sensibility in engaging with their archive? These are some of the tensions that face artists and researchers confronting the larger future histories of the moving image and Frampton’s legacy. The completion of unfinished artworks is common in music (e.g., Mozart’s Requiem) or literary works (e.g., Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood). In these cases, artists, scholars, and archivists work together, using fragments, documents, and contextual knowledge to produce a version of the incomplete work. In the spirit of Frampton’s speculative and ambitious project, it may be possible for some of Frampton’s notes to generate films as artists take up his unfinished works or riff from his notes. Some artists and scholars have engaged analytically with Frampton’s work, applying digital tools. For example, at the MindFrames exhibition at ZKM (2006–2007) on the legacy of the artists housed at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Study, video artist Steina performed digital analyses of Frampton’s Artificial Light, Palindrome, Zorns Lemma, and (nostalgia) that exposed the films’ algorithmic base structures. Artist-scholar Clint Enns has produced analysis and visualizations of Palindrome and Zorns Lemma informed by his training in mathematics.26 Anne Breimaier’s 2018 exhibition of the photo series ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, a collaboration between Freie Universität Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, yielded a book of German-language criticism on the series.27 Lisa Zaher’s research on R has delved into Frampton’s notes on Chinese written language. Ken Eisenstein’s intensive knowledge of Frampton’s archive has led to conference presentations that are works of performance art in themselves.

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Some artists have already playfully taken up and adapted Frampton’s work. Barbara Lattanzi, a former student of Frampton at SUNY Buffalo, formulated software called HF CRITICAL MASS (2002, revised 2015) that can apply the “algorithm” of Critical Mass to any footage.28 David Gatten is said to be capturing on film the phrases that make up Frampton’s fabula “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi.” Damian Moppett has made photo and drawing adaptations of Frampton photographs, including Hollis Frampton in His Wittgenstein T-Shirt (2005) and Self-Portrait as Hollis Frampton (2014), both part of the National Gallery of Canada collection.29 Guy Maddin, as part of his Seances series visualizing lost films, has made a fanciful version of Clouds Like White Sheep.30 Multimedia artist Kerry Tribe created a live performance version of Frampton’s Critical Mass, performed in different iterations at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2010), the Hammer Museum (2011), and the Tate Modern (2012) in which two actors memorized the staccato rhythms of the final film. This remediation heightened and commented on the performative energies of both the original actors and the filmmaker, bringing the gender imbalance of the original film into sharper focus. Evan Meaney has made two adaptations of Frampton’s work that integrate the films into digital forms. The first is a remarkable video-game version of Lemon whose minimalism foregrounds how foreign that aesthetic is to digital games; the piece used webGL art game on javascript/Unity, adaptable to a standing videogame console and to a web interface as /le.mon: A remediation game (2015). The second, Ceibas: Epilogue—The Well of Representation (2011), is a brilliant remake of Gloria! in 16-bit video-game technology. Meaney’s version preserves the humor and appreciation of the popular vernacular in Gloria!, updating early film comedies to low-res video games. But the text and narrative preserve the emotional depth of the original while expanding its universe as Meaney attaches the piece to his own serial work, The Ceibas Cycle (2007–2013). Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema is one scholarly attempt to find a passage through this wealth of material, these perilous seas, but many more await. Perhaps the final line of Frampton’s manifesto for Magellan, “For a Metahistory of Film,” retains its resonance: “Film has finally attracted its own Muse. Her name is Insomnia.”31

Notes

Where possible, references to texts by Frampton are taken from his collected writings, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, edited by Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press Writing Arts Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), abbreviated as OCACM in the notes below. For reasons of historical specificity, I add the date of composition for the text in brackets for the first appearance of that text in each chapter; e.g., Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film” [1975], OCACM. In cases where the text was composed before it was published, I use the date of composition as an index of the time of Frampton’s formulation; for example, while “Notes on Composing in Film” was first published in October 1 (Spring 1976), the text was written for the “Conference on Research and Composition,” State University of New York at Buffalo, October 1975. INTRODUCTION 1. He bought himself a Bolex for his thirtieth birthday but had been experimenting with film since 1962. Susan Krane, “Chronology,” in Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, ed. Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, 106–20 (catalogue for an exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 111–12. 2. The history of the Center for Media Study is captured in Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel, eds., Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 3. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [1971], OCACM, 134. 4. Annette Michelson, “Poesis/Mathesis,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 33. 5. Relatively few twenty-first-century experimental filmmakers and media artists publish as extensively, perhaps ceding theoretical ground to the academic development of

232Introduction

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

cinema and media studies from the late 1960s on, and perhaps partaking of the eclectic pluralism that emerged from the critique of modernism at the end of the twentieth century. Lucy Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” American Film 4, no.  7 (May 1979): 63. Bruce Jenkins, “Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton,” OCACM, xi. Hollis Frampton, “Statement of Plans for Magellan” [1978], OCACM, 228. Hollis Frampton, “Career Summary,” typewritten manuscript, n.d., Hollis Frampton collection, Anthology Film Archives. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 228. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 228. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226. Brian Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 112–13. Magellan set sail with 237 men on five ships in September 1519; only one ship from his fleet, with 18 men, including Pigafetta, returned to Spain in September 1522. Henderson, “Propositions,” 141. Frampton was self-conscious about the gravity of his project’s name, taking his cues from other artists; he notes that Pound never revealed the secret name for his unfinished poem and that Joyce referred to Finnegans Wake as “Work in Progress” until it was completed. Mitch Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates” [interview], Film Comment 13, no. 5 (October 1977): 57. P. Adams Sitney identifies the namesake of Joyce’s novel from “a nineteenthcentury music hall ballad about Tim Finnegan,” a mason who died from a drunken fall but revived at his wake when liquor was spilled on him. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 266. See, for example, Amelia Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning,” in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, 39– 55 (London: Routledge, 1999); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 100. Federico Windhausen has also discussed Frampton as a “philosophically oriented ironist” in his essay “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 157. Henderson, “Propositions,” 140. Hollis Frampton, “Letters from Framp 1958–1968,” ed. Reno Odlin, October 32 (1985): 44. Letter dated 11 March 1964. Odlin attempted to preserve Frampton’s unique patterns of punctuation, abbreviation, and emphasis from his typewritten letters; all future quotations from this source preserve these idiosyncrasies.

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20. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 45. 21. Marie-Josée Jean, “Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box,” VOX, accessed 27 March 2021, http:// centrevox.ca/en/exposition/la-boite-verte-marcel-duchamp/. 22. Hollis Frampton, “Film in the House of the Word” [1981], OCACM, 169. 23. P. Adams Sitney, Introduction to The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), xliv. 24. Sitney, Introduction, xliv. 25. Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 241; Lindley Hanlon, “Arson: A Review of Otherwise Unexplained Fires by Hollis Frampton,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 4/5 (Summer–Fall 1979): 157– 59. 26. Barry Goldensohn, “Memoir of Hollis Frampton,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 43. 27. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21– 77. MacDonald’s invaluable five-volume collection of interviews with independent filmmakers fittingly begins with Frampton in a long interview pieced together from three previously published interviews: Scott MacDonald, “Interview with Hollis Frampton: The Early Years,” October 12 (1980): 103– 26; Scott MacDonald, “Interview with Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 1 (1979): 23– 37; and Scott MacDonald, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Culture, nos. 67/68/69 (1979): 158– 80. 28. Frampton quoted in Robert Haller, “Discovering Hollis Frampton,” in Exis: Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul [festival catalogue], ed. Park Dong Hyun (Seoul, Korea: EXiS, 2005), 169. Cocteau’s famous saying “Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper” is a mantra for artisanal filmmaking, a production mode comparable to that of the poet or visual artist. 29. Christa Noel Robbins, “The Sensibility of Michael Fried,” Criticism 60, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 430, quoting Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5. 30. Robbins, “Sensibility,” 430. 31. To choose just a few examples within Magellan, there are allusions to Marcel Duchamp in Cadenza I (1977–1980); James Joyce and Shakespeare in Gloria! (1979); Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline in Autumnal Equinox (1974); Stan Brakhage in Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976); Eadweard Muybridge in INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT (1975), and massively to Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov throughout, but especially in SOLARIUMAGELANI (1974) and Mindfall I and VII (1977–1980). 32. Nowhere was this more evident at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2013, when ten scholars presented on Frampton’s work, contextualizing it in new and diverse ways, especially Scott Nygren’s “Vision as an Affirmative Ruin: Still Learning from Hollis Frampton’s Project,” a masterpiece of associative criticism. Other scholars included Ken Eisenstein, David Fresko, Bruce Jenkins, Lindsey Lodhie, Melissa Ragona, Maureen Turim, Michael Walsh, Lisa Zaher, and Michael Zryd. Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference program, 2013, https://www.cmstudies.org /page/past_conferences/.

234Introduction 33. Bruce Elder, Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 188. Brakhage retrospectively grouped many of his films into The Book of the Film, just as Frampton declared that all the films he made after Hapax Legomena in 1972 were to be part of Magellan. Sitney notes a competitive edge to Frampton’s project: “If Brakhage thought out loud that The Book of the Film might run twenty-four hours, then Frampton declared that Magellan would be thirty-six.” Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 261. 34. “It was to have been three times the height of the Empire State Building, that great phallic erectation [sic] into the space of western capitalism, which combined a group of Euclidian solids, a calendar, a set of civic utilities, a bunch of kinds of information, all at the same time, all rotating at different rates, one-third of a mile high, made of glass and steel.” Hollis Frampton, transcript of lecture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, December  1977, Hollis Frampton collection, Anthology Film Archives, 3. 35. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 3. 36. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 3. 37. Examples include Antoni Gaudí’s Basílica de la Sagrada Família (started in 1883 and still under construction); Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) (composed in 1987, which will take 639 years to play, ending in 2640); Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy (1974); and musician/futurist Erkki Kurenniemi’s desire to present a virtual version of himself in 2048. 38. My thanks to William Wees for originally pointing to this connection. Rachel Moore develops the connections between Frampton and Benjamin’s dialectical image in Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Books, 2006). 39. Hollis Frampton, “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [with Adele Friedman, 1978], OCACM, 183. 40. Scott MacDonald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 78. 41. Quoted in Henderson, “Propositions,” 106. 42. Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (Fall/Winter 1986/1987): 281– 82. 43. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 115. Christie also remarks on the difficulty in “assimilating” the structure of the films in SOLARIUMAGELANI. 44. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 115. 45. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 235. 46. The full subtitle for Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, the catalogue for the exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) is “Comprising much of the other work of Hollis Frampton during the years 1958–1984, especially celebrating three grand cooperations with Marion Faller, namely Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (1975), False Impressions (1979), Rites of Passage (1983–1984) and including but not limited to numerous collaborations, gifts to others both accepted and rejected,

Introduction235

47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

several findings and outright thefts, all brought together with sundry original works of that time largely and surreptitiously recreated or recollected for the present occasion.” Jenkins and Krane, Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, 1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Many essays from Frampton’s 1983 collected writings, Circles of Confusion, were translated into French in Hollis Frampton: L’écliptique du savoir, film, photographie, video, ed. Annette Michelson (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999), and into Spanish in Especulaciones: Escritios Sobre Cine y Fotografia, ed. George Stolz (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007). MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 73. Hollis Frampton [interviewed by Henry Hills and David Gerstein], “St. Hollis (part 2),” transcript of 1977 post-screening discussion, in Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 314. Frampton, “St. Hollis (part 2),” 314. Frampton, “St. Hollis (part 2),” 313–14; original emphasis. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 1. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 110. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 110. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 110. Hollis Frampton, “Erotic Predicaments for Camera [1982],” OCACM, 89– 94. Christopher Phillips gives a withering commentary on what he calls Frampton’s “infatuated commentary on the photographs of Leslie Krims,” which is linked to Frampton’s late rejection of Weston as an artistic father: “On what grounds could the precisely calculated abrasiveness and conspicuous sexual resentments that inform Krims’s imagery warrant such unreserved praise? Only on the grounds that it be regarded, as Frampton obviously did, as a final, shattering blow to the stifling decorum of F64-style photography. For most young photographers, of course, the power of these conventions had long since dissipated. But for photographers of Frampton’s generation, the reputed ‘transgressive’ value of Krims’s photographs lay in their claim to exorcise a lingering and particularly baleful shade.” Christopher Phillips, “Word Pictures: Frampton and Photography,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 55. Maureen Turim, Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 74 et passim. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); MacDonald, Avant- Garde Film; Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena,” Afterimage 6, no. 7 (1978): 8–13; Melissa Ragona, “Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 171– 201; P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant- Garde, 1943– 2000, 3rd  ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Sitney, Eyes Upside Down; Turim, Abstraction in Avant- Garde Films; and Windhausen, “Words into Film.”

236Introduction 59. Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia); Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Matthew Noble- Olson, “Lateness and the Politics of Filmic Excess,” Modernism/Modernity 27, no. 2 (2020): 273– 97; Rebecca Sheehan, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Allen S. Weiss, “Cartesian Simulacra,” Persistence of Vision, no. 5 (1987): 55– 61; Allen S. Weiss, Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 60. Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Manovich, Language of New Media; Mark Hansen, “Digital Technics beyond the ‘Last Machine’: Thinking Digital Media with Hollis Frampton,” in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. Eivind Røssaak, 45– 72 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); Jeff Menne, “The Last Qualitative Scientist: Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” in In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments, ed. Brian R. Jacobson, 192– 209 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); Keith Sanborn, “Hollis Frampton’s Algorithmic Aesthetic,” conference presentation, Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton, Princeton, NJ, 2004; Andy Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” Moving Image 12, no. 1 (2012): 18–43. 61. Anne Breimaier, “Hollis Frampton. Photography, Film, Performance, Text” (dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, forthcoming); Ken Eisenstein, “ ‘Disembering’: The Activity of the Archive in Hollis Frampton” (dissertation, University of Chicago, 2016); Giles Fielke, “Rational Fictions: Hollis Frampton’s Magellan and the Atlas of Film” (dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2019); Michelle Puetz, “Variable Area: Hearing and Seeing Sound in Structural Cinema, 1966–1978” (dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012); Lisa Zaher, “By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton’s Photographic Modernism” (dissertation, University of Chicago, 2013). To ensure that these emerging scholars have the first opportunity to publish their scholarship, I have not consulted these dissertations in my writing of this book. 62. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future [1979],” OCACM, 180. 63. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 59.

1. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO FRAMPTON’S FILMS BEFORE MAGELLAN 1. Bruce Jenkins, “The Red and The Green,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 65– 84. Jenkins is the preeminent scholar and curator of Frampton’s work. He was a curator at the Center for Media Study/Buffalo before completing the first dissertation on Frampton’s work “The Films of Hollis Frampton: A Critical Study” at Northwestern University in 1983. Jenkins cocurated, with Susan Krane, a 1984 retrospective of Frampton’s photography at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations. He also edited On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton and was part of the team of consultants

1. Frampton’s Films Before Magellan237

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

(along with Bill Brand, Ken Eisenstein, and me) for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD edition of Frampton’s film A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (2012). Jenkins, “The Red and The Green,” 65, 74– 75. Jenkins, “The Red and The Green,” 71– 72. Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton: A Complete Filmography,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 273– 75. This was prepared by Jenkins and Marion Faller (Frampton’s partner from 1971 until his death) from Frampton’s 1982 curriculum vitae (CV). MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 47; quoted in Jenkins, “The Red and The Green,” 69. This period overlaps with the brief moment (1967–1970) when experimental (or “underground”) film had a period of recognition in both popular culture and the art world. See Michael Zryd, “ ‘The Rise of a Film Generation’: Film Culture and Cinephilia” in WileyBlackwell History of American Cinema, ed. Roy Grundmann, Cindy Lucia, and Art Simon, 362– 86 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2012). Writings on these films published during the 1970s include Lucy Fischer, “Magellan: Navigating the Hemispheres,” University Film Study Center Newsletter Supplement 7, no. 5 (1977): 5–10; Bruce Jenkins, “Hollis Frampton: Approaching the Infinite Cinema,” in Film Studies Annual (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1976): 38–51; Bruce Jenkins, “Hollis Frampton’s Autumnal Equinox: A Modernist Film and Its Pictorial Past,” in Film Studies Annual: Part Two, Film Historical-Theoretical Speculations (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1977): 75– 81. Hollis Frampton file, Hunter College Archive and Special Collections. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia), One Work Series (London: Afterall Books, 2006). Frampton’s (nostalgia) and Zorns Lemma were selected for Anthology Film Archive’s Essential Cinema (1975). P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Collections of Anthology Film Archives (New York: Anthology Film Archives and New York University Press, 1975). Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film” [1975], OCACM, 150. Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture” [1968], OCACM, 130; and Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative [1972],” OCACM, 143. Hollis Frampton, “Meditations around Paul Strand” [1972], OCACM, 61. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed., s.v. “abstraction,” http://www .thefreedictionary.com/abstraction/, accessed 10 March 2015. Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 80. Despite Arthur’s claim, there is little scholarship on Hapax Legomena taken as a whole, though there are many essays on some of the individual films. Exceptions include a two-part interview with Frampton and commentary by Jonas Mekas in his “Movie Journal” column for Village Voice, 11 and 18 January 1973; Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena,” in Afterimage 6, no. 7 (1978): 8–13; and a chapter, “Hollis Frampton and the Specter of Narrative, in Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 98–122.

2381. Frampton’s Films Before Magellan 16. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture, no. 47 (1969): 1–10. Frampton complains about the term in his interview with James Broughton, “Hollis Frampton in San Francisco [1977],” in Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, ed. Scott MacDonald, 268– 69 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 17. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 18. Wanda Bershen, “Zorns Lemma,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (1971): 41–45. 19. Frampton, “Notes on Composing,” 150. Frampton adopts masculine forms as generic pronouns in his writing, following contemporary usage. Here and throughout the book, I have quoted these sources verbatim for accuracy but I reject the presumption inherent in this usage, which underscores the larger cultural problem of equating a generic, universal subject with the male subject. 20. Frampton, “Notes on Composing,” 150. 21. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Abstraction and Intimacy,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 222. The embedded quotation is from Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1: 23. 22. Mitchell, “Abstraction and Intimacy,” 222– 23; Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” 23. 23. Frampton, “Notes on Composing,” 154. Sitney notes how Frampton’s preference for serial works is part of his expansive gesture to encompass art: “In Frampton’s work, serialism was one of several means to revising, or dramatizing the revision of, our illusion of maintaining ‘a complete grasp of the universe.’ ” Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 270. 24. Hollis Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy” [1980], OCACM, 293. Frampton also adds William Carlos Williams to his list for his “investigation into the unconsecrated poetics of language at large.” Even in “Notes on Composing in Film,” the essay that is most Greenbergian in tone, Frampton derives his principles from Ezra Pound, whose approach to language was more about proliferation than reduction. Frampton stated that “Notes on Composing in Film” was “rather severely schematized” compared to his usual “bellelettristic” writing style. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 110. 25. Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy,” 294. 26. Oxford Dictionary of English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2037. 27. Hollis Frampton, “The Withering Away of the State of the Art” [1974], OCACM, 263. 28. Frampton, “Notes on Composing,” 106. Frampton quotes Pound’s archaic term “excernment,” meaning “the general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions,” from “Date Line” [1934–1935], in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, 74– 87 (New York: New Directions, 1968). 29. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143.

1. Frampton’s Films Before Magellan239

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143–44. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” 223. Rachel Moore explores the resonances of fire in her Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia). In an autobiographical subtext, Frampton’s first marriage was dissolving during the production of Hapax Legomena. Frampton notes in the catalogue description for the serial as a whole, “The work is an oblique autobiography, seen in stereoscopic focus with the phylogeny of film art as I have had to recapitulate it during my own fitful development as a film-maker.” Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7 (New York: New American Cinema Group, 1989), 170. Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage (UK), no. 4 (1972): 62. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 46–47. Critical Mass has two parts marked by the transition from the first roll of film to the second; Frampton also adjusts the visual and sound editing algorithms. The editing patterns on the soundtrack become more whole and continuous as the film goes on, perhaps foreshadowing the long take of Travelling Matte. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 171. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 64; original emphasis. Frampton, “Withering Away,” OCACM, 261. This essay was originally presented as a paper at the “Open Circuits: The Future of Television” conference at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1974. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 65. The kinescope was completed at Antioch College; see Leah Churner, “Travelling Matte Preservation History,” 2008, http:// www.nyu .edu /tisch /preservation /program /student _work /2008spring /08s _3402 _class _a1.pdf/, accessed 15 March 2015. Churner, “Travelling Matte Preservation History.” Frampton calls Ordinary Matter “a kind of acceleration from Travelling Matte”: “In Travelling Matte the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And in Ordinary Matter the need somehow to worry about those words and still photographs, and so forth [in the first three films of Hapax Legomena] is behind. Ordinary Matter is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” Mekas, interview in “Movie Journal,” Village Voice, 18 January 1973, 70. MacDonald, “Hapax Legomena,” 12. An early title for Remote Control was (given . . .). Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 77. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 66. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 172. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 172. Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 120.

2401. Frampton’s Films Before Magellan

50. The sharp graphic quality of the film was emphasized by Frampton: “Frampton’s printing instructions specify that the film retain its contrasting deep black and stark white.” Nicole Aynsley Martin, “Special Effects Preservation History,” 2008, http://www.nyu.edu /tisch/preservation/program/student_work/2008spring/08s_3402 _class_a1.pdf/, accessed 15 March 2015. 51. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 72. 52. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 53. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 54. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 55. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 60. 56. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer 1967): 12–23. Christa Noel Robbins provides an important critique of Fried’s essay in “The Sensibility of Michael Fried,” Criticism 60, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 429– 54. 57. Exemplars include Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–1975): 39–47; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18; Peter Gidal, ed., Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976); and Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (New York: Routledge, 1989). 58. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 59. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 60. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [1971], OCACM, 134– 35. 61. Frampton, “Metahistory,” OCACM 134. 62. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 63. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsvolod Pudovkin, and Gregori Alexandrov, “A Statement [on Sound],” in Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda, 257– 59 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949). 64. Hollis Frampton, “(nostalgia): Voice- Over Narration for a Film of That Name” [1971], OCACM, 209; original emphasis. 65. Collins English Dictionary— Complete and Unabridged, s.v. “abstraction,” http://www .thefreedictionary.com/abstraction/, accessed 10 March 2015. This meaning is also suggestive insofar as the narrator says that he “shall never dare to make another photograph again.” 66. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 64. Frampton’s use of the masculine pronoun here may underline his autobiographical identification with elements of the scenario presented by the screenplay. 67. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 68. 68. In interviews of the period, Frampton had conceived a much more elaborate soundtrack consisting of voices describing Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . .) (1946–1966), alternating male and female voices reading combinations of sentences from the descriptions. Peter

2. An Introduction to Magellan241

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

Gidal and Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 11–13. As MacDonald notes, “Unlike the pixilation in Ordinary Matter, the pixilation in Remote Control creates no illusions of continuous time and space.” MacDonald, “Frampton’s Hapax Legomena,” 130. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 172. The “surprise” refers to Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, which features a surprise chord that is not repeated (another hapax legomena), echoing a color sequence Frampton cut into the film, a single sequence, like the lone color insert in Eisenstein’s film. Sitney, using notes from MacDonald, analyzes the gestures toward narrative and “systems of enumeration” in Eyes Upside Down, 119–20. Mekas, “Movie Journal,” 18 January 1973, 70. John Powers does just this and provides a detailed analysis in his essay “Time Lapse Looped in Hollis Frampton’s Remote Control,” Discourse 44, no. 2 (2022): 181–212. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 65. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 107. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 171. Michelle Puetz, “A Cinema of the Ear: Hollis Frampton’s Special Effects,” conference presentation, “Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton,” University of Chicago, February 2010, http://michellepuetz.com/presentations/, accessed 24 February 2021. Puetz, “Cinema of the Ear,” 9. An early title for the film was “Cascade.” Frampton, “Pentagram,” 144; bracketed addition in original.

2. AN INTRODUCTION TO MAGELLAN 1. In “A Lecture,” Frampton answers the question of what all films are about: “At one time and another, we shall have seen, as we think, very many things.” “A Lecture” [1968], OCACM, 128. 2. “Statement of Plans” was drafted in 1978 but first published in 2009 in OCACM. It exists in several versions, which accompanied Frampton’s many successful grant applications from the mid-1970s onward. Bruce Jenkins mentions three versions of the text– –grant applications for Creative Artists Program Service Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Guggenheim– –and suggests the possibility of others. OCACM, 229. 3. Hollis Frampton, “Statement of Plans for Magellan” [1978], OCACM, 226– 27. 4. Frampton refers to Magellan as a calendrical cycle as early as 1974 even though the calendar in Frampton’s production files is dated late 1978. Hollis Frampton, “: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR FOR MAGELLAN / VERSION 1.2.0=1 DEC 1978,” Anthology Film Archives. 5. In two extant versions of the calendar, one has the Birth and Death spanning three days and another two days. The Magellan Calendar document dated 1 December 1978 indicated

2422. An Introduction to Magellan

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

three days each for these sections, but the version of the calendar dated 21 December 1978 excises 29 December and 3 January from the Birth and Death sections, respectively. For example, in this program, Yellow Springs, Quaternion, and For Georgia O’Keefe were screened together in a portrait gallery section of The Death of Magellan called “Interlude: Pares Magelani.” “Magellan (1972– 79),” Hollis Frampton Program Note, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980. MoMA Film Study Center, artist file. In letters and interviews, Frampton refers frequently to high laboratory printing costs for reasons why films he has completed could not be released. For example, he released only one film in 1973, Less, a one-second film that he completed so that he could at least claim one released film that year. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue no. 7 (New York: New American Cinema Group, 1989), 173. Brian Henderson calls this the “all-important!” cut. Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 101. Despite this stated intention, it is unclear when these sections would start and stop within the extant sixty-seven-minute film print. Suranjan Ganguly, ed., “Interview with P. Adams Sitney,” Stan Brakhage: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 22. “Hollis Frampton: A Complete Filmography,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 275. Mitch Tuchman, “Frampton,” Film Comment 21, no. 4 (July–August 1985): 39. Tuchman, “Frampton,” 39. Pamela Purdy, “Moby Flick,” City Paper (Baltimore), December 1981, 16. Purdy, “Moby Flick,” 16. Bruce Jenkins, Lucy Fischer, Mitch Tuchman, and later Maureen Turim appreciated many of the Magellan films, while many reviews in newspapers and experimental film magazines were more critical, including Amy Taubin, “Tilting at Linearity,” Soho Weekly News (1980): 58; Vincent Grenier, “Works by Schilling, Frampton, and Landow,” Ideolects, no. 1 (1976): 17–18; Samir Hachem, “Cinema,” LA Reader, September 5, 1980, 10. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 262. Sitney mentions similar ambivalence reported by Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 25. Each five-minute segment was designed palindromically, the first half of the segment mirroring the last half, and each segment was meant to be screened in the Magellan Calendar, once forward and right side up and a second time backward and upside down. Arthur calls this “The Featurization of the Avant- Garde,” in Paul Arthur, “The Last of the Last Machine?: Avant-Garde Film since 1966,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (1987): 81– 89. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226– 27. Earlier versions listed seven goals. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 73. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226.

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23. Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “poesis,” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/poesis/, accessed 30 March 2019. 24. Henderson, “Propositions,” 114. 25. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film,” OCACM, 138. 26. Hollis Frampton, “St. Hollis (part 2)” [1977], interview by Henry Hills and David Gerstein, transcript of post-screening discussion, in Scott MacDonald, ed., Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 314. 27. Michael Zryd, “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, 182–216 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 28. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. Frampton refers to Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin (1925). Although in this essay, Frampton follows the familiar sexist pattern of presuming a male pronoun for the historian, in a 1974 essay, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” he refers to a female historian (OCACM 33), a correction informed by his awareness of feminism and the training of his first wife, Marcia Steinbrecher, identified as “an historian” in his program note on Manual of Arms. 29. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film,” OCACM, 154. 30. George Derk, “Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 261- 62. 31. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 138. 32. Frampton, “St. Hollis,” 314. 33. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 228. 34. The main scholarly association during this time was the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS), which became the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in 2003. 35. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226; original emphasis. 36. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice April 4, 1974. 37. Frampton, “Incisions,” 36. 38. Hollis Frampton, transcript of lecture at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, December 1977, Anthology Film Archive Hollis Frampton artist file, 2. 39. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226. 40. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 115. The footage was shot at the Gross Anatomy Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, with permission to film arranged by Sally Dixon at the Carnegie Museum of Art shortly after Dixon had helped Brakhage shoot his The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971) at a coroner’s office in Pittsburgh. 41. In theory, with a double-perforation filmstrip, each segment could be flipped. 42. The first edition of Sitney’s Visionary Film was published in 1974, early in Magellan’s production. 43. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 52– 53.

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44. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226– 27. 45. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future” [1979], OCACM, 180. 46. Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” [1978], OCACM, 80. Lisa Zaher has brilliantly developed this relation of images to natural languages, investigating another unfinished project, R, that involved examining the radicals of Chinese pictorial language in relation to bodily gestures. Lisa Zaher, “Utopian Technopolitics and Modernist Regressivity: Towards Hollis Frampton’s ‘R’ (1980– ),” conference presentation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, March 2014. 47. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 27. 48. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. 49. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113. 50. MacDonald draws out the autobiographical dimensions in his long interview “Hollis Frampton” and in “Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma,” in Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67– 78. 51. Quoted in Susan Krane, “Chronology,” in Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, catalogue for an exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, ed. Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 110. 52. Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 233. 53. Manual of Arms includes sculptor Carl Andre, photographer Barbara Brown, painter Rosemarie Castoro, dancer Lucinda Childs, poet Barry Goldensohn, painter and filmmaker Robert Huot, Eric Lloyd, painter Lee Lozano, Linda Meyer, painter Larry Poons, multimedia artist Michael Snow, historian Marcia Steinbrecher, dancer Twyla Tharp, and multimedia artist Joyce Wieland. Andre, Castoro, Huot, Lozano, and Tharp reappear in Artificial Light. Frampton also designed the poster for Snow’s exhibition. In 1984 Wieland completed a film collaboration begun in 1966 with Frampton, A & B in Ontario, from footage shot by the two artists. 54. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 172, 176. 55. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. 56. Ryan Pierson, “Postwar Animation and Modernist Criticism: The Case of Annette Michelson,” conference presentation, “New Views of Modernism: Forms and Publics,” 19– 26 February  2021, https://www.newviewsofmodernism.com/recordings/, accessed 24 March  2021; Michael Snow, “Hollis Frampton Interviewed by Michael Snow,” Film Culture, nos. 48/49 (Winter/Spring 1970): 8. 57. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 34– 35. 58. Snow, “Hollis Frampton Interviewed by Michael Snow,” 13. 59. Quoted in a post-screening discussion in 1977 in San Francisco, in MacDonald, Canyon Cinema, 270. Frampton, framing his remarks on the adaptive qualities of, in his

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

example, herbivores needing to see color to see edible food, speculates that color “doesn’t have to do with things as far as recognizing them, separating them from each other. It seems to have a lot to do with our attitude towards them.” MacDonald, Canyon Cinema, 270– 71. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227; ellipses in original. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. The “Encounter” is Lautréamont’s word in his phrase “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. Melissa Ragona, “Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 173. Ragona, “Hidden Noise,” 175. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. Frampton served on the Anthology Film Archives Video Selection Committee from 1974 onward. Uhrich recounts an experiment with video that Frampton tentatively meant to include in Magellan: “In March 1972, Frampton experimented with the Paik–Abe analog video synthesizer, which was a processor and generator of video imagery created to Paik’s specifications. Frampton created two hours of footage, which he exhibited on November 2, 1974, at Anthology Film Archives as part of its From Film to Video series. Shown alongside both the film and video versions of Travelling Matte, Frampton called the new footage Memoranda for a Dream of Magellan.” Andy Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” Moving Image 12, no. 1 (2012): 24. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 228. Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema,” 21. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227– 28. Hollis Frampton, Letter to Donald Richie [1973], OCACM, 159. Hollis Frampton, “FRAMPTON.CV,” unpublished CV, c. 1981, Carnegie Museum of Art, Department of Film and Video Archive, http://records.cmoa.org /things/30e3a1d0 -cbbb -48c1-b0f6 -bd34e67dac26/, accessed 23 September 2017, 2. Frampton also published computer code in a legendary DIY computing magazine, Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia: “Hollis Frampton, CPCON: An ALS-8 to CP/M File Converter,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal 5, no. 1 (#41) (September 1979): 29– 33. His characteristic humor is reflected in some of the annotations entered for each line of code. Keith Sanborn, “Hollis Frampton’s Algorithmic Aesthetic,” lecture presented at conference, Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton, Princeton, NJ, 2004, and also at “REFRESH! The First International Conference on the Histories of Art, Science and Technology,” 28 September–1 October 2008, Princeton, NJ.

2462. An Introduction to Magellan

76. Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema,” 38. He concludes, “Their artist-run model was determined by anarchic contingency, analytical abstraction, and the aestheticization of rationality” (38– 39). 77. Jeff Menne, “The Last Qualitative Scientist: Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” in In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments, ed. Brian R. Jacobson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 205. 78. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 228. 79. Frampton, “Incisions,” 45.

3. METAHISTORY AND THE ARCHIVE 1. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 111–12. 2. While attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Frampton, along with classmates Carl Andre and Frank Stella, had Patrick Morgan as his painting teacher. Morgan and his partner, Maud Morgan, had studied with Hans Hoffman in Germany. Frampton saw Abstract Expressionist paintings at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Andover and, guided by Maud Morgan, visited New York and the Cedar Tavern, soaking up its mythology. 3. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 111. 4. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 111–12. 5. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 32– 35 (reprinted in OCACM, 131–39), part of the first special issue on film in Artforum, ed. Annette Michelson. In a 1980 interview, Frampton declares, “That article, which is nine years old, was, in my mind, quite openly a manifesto for a work that I was at that moment thinking quite seriously about undertaking, namely the Magellan project.” Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 241. The essay is included in Scott MacKenzie’s comprehensive edited collection of manifestos, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 78– 85. 6. My thanks to Cannon Schmitt for this insight. 7. These authority figures were all men. Although Frampton inherited and often embodied the masculinist bias of this period, more than most in the New York film and art scene, he recognized female figures within history; for example, there is a gnomic imperative in his fiction “Mind over Matter” [1976-1978], “get lovelace,” inserting Ada Lovelace beside Charles Babbage into the early history of computing (OCACM, 314). 8. Hollis Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy” [1980], OCACM, 294. 9. See, for example, Anna Lovatt, “Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 1985,” Burlington Magazine 153, no.  1302 (September  2011): 601– 604. 10. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131.

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11. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 133. In a 1972 interview, Frampton adds to this list the death of Beethoven. See Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage (UK), no. 4 (1972): 48. 12. Michael Billington, “Woyzeck for Ever,” The Guardian, 28 September 2002, accessed 21 December 2014. 13. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134. 14. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 133, 134. 15. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134, 135. 16. Once the conceptual machine formed by metahistory is named, Frampton devotes much of the conclusion of the essay to theoretical postulates and problems of definition, specifically, of film, cinema, projection, and film’s paradoxical objecthood. As Noël Carroll has observed of Frampton’s essay, it balances a “historical approach” and an “essentialist approach”; i.e., a concern with defining what seem to be the essential and apparently timeless qualities of cinema. Noel Carroll, “A Brief Comment on Frampton’s Notion of Metahistory,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (Fall/Winter 1986/1987): 205. 17. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 115. Frampton uses the masculine pronoun here to point to himself as the metahistorian with the problem to solve. Mathematical derivation seeks to “obtain (a function or equation) from another by a sequence of logical steps, for example by differentiation” (“derive,” Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, encyclopedia.com, last updated 18 May 2018). Frampton seeks to outline a sequence of logical steps for film from its material functions. 18. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. 19. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in 20th Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. Gary Geddes (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969), 440. 20. For Eliot, “the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality.” Eliot is not interested in the particular emotions of the individual artist; rather what “counts” is “the intensity of the artistic process” working through the concerns and products of tradition. Eliot, “Tradition,” 445. 21. Eliot, “Tradition,” 441–42. 22. Eliot, “Tradition,” 441. 23. “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.” Eliot, “Tradition,” 441; original emphasis. 24. Peter Gidal, “Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1972], in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 10. 25. Artists cited by Frampton in his interview with Gidal include Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kubelka, Andrew Noren, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wieland. Gidal, “Interview,” 27. 26. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 111–12.

2483. Metahistory and the Archive 27. Brian Henderson begins a preliminary discussion of vertical montage in Mindfall in “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 114-15, 120-23. 28. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 241. 29. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 241. 30. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 244. 31. Isabel Sobral Campos reads insomnia in relation to Levinas’s idea of “the wakening of consciousness to itself,” examining Frampton’s work in relation to religious dimensions of infinity and totality. Sobral Campos, “Futureless Invention: Hollis Frampton’s InfiniteFinite Film,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33, no. 3 (2016): 230– 50. 32. Hollis Frampton, “Letters from Framp 1958–1968,” ed. Reno Odlin, October, no. 32 (1985): 34. Frampton composed a three-page Trio, dated 12 November 1956, with the note, “10 feb 1968—a redaction with minor repairs for R. Odlin,” published in Bob Davis and Rich Gold, eds. Break Glass in Case of Fire. The Anthology from the Center for Contemporary Music (Oakland, CA: Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, 1978). 33. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 32. 34. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 52; letter dated 20 January 1968. 35. Eliot, “Tradition,” 442. 36. Eliot, “Tradition,” 442. 37. He even qualifies the term “development” as nonevaluative: “This development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not from the point of view of the artist, any improvement.” Eliot, “Tradition,” 442. 38. Eliot, “Tradition” 442; original emphasis. 39. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 73. 40. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future” [1979], OCACM, 181. 41. Frampton, “Invention,” 181. 42. Frampton, “Invention,” 180. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer who points out that the Lumière quotation is in fact that the cinematograph is an invention without a future— not the cinema. The reviewer suggests that “Cinema is an invention without a future” is a misquotation that appears in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). 43. Frampton, “Invention,” 180. 44. Frampton, “Invention,” 180. 45. Frampton, “Invention,” 181. 46. Resources include the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) with its Wayback Machine and, within the field of cinema and media studies, the Media History Digital Library (https://mediahistoryproject.org/). 47. Gunning adopts Sergei Eisenstein’s original term from the montage of attractions. Gunning’s pioneering work on the relationship between the avant-garde and early cinema can be found in his highly influential “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3/4 (1986): 63– 70, and elaborated in “An

3. Metahistory and the Archive249

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

Aesthetic of Astonishment,” Art & Text, no. 34 (Spring 1989): 31–45. His earliest essay on early film and the avant-garde is “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell, 355– 66 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). This essay builds upon the lecture he presented at the Whitney Museum in 1979 as part of the same lecture/screening series, “Researches and Investigations into Film: Its Origins and the Avant-Garde,” that included Thom Anderson, Nick Browne, Burch, Regina Cornwell, Frampton, Gunning, Ken Jacobs, and Maureen Turim. Burch’s essay “Primitivism and the AvantGardes: A Dialectical Approach” (also first presented at the 1979 Whitney event) argues for the attraction of the “otherness of preinstitutional cinema” for modernist artists (published in Narrative-Apparatus-Ideology, ed. Phil Rosen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 500). Controversies over the use of the term “Primitivism” in art history came to a head with MoMA’s 1984 “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art exhibition. An important review pointing to the colonial taint of the term is Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” Artforum International 23, no. 3 (1984): 54– 61. Frampton mentions Jacobs’s film in Frampton, “Metahistory,” 116; Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 69; Gidal, “Interview,” 27. Exemplary films include Ernie Gehr’s History (1970) and Eureka (1974); Al Razutis’s Visual Essays: Origins of Film (1973– 1984); Malcolm LeGrice’s Berlin Horse (1970) and After Lumière—l’arroseur arossé (1974); Peter Gidal’s Movie #2 (A Phenakistiscope Film) (1972); and later Noël Burch’s Correction Please, or How We Got into Pictures (1979). Stan Brakhage published a lecture on Georges Méliès in The Brakhage Lectures (Chicago: The GoodLion at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1972). Bart Testa’s Back and Forth: Early Film and the Avant-Garde (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992) is a valuable discussion relating these films to early film scholarship. Jonas Mekas, “Ernie Gehr Interviewed by Jonas Mekas, March 24, 1971,” Film Culture, nos. 53–55 (Spring 1972): 33. Thanks to Ken Eisenstein for this reference. Hollis Frampton, “Letter to Annette Michelson” [7 January 1974], Ideolects 13 (1983): 71; Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251. In a letter to Stan Brakhage (19 July 1972), Frampton says that he obtained a pirated copy of The Big Swallow from Standish Lawder and was distributing copies to friends (letter in Anthology Film Archive, Frampton artist file). Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 63; original emphasis. Lucy Fischer reports that he taught a course on early cinema, although I have found no record of this, at least at SUNY Buffalo. Lucy Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” American Film 4, no. 7 (May 1979): 60. Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” 26; Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251. In a 3 July 1973 letter to Marjorie Keller at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Frampton refers to his purchase of Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison, 1903) and to two other titles, Epileptic Seizures, Nos. 1–7 and No. 9 and Views of the Decorticated Dog (which Frampton describes as “late ’Thirties silent horror from the halls of science”) (letter in

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54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

Anthology Film Archives, Frampton artist file). The epilepsy footage was incorporated into early versions of Mindfall but not retained in the final released version. Frampton also refers to an edition of the short films as 32 Fragments in Mitch Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates: Interviewed by Mitch Tuchman,” Film Comment 13, no.  5 (September– October 1977): 58. Andrew Uroskie connects Frampton’s “Phenakistoscope” to kineographs made in the late 1950s and early 1960s by artists like Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Yoko Ono, and especially Robert Breer. Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 103–4. Hollis Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract” [1973], OCACM, 22– 32. Rebecca Solnit, in the introduction to her book on Muybridge, praised Frampton’s essay as “the best essay ever written on Muybridge.” River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 84. Gail Camhi, Otherwise Unexplained Fires, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7 (New York: New American Cinema Group, 1989), 176. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 25. Rudyard Kipling, “Mrs. Bathurst,” Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1904). Nicole Védrès, Images du cinéma français (Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1945); Ivor Davies, “Western European Art Forms Influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson before 1914, Particularly Italian Futurism and French Orphism.” Art International 19, no.  3 (March  1975): 49– 55. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. Remote Control, which is composed of single-frame images of Hollywood movies Frampton filmed off a television screen, could also be argued to be a found footage film, although Frampton’s algorithm for image gathering in that film is as important as the material itself. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 35, 38; Frampton, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 168. Frampton, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 167. Ken Jacobs’s Perfect Film (1986) is like Works and Days in that Jacobs found and exhibited the footage almost “as is” (he amplifies rather than suppresses the soundtrack). Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) is a classic example of a heavily manipulated found footage film. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 37– 38. In the Magellan Calendar, Frampton requested that Rainer choose the films to be screened in leap years on 29 February, in honor of Sadie Hawkins Day. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251.

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70. My thanks to Cannon Schmitt for these connections. 71. Frampton, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 168. 72. Frampton used a stylized version of his initials as a signature end title until 1972. He stopped adding his logo to films in Magellan, emphasizing that each of the films released after 1972 would be part of a larger cyclical work without end. Ken Jacobs described Frampton’s logo disparagingly as a quasi-swastika, a charge to which Frampton might have been sensitive given his youthful attachment to anti-Semite Ezra Pound. 73. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 41, 48–49. 74. Hollis Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” Artforum 11, no.  5 (January  1973): 72– 80. Frampton notably insists on the importance of Jane Brakhage (née Collum, now Wodening) for Stan Brakhage’s work. For information on the seminar recordings, see Ken Eisenstein, “The Hollis Frampton Collection at the Harvard Film Archive: An Inventory” [Finding Aid], Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, 2005. P. Adams Sitney considers the “parallelism, or competition” between Brakhage and Frampton in Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 259– 63, 338–44. 75. Frampton, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7, 176. 76. Frampton agrees with Gail Camhi’s review of the film that it is “a critique of a part of Brakhagian montage” (Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 241). Magellan: At the Gates of Death is a response to Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, again privileging an analytical rather than expressive rhetoric. 77. Bruce Jenkins, “Hollis Frampton: Approaching the Infinite Cinema,” Film Studies Annual (1976): 38– 51. 78. Keith Sanborn, “Hollis Frampton’s Algorithmic Aesthetic,” lecture presented at conference, “Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton,” Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 2004, quoted in Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 263. 79. Carroll, “Frampton’s Notion of Metahistory,” 205, 204. 80. Eliot, “Tradition” 442. “The mind of Europe” is a phrase used by Pound in ABC of Reading (1934) to refer to Chaucer. Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 2. 81. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. 82. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Filmmakers” [1971], OCACM, 190. 83. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 239. 84. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 57. 85. Hollis Frampton, “Letter to Macalester College” [1980], OCACM 297; Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 57. 86. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 50. 87. Barry Goldensohn, “Memoir of Hollis Frampton,” October 32 (1985): 7–16. 88. Hollis Frampton, “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, 183.

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89. Frampton’s correspondence with Pound is available in the Pound fonds at the Yale University Library. My thanks to Giles Fielke for sharing these texts. See also Marcella Booth, “Ezrology: The Class of ’57,” Paideuma 13, no. 3 (1984): 375– 88. 90. Alice Lyons, “A Keyboard Mind: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem,” Poetry Foundation, 17 February 2020, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/03/a-keyboard -mind-hollis-framptons-gloria-as-lyric-poem/. Pound’s failure to complete high school and college degrees parallels Frampton’s failure to graduate from Phillips Academy and Western Reserve University. 91. Frampton, “Interview at the Video Data Bank,” 183. 92. George Derk, “Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 242. Derk cites scholarship that reads “modernist poetry and avantgarde film as a continuum”: P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Scott MacDonald, “Poetry and the Avant-Garde Film: Three Recent Contributions,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 1–41; R. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998). 93. Derk, “Make It Old,” 262. 94. Hollis Frampton, “Some Propositions on Photography” [1965], OCACM, 8. 95. Hollis Frampton, “Letter to Enno Develing” [1969], OCACM, 284. 96. Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” [1978], OCACM, 68. 97. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 86. He concludes, “We are under no obligation to put up with this sort of thing.” 98. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 86. 99. Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 102. As Cannon Schmitt points out, Venus Genetrix is a found mother rather than another founding/frowning father. 100. “Lucretius,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/ lucretiu/ #SH3a/, accessed 15 December 2014. 101. Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy,” 293. Frampton also adds William Carlos Williams to his list for his “investigation into the unconsecrated poetics of language at large.” 102. Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy,” 294. 103. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251. 104. The two completed Dreams are Matrix (1977–1979) and Palindrome, a film that Frampton completed in 1969 and subsequently planned to include in Magellan, appropriating his own films for his metahistory. In the 1978 calendar, Palindrome is listed as “Second Dream,” but in 1980 Frampton screened it as “First Dream.” His 1982 CV, which is the basis for his published “Complete Filmography,” lists Matrix as “First Dream.” 105. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 42.

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106. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. 107. Borges, “Pierre Menard,” 44. 108. Thanks to Ken Eisenstein for tracking down the gravesite and sharing this image. In the documentation of “Camera footage for unmade films (?)” at Anthology Film Archives, there is a reference to a film can labeled “Alpha & Omega.” 109. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134. 110. Gidal, “Interview with Frampton,” 7. 111. Frampton, “Zorns Lemma: Script and Notations” [1970], OCACM, 192; original emphasis. 112. For a critique of Frampton’s appropriation of Grosseteste, see Luke A. Fidler, “The Praxis of the Tractrix,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 7 (2016): 96–114. 113. Gidal, “Interview with Frampton,” 7. 114. Frampton, “Invention,” 179. 115. Frampton, “Invention,” 179. 116. Gidal, “Interview with Frampton,” 7. 117. Gidal, “Interview with Frampton,” 7. Frampton here seems to be alluding to Bishop Berkeley’s famous idealist stance that the world exists only in consciousness: “This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.” Wikipedia, s.v. “George Berkeley,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /George_Berkeley/, last modified 23 March 2021. 118. Hollis Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity” [1974], OCACM 38; original emphasis. 119. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 226. 120. FinnegansWiki, Page 3, http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Page_3/, last modified 11 July 2015. 121. Henderson, “Propositions,” 106. 122. Derk contrasts how far Frampton has come from Pound in Cadenza I: “A beginning that enacts a return to origins can also be found in The Cantos, but the discrepancy between these returns intimates that Frampton and Pound are conducting two different types of voyages. While Pound stated that ‘all poetic language is the language of exploration,’ beginning The Cantos with a translation of Homer imbues the epic with the feeling that everything has been preordained and has, in a sense, already transpired: ‘The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place / Aforesaid by Circe.’ ” Derk, “Make It Old,” 248-49. 123. Frampton, “Incisions,” 34. 124. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251. 125. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 43– 52. 126. Letter from Hollis Frampton to Sally Dixon, 22 August 1971, Carnegie Museum of Art Archives, Department of Film and Video Archive, https://records.cmoa .org /things /4bafc52d-1ad4-4c82- 92e6 -1deabc3a6761/, accessed 20 January 2018; Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 31.

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127. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 251. 128. Tuchman, “Talking about Magellan,” 57. 129. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136.

4. ENCYCLOPEDISM, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING 1. Lucy Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” American Film 4, no. 7 (May 1979): 60. 2. Mitch Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates” [interview], Film Comment 13, no.  5 (October  1977): 58. Quaternion is also the title of Frampton’s portrait film of James Rosenquist. 3. Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (London: W. H. Allen, 1964), 3; quoted in Federico Windhausen, “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 167. 4. Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 1. 5. Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston” [1978], OCACM, 241. 6. Kenner overtly links the encyclopedia to the Enlightenment, the grand historical moment that the historical figure of Ferdinand Magellan preceded and whose circumnavigation of the world Frampton saw as emblematic of the compulsion to totality that was characteristic of the Scientific Revolution and modernity. Kenner describes the work of Flaubert (whose last book, Bouvard and Pécuchet [1881] was a satire of encyclopedism): “And the Enlightenment having invented the modern world, Flaubert was driven at last to fiction of encyclopedic scope; nor even here does one evade the Enlightenment, which invented the Encyclopedia.” Kenner, Stoic Comedians, xviii. Like Flaubert, Frampton is driven to encyclopedic scope, bringing together, in ambivalent extension and critique in filmic form, the Enlightenment and modernity. Kenner’s book The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968) is quoted in and frames the general theory of history found in Frampton’s essay “For a Metahistory of Film” [1971], OCACM, 131– 39. 7. Tuchman “Frampton at the Gates,” 58. The Encyclopédie was not the first encyclopedia, a common misconception (see discussion below). 8. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future” [1979], OCACM, 180. 9. Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1990). My thanks to Ken Eisenstein for introducing me to this text. 10. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 1. 11. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 3– 7. 12. In Arnar’s gloss, all encyclopedists have been male, although no doubt women contributed and were written out of history. 13. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 11.

4. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything255 14. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 13. 15. Robert L. Fowler, “Encyclopedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems,” in Pre-modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley, 3– 30 (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 16. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 11. 17. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [1971], OCACM, 135. 18. Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1968), 84. 19. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 105. 20. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 58. 21. Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena, Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage (UK), no. 4 (1972): 74. In calling them “daylights,” he noted their contrast with the severe, black-and-white, often highly edited films in Hapax Legomena. 22. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 105. Frampton tells a similar anecdote in a 1974 talk at a Millennium Film Workshop about becoming “totally overrun.” “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (Fall/Winter 1986/1987): 284. For more on the categories in the Lumière catalogues, see the 1903 Catalogue Général des Vues Cinématographiques Positives de la Collection Lumière. 23. I was involved, along with a small group of Frampton scholars, in selecting films for the Blu-ray/DVD edition of Frampton’s films issued by the Criterion Collection, A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (2012). As we tried to find a representative sample of the pans, we began to categorize them and ended up having more e-mail exchanges about the choice of a few one-minute films than we did about choosing what to include from the whole of Frampton’s oeuvre. 24. Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 72. 25. Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 72– 73. 26. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 106. 27. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 106. 28. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 106. 29. Hollis Frampton, “Statement of Plans for Magellan” [1978], OCACM, 226. 30. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. 31. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 1. 32. Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna: Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia [The Great Renewal: Many will pass through and knowledge will be the greater] (1621); George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817, 1827); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Encyclopaedia Metropolitanica; or Universal Dictionary of Knowledge (1818–1845). 33. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 138. 34. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 137. Frampton’s attention to the distribution and exhibition conditions of early film likely influenced his sense of cinema expanded beyond its textual parameters.

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35. Windhausen suggests, “Frampton’s famous formulation of cinema as ‘the last machine,’ one whose workings, he claims, can be understood by inspecting its parts, seems to have been inspired by Kenner’s claim that in the Age of Machines, ‘You could understand how a thing worked by looking at it.’” Federico Windhausen, “Syncretic Practices and the Idea of Didactic Cinema: The Significance of the Non-Cinematic Arts for the Work of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits” (PhD diss., New York University, 2007), 148, quoting Kenner, Counterfeiters, 44. 36. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131; original emphasis. 37. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131. 38. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134– 35. 39. Kenner, Counterfeiters, 23. 40. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131. Magellan in its incomplete state is like the dog and the dice, the machine that strips away context and meaning, in the sense that many films may at first seem illegible and repetitive. However, Frampton’s conception of a complete Magellan imagined it as a synthetic machine that would explain and add to our understanding of the complexity of both human consciousness and art. 41. Another related text in Frampton’s research files is Heinrich von Kleist’s “Puppet Theatre,” Salmagundi, nos. 33/34 (Spring/Summer 1976): 83– 88. 42. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 114–15. In conceiving of cinema as a simulacrum, Frampton is of course not alone. Well before Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1983), predecessors include André Bazin’s 1946 essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Jean Epstein’s monster of representation (whose 1946 book was titled “L’intelligence d’une machine” [Paris: Jacques Melot, 1946]), and Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed (1971), in which cinema ingests the world partly through its automatic mechanical nature. Frampton’s infinite cinema differs from Bazin’s total cinema in not being bound to Bazin’s realist telos; the infinite cinema is open to much more diverse media and stylistic variety. Baudrillard, Simulcra and Simulation (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. Hugh Gray, 17– 23, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 43. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 137; original emphasis. 44. James Irby, Introduction to Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates (New York: New Directions, 1964), xviii. 45. Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 234. 46. Windhausen, “Words into Film,” 150. 47. It is also a mathematical exercise given to computer science students. Wikipedia, s.v. “Knight’s Tour,” http://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Knight%27s _tour/, last modified 25 February 2021. 48. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 138. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same source and page.

4. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything257

49. Five years after Frampton published the “Metahistory” essay, he used the Knight’s Tour metaphor again in his 1976 interview with Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, again as a figure of openness but this time privileging the activity of the spectator: “The nature of the tour itself— or the manner in which one constructs meaning (inventing it as the spectator in the midst of witnessing the work)—is under construction again.” Frampton, in constructing Magellan, sets up a series of pathways through the material, individual patches of filmic material that point to the larger fabric that connects them: “There are [sic] a very large number of knight’s tours; so there are [sic] presumably a very large number of pathways through a body of illusionist material.” Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 117. 50. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 116–17. 51. Peter Gidal, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 7. 52. Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time,” in Labyrinths, 229. 53. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 58. 54. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 1. 55. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983). 56. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131– 32. Fowler notes, “The nineteenth century certainly displays a naïve belief in the existence of facts, finite in number and theoretically countable. . . . Progress in this world consists in the discovery of more facts.” Fowler, “Encyclopedias,” 25. 57. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 131. 58. As Windhausen states, “Kenner and Frampton intend to remind the reader that the concept of a fact has a history, one that includes periods in which empirical data was intensely fetishized.” Windhausen, “Words into Film,” 156. 59. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” [1942], in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 103. This quotation (in a slightly different translation) is central to the preface of Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xv. 60. Hugh Kenner also invokes Wilkins in both The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters, although Kenner contextualizes Wilkins’s project within what he describes as a larger project of the Royal Society to “tidy up human discourse” through the standardization of language, which, for Kenner, “thinned and sharpened English diction, and made the norm of style a tidy logic.” Kenner, Counterfeiters, 39, 40. 61. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 102. Frampton was very interested in natural and artificial languages: “For whatever wisdom language holds, it is common knowledge among philologists that languages spring, as it were, full-blown into life and proceed, as time passes, from complex to simple. The most primitive languages we know are, quite uniformly, the most complicated grammatically. The utopian artifices once put forth as ‘universal languages’ are a case in point: the oddity called Volapük, a predecessor of Dr. Zamenhof’s Esperanto, boasted more cases, tenses, moods than Sanskrit (itself a

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

priestly invention based on Vedic). Sir Thomas Urquhart, Rabelais’s first English translator, is said to have brought forth a ‘tongue’ of even daffier proportions.” Hollis Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity” [1974], OCACM, 37. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 104; original emphasis. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 103. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 104. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 104. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 104. Borges also mentions “the ‘Volapük’ of Johann Martin Schleyer and the romantic ‘Interlingua’ of Peano” as well as more institutional absurdities of the “Bibliographic Institute of Brussels” and the “Grammar of the Royal Spanish Academy.” Borges, “Analytical Language,” 104. Borges, “Analytical Language,” 103. Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” 227. King, following Borges’s parameters in the story, has calculated that at 410 pages x 40 lines x 80 characters, there are 1,312,000 characters per book. Each character can be one of 25 characters, each independent of the next: 251,312,000 is approximately 101,836,800. To put this in perspective, 1011 = number of stars in our galaxy; 1018 = number of grains of sand; 1018 = number of atoms in a gram of hydrogen; 1080 = number of atoms in the observable universe. Daniel King, “Mathematics and the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges,” lecture, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, 14 April 2008. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 73. Hollis Frampton, transcript of lecture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, December 1977, Anthology Film Archive, Hollis Frampton artist file, 4. There is no title at the start, but the film ends with Frampton’s “HF” logo. Frampton did a guest lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) for Stan Brakhage on early film, for which he ordered the sixteen films that constituted Public Domain as a single reel (in a somewhat devious attempt to get SAIC to pay for his film printing costs from the Library of Congress). See Frampton’s letter to Marjorie Keller (3 July 1973) when she was working at SAIC in the Frampton file at SAIC Archive. Frampton, “Invention,” 181. Kinetoscopes, fairgrounds, and vaudeville were the major venues for early film before the rise of the nickelodeon theaters in 1905. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Frampton was interested in the chance operations afforded in early film distribution and exhibition practices. He said of his series of one-minute pans, “I propose that there shall be four groups of them. . . . This is an open imitation of the Lumière brothers’ catalogue, which had ‘Vues Comiques,’ ‘Vues Militaires,’ and so forth, with numbers, and they had two thousand of them. I think what I would like to do is make two hundred and forty in

4. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything259

78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

four groups, ‘Ordinary Views,’ ‘Extraordinary Views,’ ‘Erotic Views,’ and ‘Exotic Views’ . . . [and] divide each of the groups into 6 subgroups of 10 each, and if anyone were foolish enough to rent Straits of Magellan, what they would get would be one 10-minute reel from each group.” Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 74. This early plan would distribute Straits of Magellan as a random sample of titles, imitating the Lumière company. If the arrangement of the sixteen films in Public Domain is alphabetically randomized, it must be acknowledged that Frampton chose them from the Paper Print Collection. Those criteria of selection are ultimately unknowable, but one principle may have simply been variety. Library of Congress, “History,” http://www.loc.gov/about/ history.html/, accessed 10 May 2013. Library of Congress, “History,” http://www.loc.gov/about/ history.html/, accessed 10 May 2013. Arnar names the library as an encyclopedic form: “Libraries represented, in a sense, concrete manifestations of the ideal encyclopedia—they were three-dimensional encyclopedias.” Arnar, Encyclopedism, 43. Lucy Fischer reports that Frampton “spent one summer ensconced at the Library of Congress viewing the entire Paper Print collection.” Fischer notes that Frampton “affectionately likened the collection to ‘the back rooms of the fourth floor of the American Museum of Natural History which have endless, incomprehensible objects.’ ” Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” 62. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 234. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 50– 51. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 18, 37– 39. Fowler, “Encyclopedias,” 20– 21. Paolo Cherchi, preface to Arnar, Encyclopedism, x. See also Kenner, Counterfeiters. Coleridge, in Arnar, Encyclopedism, 4. In the subtitle to Coleridge’s Encyclopedia Metropolitania, he claimed “the Twofold Advantage of Philosophical and an Alphabetical Arrangement.” Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 2. Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 24. “Before encyclopedias were invented, facts had to be invented, the very concept of a fact: fact as the atom of experience, for the encyclopedist to set in its alphabetical place, in dramatic testimony to the realization that no one knows in what other place to set it, or under what circumstances it may be wanted again.” Kenner, Stoic Comedians, 18. Cherchi, Preface, x. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 38. For me, as I contemplate Public Domain, and Magellan in general, my mental work becomes: “I know there is a system; I’m trying to figure out the rules; and the more I look for

2604. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115.

116.

systematicity, the more I encounter ‘discrepancies, irrational values, accumulations of error.’ ” Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 58. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 58. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 30. Hollis Frampton, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7 (New York: New American Cinema Group, 1989), 166. Audio recording of talk at Cooper Union, 1972, Harvard Film Archive, Hollis Frampton collection, Cambridge, MA. Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1971); Gerald O’Grady, “State University of New York at Buffalo Media Study,” pamphlet c. 1982. O’Grady includes this text in the photocopied 532-page compendium of Frampton miscellanea that he distributed to Frampton scholars: Mental Notes: Nostalgic, Epitaphic, Necrological, Pedagogical, Academical, Technical, Calendrical and Orthodontal: A Hand-Made Scrapbook Encomium (Cambridge, MA: Scribbledehobble Productions: 2004), 329- 31. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 48. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979). Hollis Frampton, “Mind over Matter” [1976-1978], OCACM, 308–20. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 318. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 318. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 319; original capitalization. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 2. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 57. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 57. Magellan was killed on the island of Mactan due to his aggressive Christian evangelism. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 57. Denis Diderot, “Encyclopedia,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Philip Stewart (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004/, accessed 11 June  2013. Originally published as “Encyclopédie,” Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635– 648A (Paris, 1755). Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 319; original capitalization. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 319. Kenner, Counterfeiters, 26. As Arthur Danto puts it, “Descartes, and modern philosophy generally, drew a philosophical map of the universe whose matrix was the structure of human thought.” Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6. For example, race is not a category that Frampton addressed in his writings, nor did he discuss just how deeply the logics of capitalist exploitation were rooted in racist precepts.

4. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything261

117. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 312. The number 5,040 was important to Plato as having multiple divisions, “making it an ideal number for the number of citizens (heads of families) making up a polis.” Wikipedia, s.v., “5040 (number),” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki /5040_(number)#:~:text=5040%20is%20a%20factorial%20(7,8%20%C3%97%207%20 %3D%205040)/, last modified 16 December 2020. 118. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 312. This may be a pun on Bentham’s panopticon as architecture in a “penal vein.” In Frampton’s research collection of postcard images, there is a postcard of the stuffed Bentham on display at King’s College London; here, in another curious cabinet, the spirit of Bentham’s mad utilitarianism is invoked and mocked. 119. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 312. 120. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 43. 121. Frampton, “Mind over Matter,” 312. 122. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 11. 123. Hollis Frampton, “Zorns Lemma: Script and Notation” [1970], OCACM, 200; and MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 51. The edition is likely one published in 1969, one year before Zorns Lemma was released, and part of Frampton’s papers at Anthology Film Archives: a facsimile edition of a French translation from 1525, with English translation. Antonio Pigafetta, The Voyage of Magellan: The Journal of Antonio Pigafetta, trans. Paula Spurlin Paige (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). 124. Pigafetta, Voyage of Magellan, 82. 125. Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 84, 85. 126. Arnar, Encyclopedism, 11. 127. Hollis Frampton, “Letters from Framp 1958–1968,” ed. Reno Odlin, October 32 (1985): 27. 128. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 27; original emphasis. 129. Wikipedia, s.v. “Parable of the Sunfish,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Parable_of_the _ Sunfish/, last modified 1 February 2021. 130. Hollis Frampton, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” [1972], OCACM, 21. 131. Quoted in Noel Stock, Poet in Exile (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester, 1964). 6. Wikipedia, s.v. “Ezra Pound,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound#Education/, last modified 28 March 2021. 132. The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary. S.v. “polygenism.” Retrieved October 9 2022 from https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/polygenism/. 133. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 40. My thanks to Sarah Choi for bringing this text to my attention. 134. Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 40. 135. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 27. 136. George Derk, “Make It Old: Hollis Frampton Contra Ezra Pound,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 242.

2624. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything 137. Brian Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 121-22. 138. Henderson, “Propositions,” 122. 139. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 60– 61.

5. ARCHAEOLOGY 1. Hollis Frampton, transcript of lecture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, December  1977, Anthology Film Archives, Hollis Frampton artist file, 1. 2. Hollis Frampton, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” [1972], OCACM, 9. 3. My thanks to Ken Eisenstein, Eli Horwatt, Keith Sanborn, Tess Takahashi, and Federico Windhausen for their invaluable help in charting some of these connections. I am especially grateful to Keith Sanborn for bringing Kubler’s text to my attention. 4. Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966), 28– 31, and “Ultramoderne,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 1 (September/October 1967): 31– 33; Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1971); Robert Morris, “Form-Classes in the Work of Constantin Brancusi,” unpublished thesis, Hunter College, New York, 1966. 5. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 32– 35 (reprinted in OCACM, 131– 39); Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 53– 55. Annette Michelson says recruiting Frampton and Smithson to write in Artforum were her “two big editorial coups”; quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962–1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 235. 6. Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980). 7. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 1. 8. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 52. Frampton reports that he was “hooked off onto hard science at an early age.” Susan Krane, “Chronology,” in Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, eds. Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 107. While at Wilbur Wright Junior High School, Frampton and ninth-grade classmate Tom Reed published “A Transparent Working Model of the Human Digestive System,” in Science Teacher 19, no. 2 (March 1952): 69– 70. The editorial notes that they “are the youngest authors to hit the pages of this journal” and that they demonstrated their model at the 1951 convention of the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers at Cleveland. 9. Kubler, Shape of Time, 10. 10. Kubler, Shape of Time, 33.

5. Archaeology263

11. “How does artistic invention differ from useful invention? It differs as human sensibility differs from the rest of the universe. Artistic inventions alter the sensibility of mankind. They all emerge from and return to human perception, unlike useful inventions. Useful inventions alter mankind only indirectly by altering his environment.” Kubler, Shape of Time, 65. 12. Hollis Frampton, “Letter to Donald Richie” [1973], OCACM, 160. 13. Kubler, Shape of Time, 1. Kubler acknowledges that the history of things is known by a more familiar term, “material culture,” but it is a term he disdains for its “bristling ugliness” (9). 14. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 135. Notably, what also survives is “potsherds and garbage dumps . . . from Neolithic times,” which reflects Frampton’s un-precious sense of art. 15. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 135. 16. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 136. George Derk states, “Paradoxically, it is only by turning the cinema into a relic of a bygone era that the metahistorical goal of fathoming the sum total of all recorded images can be achieved.” Derk, “Make It Old: Hollis Frampton Contra Ezra Pound,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 246. Yet in 1983, in his preface to the first collection of his writings, Circles of Confusion, Frampton admitted to being less certain that film had attained such purposelessness— and if cinema is less a relic than an evolving instrumental technology, there remains a ghost in the machine of the infinite cinema. Hollis Frampton, “Ox House Camel Rivermouth: A Preface,” in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968-1980, by Hollis Frampton (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 11. 17. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 135. 18. Kubler, Shape of Time, 65. 19. Kubler, Shape of Time, viii. 20. Kubler, Shape of Time, 33. Frampton calls metahistories a “class” of artifacts in the “Metahistory” essay. 21. Kubler, Shape of Time, 8. 22. Kubler, Shape of Time, 9. 23. Kubler, Shape of Time, 9. 24. Kubler, Shape of Time, 9. 25. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 2, 3. 26. Pamela Lee, “ ‘Ultramoderne’: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art,” Grey Room 2, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 54. I am grateful to Eli Horwatt for introducing me to Lee’s work. 27. Kubler, Shape of Time, 8. 28. Kubler, Shape of Time, 6, 33. 29. Kubler, Shape of Time, 8. During the 1970s, Frampton often cited Barthes’s and Foucault’s pervasive critique of authorship. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

2645. Archaeology 30. Kubler, Shape of Time, 50. 31. Kubler, Shape of Time, 35. 32. Hollis Frampton, “Letters from Framp 1958–1968,” ed. Reno Odlin, October 32 (1985): 51. The “Dictionnaire des Iddees Recues” [sic] refers to Gustave Flaubert’s satirical Dictionary of Received Ideas (written in the 1870s and published in 1911–1913). 33. Kubler, Shape of Time, 27. 34. Hollis Frampton, “(nostalgia): Voice- Over Narration for a Film of That Name” [1971], OCACM, 206– 7. 35. Kubler, Shape of Time, 9. Kubler showed a chapter of his book to a math colleague at Yale who contributed a long footnote on the connection to networks and “graph theory,” which resembles vectors (34). 36. Kubler, Shape of Time, 13. 37. Kubler, Shape of Time, 9. 38. Hollis Frampton, “The Withering Away of the State of the Art” [1974], OCACM, 262. 39. Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative” [1972], OCACM, 142. 40. Frampton, “Pentagram,” 143. 41. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 51; original emphasis. 42. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 51. 43. Kubler, Shape of Time, 13. 44. In Frampton’s production files, Sheldon Nodelman’s “Structural Analysis in Art and Anthropology,” from a special issue on Structuralism in Yale French Studies 36/37 ([1966]: 89–103), shows Frampton’s interest in the connection of art to archaeological frameworks. Nodelman compares Lévi-Strauss’s method of structural analysis with the work of art historians like Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg and Alois Riegl to promote the “structuralanalytic method” as a way of articulating “the structure and content of consciousness” in archaeological epochs (100–101). 45. James Broughton, “Hollis Frampton in San Francisco” [1977], in Scott MacDonald, ed., Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 265– 69; P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture, no. 47 (1969): 1–10. 46. Hollis Frampton, “St. Hollis (part 2)” [interview by Henry Hills and David Gerstein], transcript of post-screening discussion, in MacDonald, Canyon Cinema, 313–14. 47. As a child, Frampton frequented both the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Krane, “Chronology,” 107. Frampton’s close friend, poet Reno Odin, was trained as an Egyptologist. 48. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Filmmakers” [1971], OCACM, 190. 49. Christine Froula, introduction to A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983): 8. 50. Ezra Pound to Hollis Frampton, correspondence, c. 1956, Ezra Pound fond, Yale Beinecke Library. In his letter of 6 April 1956, Frampton offers his services to Pound as a translator, stating that he knows French, German, Greek, and some Latin. Frampton first wrote

5. Archaeology265

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

to Pound 8 March 1956 about his radio show at Oberlin College, where he scandalously read some of The Cantos on air. In the Frampton “Chronology,” the entry for 1957 concludes, “Completes the translation into English of the seven volume Erlebte Erdteile [sic] (Frankfurt-am-Main, West Germany: Societatsdruckeri, Abt. Buchverlag, 1925–1929) by German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, a project suggested by Pound [unpublished]” (109). Frampton first mentions the translation project in a letter to Pound of 20 November 1956. He refers to Guy Davenport, also working on a translation, and Frampton asks Pound how much Davenport had completed and if he was working from a French translation. Frampton retained research files labeled “Leo Frobenius, Diagrams/Erdlebte Erdteile”; included in this file is the introduction to Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Paul A. Olson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Frampton’s report on his lack of progress is dated 17 May 1958 in “Letters from Framp,” 26. Suzanne Marchand, “Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 2 (April 1997): 153. Frobenius was read by “an important group of African students in Paris, who adapted Frobenius’s neoromantic fascination with Negerheit to their own anti-colonial purposes” (153). Marchand, “Leo Frobenius,” 163, 169. Later African writers like Wole Soyinka were far more critical of Frobenius’s primitivism. Marchand, “Leo Frobenius,” 167. Marchand, “Leo Frobenius,” 168. Marchand also points to Frobenius’s “sometimes unscrupulous” (168) methods of collection, whose legacies—along with those of most ethnographic collection/theft/plunder—require redress. J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 31. Paideuma is the title of the fourth volume of Erdlebte Erdteile. Paideuma is also the name of a journal of Pound Studies within which Marcella Booth’s remembrance of Frampton is published: “Ezrology: The Class of ’57,” Paideuma 13, no. 3 (1984): 375– 88. Tony Tremblay, “Leo Frobenius,” The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 126– 27. Derk, “Make It Old,” 244-45. Derk foregrounds how Frampton’s interest in modernism and film understands cinema as “an inherently vernacular medium.” Derk, “Make It Old,” 242. Hollis Frampton, “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, 183. Frampton, “Digressions,” 14; original emphasis. Frampton, “Digressions,” 9. See Marchand, “Leo Frobenius,” passim. Robert Smithson also made an Atlantis, Hypothetical Continent (Map of broken clear glass, Atlantis), as a photo project (1969) and then as a broken glass installation. Frampton, “Digressions,” 9; original emphasis and punctuation. Frampton, “Digressions,” 9–10.

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66. Frampton, “Digressions,” 10. 67. Ken Eisenstein, “ ‘The Archives of Our Memory’: Hollis Frampton’s Marmoreal Mammary,” Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 12, no.  1 (2012): 102. 68. Frampton, “Digressions,” 15; original emphasis and punctuation. 69. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 217– 52. 70. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. 71. Bazin, “Ontology,” 14. 72. Frampton, “Digressions,” 11. 73. Frampton, “Digressions,” 11. 74. Hollis Frampton, “Meditations around Paul Strand” [1972], OCACM, 66. 75. Frampton suggests that Weston’s analect would be “The Photography Must Be Visualized in Full Before the Exposure Is Made.” Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place” [1978], OCACM, 68. 76. Frampton, “Paul Strand,” 61. Subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from this page. 77. Frampton, “Paul Strand,” 61. Frampton also mentions Goldbach’s Theorem in “Mind over Matter,” OCACM, 314. 78. Eric W. Weisstein, “Goldbach Conjecture,” Wolfram Mathworld, https://mathworld.wolfram .com/GoldbachConjecture.html/, accessed 11 March 2021. The Conjecture dates to 1742. 79. Frampton, “Digressions,” 11; original emphasis. 80. Weisstein, “Goldbach Conjecture.” 81. Notably, within the Library of Congress subject code call numbers, Photography (TR) is located far from Fine Arts (N) but rather between Chemical technology (TP) and Manufactures (TS); the wider T code for Technology rests between Agriculture (S) and Military Science (U). The summa of LOC subject codes had also not seen photography as art. 82. Frampton, “Digressions,” 10. 83. Frampton, “Digressions,” 11. 84. Options and Alternatives: Some Directions in Recent Art, catalogue for an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery, 4 April–16 May 1973 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1973). The text was revised for publication in Film Dimension, a supplement to The Spectrum at Boston University (18 April 1975), but the revision is minor, swapping out one of the decoded terms and modifying wording in a few more. 85. Hollis Frampton, “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi” [1973], OCACM, 303. The “transparent substance” is “dried and flattened dog intestine.” Frampton delighted in saying film was originally an animal product; in his lecture on early cinema, he writes, “The Eastman Kodak Company still insists that the very best photographic gelatin is made from selected ear and cheek clippings of Argentinean beef cattle that are fed on mustard greens. How’s that for magic?” Frampton, “The Invention without a Future” [1979], OCACM, 177.

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86. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 303. In “The Withering Away of the State of the Art,” Frampton ruminated on Eisenstein’s excitement about the aesthetic dynamism of a square film frame (OCACM, 264). This story is a realization of Eisenstein’s dream, another “making film over as it should have been.” Frampton, “Statement of Plans,” OCACM, 226. 87. While I am emphasizing the link to language, it is still a story, like the Atlantis parable, about science befuddled by something new. The narrator reports that the archaeological find was “resistant to study by canonical methods,” but persistence through the basic scientific presumption that “We are obliged to assume that this stuff means something!” finally afforded some understanding through the approach of cultural reframing. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 303. 88. A variety of late nineteenth-century texts posited Atlantis as a lost “advanced” civilization that preceded various real civilizations (e.g., Mayan, Yoruba), thereby undermining their achievements. 89. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304. 90. Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 180. 91. Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, 72. 92. Photocopies in his research files include Roman Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Lemon and Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism; and Jacques Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” SubStance 4, no. 10 (1974). For evidence of anti-academic attitudes in the experimental film world in the 1970s and 1980s, see editions of the magazine Spiral and reports on major events like the International Film Theory Conference series at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, published in Wide Angle. 93. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 305; Wikipedia, s.v. “International Phonetic Alphabet,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_ Alphabet/, last modified 10 March 2021. 94. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304. 95. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304. 96. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 303. 97. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 305. 98. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134. 99. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304. Pound’s “ideogrammatic” method is described in detail by Hugh Kenner in “Ideogram: Seeing,” in The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1968). Thanks to Matt Teichman for this reference. 100. Michael Snow, “Hollis Frampton Interviewed by Michael Snow,” Film Culture, nos. 48/49 (Winter/Spring 1970): 12. 101. Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (Fall/Winter 1986/1987): 280. Frampton calls Whorf “the third of the three grey insurance salesmen. He goes along with [Charles] Ives and [Wallace] Stevens as a monument to the virtue of the insurance industry” (279).

2685. Archaeology 102. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus,” OCACM 86. 103. Hollis Frampton, “Film in the House of the Word” [1981], OCACM, 169. 104. Frampton, “Film in the House,” 167. 105. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 305, 307. 106. This is an allusion to Stan Brakhage through Frampton’s film Otherwise Unexplained Fires, which includes footage of the Brakhage family home when Brakhage apparently was the only male inhabitant. Hollis Frampton, introduction to film screening at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 21 March 1978, Hollis Frampton artist file, Carnegie Museum of Art, Department of Film and Video Archives. 107. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304. 108. These photographers include Bernice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, Laura Gilpin, Margrethe Mather, Tina Modotti, Barbara Morgan, and Sonya Noskowiak. 109. Frampton, “A Stipulation,” 304; original emphasis. 110. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 84; italics in original. 111. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 84– 85. 112. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 85. Subsequent quotations in this discussion are also from this page. Earlier in his own career, Frampton indulged in the same purity of selection in his casting of the star of his film Lemon: “Choosing the lemon, of course, was very important. I spent half an hour feeling up all these lemons, looking for the one that would be most breastlike, most splendidly citroid. Finally, the produce manager came over and watched me for a while, wondering if I had a lemon fetish. I bought half a dozen to cover myself.” MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 39. 113. Some of his “junk and rubble” photographs are reproduced in “A Portfolio of Photographs,” October 32 (1985): 17– 24. 114. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 84– 85. 115. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 2. 116. Mitch Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates” [interview], Film Comment 13, no. 5 (October 1977): 59. 117. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 59. 118. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film” [1975], OCACM, 153. 119. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 28. 120. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 29. 121. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 29– 30. 122. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 30; original emphasis. 123. Hollis Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy” [1980], OCACM, 293– 94. 124. Frampton, “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy,” 294. As far as I can determine, this is the earliest use of the term “postmodernism” in Frampton’s writings. A useful early definition of postmodernism from architecture is from Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity

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125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131.

132.

133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

142.

and Contradiction in Architecture: “elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ ‘ambiguous’ rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as ‘interesting’” (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), quoted in Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 12. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 59. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 59. Tuchman, “Frampton at the Gates,” 59. Frampton usually identified himself as an “avant-garde” filmmaker but also referred to the broader category of “experimental film.” During this period, these terms were rarely differentiated systematically, but Frampton allied himself more strongly with the political edge and drive for the new that is associated with avant-gardes of the twentieth century. Hollis Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 79. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage,” 79. Gregory Zucker, “Cinema and Critical Reflection: A Conversation with Ken Jacobs and Family,” Logos 4, no. 3 (Summer 2005). See also Michael Zryd, “Professor Ken,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, 249– 61 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Within this conception of spectatorship, the “plausibility of the photographic illusion” that Frampton asserts as a fundamental characteristic of cinema becomes a problematic quality for political modernist film theory. Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage (UK), no. 4 (1972): 52. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 54. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage,” 79. Letter to Peter Gidal, 16 April 1973, Peter Gidal personal collection. Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 61. Frampton, “Invention,” 177– 78. Frampton, “Letter to Donald Richie,” 159–162. Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 51– 52. “That there was work to be done; that more and more, it was understood that there was work to be done . . . and that there were things that you needed to know, to begin with. Really I think there was only a relatively short period anywhere in Western art, and mostly in the 19th century, when there was this belief that everything was laid out for the perceiver, and everything that he needed to know was going to be told him, right there, in the work. Well that’s certainly bullshit.” Field and Sainsbury, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” 51– 52; original emphasis. Frampton’s class identification and origins in the “American heartland” has parallels with Ezra Pound’s iconoclasm, which expressed itself in part against monied elites. Pound’s

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143. 144.

145. 146.

147. 148. 149.

reaction formation against his background was more extreme and lacked Frampton’s sense of self-irony. Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 250. Frampton, “Impromptus,” 78. Jenkins notes that “workman’s attire” was “his uniform of choice throughout his adult life,” but in Frampton’s speech “there resonated locutions worthy of an Oxbridge don.” Bruce Jenkins, “Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton,” OCACM, xii. Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture” [1968], OCACM, 129. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 235. Federico Windhausen also points to the stakes of Frampton’s utopian spectator, including the possibility that they may not exist: “Frampton’s utopian position appears to have been tempered by an awareness of the risks he had undertaken, or at least of the possibility that the dynamically responsive spectator he seeks, the agent willing to ‘move his consciousness out of the pathetic and into the operational view of art,’ might not be there at all.” Windhausen, “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” in Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 163. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 235. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 237. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 236. See also Frampton, “Withering Away,” 261– 68.

6. THE CONSTELLATION 1. Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 69. 2. Robert Fernandez, “On Azure and Translating Mallarmé,” Harriet: The Blog, http://www .poetryfoundation.org / harriet/2015/09/on-azure-and-translating-mallarme/, accessed 7 July 2016. Also Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Stéphane Mallarmé, Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), xx. 3. Fernandez, “On Azure and Translating Mallarmé.” 4. Fernandez, “On Azure and Translating Mallarmé.” 5. Ian Christie and Deke Dusinberre, “Episodes from a Lost History of Movie Serialism: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 117. Frampton elaborates on the projector as a performer in “A Lecture” (1968), in OCACM, 125– 30. 6. Examples include Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry; and Fernandez, “On Azure and Translating Mallarmé”; Sarah Keller, Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading ‘Capital,’ ” October 2 (1976): 26– 38. Thomas Beard curated an exhibition, The Unfinished Film, at the Gladstone Gallery, New York, that included work by Frampton in addition to artists like Kenneth Anger, Joseph Cornell, Morgan Fisher, and Jack Goldstein.

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7. In his production files, Frampton had articles on navigation as an amalgam of art and science like D. W. Waters, “Science and the Techniques of Navigation in the Renaissance,” 2nd ed. (London: National Maritime Museum, 1980). 8. The subtitle of Dava Sobel’s book captures its magnitude: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995). 9. Morton Wagman, Lost Stars: Lost, Missing, and Troublesome Stars from the Catalogues of Johannes Bayer, Nicholas-Louis de Lacaille, John Flamsteed, and Sundry Others (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward, 2003). 10. Antonio Pigafetta, The Voyage of Magellan: The Journal of Antonio Pigafetta, trans. Paula Spurlin Paige (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 26. Other names for the Large and Small Clouds are Nubecula Major and Nubecula Minor (1603, Bayer) and “Le Grand Nuage” and “Le Petit Nuage” (1795, Flamsteed). 11. Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 230. 12. Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 13. Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, 231. See also David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1979). 14. In Zorns Lemma, the concluding section soundtrack is a text by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, “On Light, or the Ingression of Forms,” that Frampton translated and edited. In astronomy, “ingression” means “the arrival of the sun, the moon, or a planet in a specified constellation or part of the sky” or “the beginning of a transit,” apposite to the way the text speaks of numbers and heavenly forms. Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, s.v. “ingress,” Encyclopedia.com, 8 October 2022, https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities /dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/ingress- 0/. 15. Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, 230– 31. 16. Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, 231. 17. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 117. 18. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 117. 19. Christie and Dusinberre, “Episodes,” 117. 20. My thanks to Alexandra Keller for this elegant formulation. 21. Will Kyselka, An Ocean in Mind (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1987). 22. Hollis Frampton, “Letters from Framp 1958–1968,” ed. Reno Odlin, October 32 (1985): 46– 47. All quotations from this source preserve the idiosyncratic style and punctuation found in Frampton’s typed letters. 23. With photographic film, the opposite occurs; we tend to forget the reality of the 2-D screen and see an imagined 3-D and—since film is in motion—a 4-D space/time. 24. If the spectator oscillates between making and finding meaning, the artist’s choice is slightly different. In his essay on photographer Edward Weston, Frampton suggests, “Into the workshop of the photographer who would remanufacture the world, only one or the other of two verbs may come, and it is obliged to wipe its feet at the door: take or make. Take your choice.” Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in its Place”

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25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

[1978], OCACM, 67. The photographer may take a photograph, using the frame to cut a quadrangular image of the world from reality. Or the photographer may make an image through composition, mise-en-scène, optical labor, or laboratory play. Of course, photographers both take and make photographs, and Frampton is making a false distinction. But his sense of the history of photography contrasts these options in order to emphasize their epistemological stakes, as in his contrast of the photography exhibitions reviewed in “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” (see chapter 5). For Frampton, the early history of photography finds artists making images, imitating the tropes of painting (e.g., Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustave Rejlander), and stressing the capacity of the medium to signify symbolically in contrast to later artists like Weston and Paul Strand who supersede the imitation of painting, instead embracing the unique power of the photograph to take an image of the world. Hollis Frampton, “Statement of Plans for Magellan [1978],” OCACM, 228. The term “didactic hoax” is taken up by Frampton’s friend Reno Odlin, who uses the title in his later poetic work (e.g., centrum circuli). In a letter to Henry Wessells (26 March 2001), Odlin described the Didactic Hoaxes as follows: “The title is taken from an uncompleted project of Hollis Frampton’s youth. Absit omen! Part One constitutes specimen pages as they might appear if brought back from Earth-like planets in their various Alternate Universes. Guy Davenport has spoken of the over-all project as ‘speculative realities,’ and I have no problem with that.” Examples of his Didactic Hoaxes and other typographic works were regularly exhibited at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris. “centrum circuli,” Criticalfiction.net, http://criticalfiction.net/wordpress/?p =45/, accessed 4 April 2021. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 44–45. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 44-45. Subsequent quotations in this discussion are from these pages. Jorges Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 63. Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” 63– 64. Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” 66. Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” 64. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 46; my emphasis. Frampton, “A Lecture,” OCACM, 130. Frampton quoted in Bruce Jenkins, “Collecting His Thoughts: Remarks on the Writings of Hollis Frampton,” OCACM, xi. My thanks to John Belton for this valuable extension of cinema to the digital realm. All references to production notes in this section come from the “Clouds of Magellan: Notes” and “Magellan: Matrices” files, box Y, Hollis Frampton Magellan film and paper collection, Anthology Film Archives. The Small Cloud films appeared usually forty days apart but with a variance of thirty-nine to forty-three days; The Large Cloud films appeared usually twenty-seven days apart but

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38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

with a variance of twenty-six to thirty-one days. The first Small Cloud appears on 1 January and the last on 31 December, an illogical spacing in a calendrical cycle. This note is dated “2/7/76 Eaton.” Of Aristotle’s four fundamental causes, the first is the material cause. If there are 12 layers of 225 matrices, then 2,700 would need to be generated. However, on one production note, Frampton asks, “Total 144 Mat/s needed?” underlining the ambiguities of this reconstruction. Original emphasis. Go officially has a nineteen-sided grid but can be played on smaller grids. Wikipedia, s.v., “Seki--List of Go terms,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms #Seki/, last modified 2 April 2021. Jorge Luis Borges, “Go,” trans. Wayne Nelson, American Go E-Journal, 1 October 2012, https://www.usgo .org /news/2012 /10 /go -spotting -jorge-luis -borges - on -the-astrological -game-of-go/. In one of Frampton’s dialogues with Carl Andre, Andre notes, “Cartography is dimensional and navigation is durational.” Magellan’s voyage required both. Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980), 41. Wikipedia, s.v., “Dextrorotation and levorotation,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Dextrorotation_and _levorotation/, last modified 12 December 2020. Hollis Frampton, “About the Digital Arts Lab” [c. 1982], OCACM, 274. Jeff Menne, “The Last Qualitative Scientist: Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” in In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments, ed. Brian R. Jacobson, 192– 209 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). Frampton adds another note to “factor the mat[rice]s for operations [i.e., aspect and hue] / rotate one shell at a time and multiply.” “There are six colors in the RGB color wheel: (primary) red, blue, green, (secondary) cyan, magenta, and yellow.” Wikipedia, s.v., “6,” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/6_(number)/, last modified 15 March 2021. See Animax, “6-Bit Binary Converter,” Scratch, https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1669306/. Wikipedia, s.v., “6.,” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/6/, last modified 5 May 2021. Alex Ross, “Encrypted.” New Yorker, 11 April 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine /2016/04/11/stephane-mallarme-prophet-of-modernism/. I am grateful to Keith Sanborn for this nuanced translation (e-mail to the author, 31 March 2004). Magellan notes, box 1, Hollis Frampton collection, Museum of Modern Art Archives. Another note for “opening of mal armé” states: “once in a blue moon—get back pxr of moon in Buffalo,” another reference to Azure. My thanks to Ken Eisenstein for sharing these images from Anthology Film Archives. The relation between Mallarmé and Frampton has been taken up by other scholars, especially P. Adams Sitney. He says of the end of (nostalgia), “The excess of affect both entices

2746. The Constellation

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

and frustrates the viewer’s complicity in the quest for the uncanny referent. In this regard, Frampton reenacts the semiological mise en abyme of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Le demon de l’analogie.’ ” P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111. Andre and Frampton, 12 Dialogues, 37. In another essay, Frampton mentions “a poetics of the printed page invented by Mallarmé.” Frampton, “Pictures, Krim’s Pictures, PLEASE!” [1981], OCACM, 100. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Preface of 1897,” in Un coup de dés/A Throw of the Dice, trans. A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2007. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR /French /MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm/. All subsequent quotations of Mallarmé in this discussion are from this source. Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus,” 81– 82. Frampton also echoes Roland Barthes’s essay “The Rhetoric of the Image” and its argument about how the image and language interconnect semiotically. It was translated into English and published in 1977, a year before Frampton’s essay was published in October. Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 27. The Persian astronomer Al Sufi described the Large Cloud of Magellan as “al-Bakr” or “the Sheep” of the southern Arab sky. Wikipedia, s.v., “Magellanic Clouds,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Magellanic_Clouds/, last modified 30 March 2021. Another note in the Magellan production files for the planned film, MAGELLAN IS BUT POORLY ARMED reads, “(homage à l’azur) / . . . sky, clouds, words . . . /! for the ‘open’ position in cycle,” dated “NYS Rte #17, 5/21/76,” Magellan notes, box 1, Hollis Frampton collection, Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Les anges si purs” translates literally as “angels so pure,” but the assonant “Ses pur ongles” evokes the more menacing phrase “her pure nails” from Mallarmé’s poem “Ses purs ongles très haut.” “Bergère d’azur infinie” means “shepherd of infinite azure,” while the first line of Mallarmé’s poem “L’Azure” is “De l’éternel azur la sereine ironie,” or “Eternal azure’s serene irony” (my translation). “Le Mer” is also sung at the end of George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (a film Frampton admired), the cheery tune contrasting with the slaughter of cows. Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton” [1980], OCACM, 247. Another pan from Straits of Magellan features the reflection of sky in a puddle; gradually we realize the puddle is blood as the camera pans to an animal’s bleeding torso. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232. Only the Gloria was completed (see below). Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232. Starke R. Hathaway and J. Charnley McKinley, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Psychological Corporation/University of Minnesota, 1943). According to Wikipedia, it is the “most widely used and researched standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology,” Wikipedia, s.v., “Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personality_ Inventory

6. The Constellation275

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

#:~:text =The%20Minnesota%20Multiphasic%20Personality%20Inventory,of%20adult%20 personality%20and%20psychopathology/, last modified 12 January 2021. Belgian artist and filmmaker Broodthaers is another artist who ties poetry to film. The connections between Broodthaers and Frampton’s Magellan are highly suggestive, especially Broodthaer’s film A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) and his détourned maps, Political World Map (1970) and Map of The Poetic World (1968). Hugh Kenner, “The Poetics of Error,” MLN 90, no. 6 (1975): 743. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 742. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 740. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 742. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 44. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 44. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 745. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 745. Kenner, “Poetics of Error,” 745. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 29. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 44. Paul Arthur, “The Last of the Last Machine?: Avant- Garde Film since 1966,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (1987): 90. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 60. He worked from 1960 to 1969 as a “technician specializing in dye imbibition color processes in photographic laboratories,” primarily Technicolor Inc. Susan Krane, “Chronology,” in Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations [catalogue for an exhibition at AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo], ed. Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 111. Frampton, “Letters from Framp,” 46; my emphasis. Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinematograph, 1893– 98,” PMLA 120, no. 1 (2005): 128–47; and Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 61. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 61– 62. In a significant footnote in his book, Wall-Romana points to how Mallarmé’s brief statement on cinema is written at the same time as the draft prefaces to Un coup de dés and how there are similarities in syntax and diction between the texts. In short, Mallarmé’s poem and thinking about cinema are deeply entwined. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 387n40. Ross, “Encrypted.” Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [1971], OCACM, 134. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 134. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 75. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 75. Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics,” 129.

2766. The Constellation

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

101. 102.

103.

104. 105.

106.

107. 108.

Hollis Frampton, “The Withering Away of the State of the Art” [1974], OCACM, 262. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 69. Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics,” 130. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” OCACM, 232– 52. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 60. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 60. Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 64. Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics,” 130. “With the advent of free verse in the mid1880s, new rhythmic and visual patterns on the page tended to foreground the corporeal, spatial, and temporal immediacy of the poem.” Also called “sprocket feed” or “fanfold paper.” Wikipedia, s.v., “Continuous stationery,” https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Continuous _ stationery/, last modified 8 October 2020. Frampton’s files also contain many drafts of his essays on continuous form computer paper. The film is copyrighted 12 June 1903 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, though it may have been made earlier. My thanks to Keith Sanborn for identifying this film. As noted above, The Death of Magellan was to end a trio of films, “an Alleluia, a Gloria, and a Hosanna,” each of which was to have a “dominant color.” Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232. Since the Alleluia was Mallarmé blue and Gloria was Joyce green, it is intriguing to speculate on the color and identity of the writer associated with Hosanna. “Irish Burial Traditions,” Your Irish Culture, http://www.yourirish.com/traditions/irish -burial-traditions, accessed 1 January 2017. See also Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 266– 67. The text speculates that the song is called “Lady Bonaparte,” but the title is “Madame Bonaparte,” a recording from 1969 that Frampton used. Finbar Furey (with Eddie Furey), Traditional Irish Pipe Music, Vinyl LP (XTRA 1077), 1969, https://www.irishtune.info/ album/FFurey/, accessed 5 January 2017. In his interview with Bill Simon, Frampton reports being “at once touched and annoyed” by Dante’s dedication of The Divine Comedy to Beatrice Portinari when, he says, Dante saw her only once as a nine-year-old. Although Frampton sardonically notes that Beatrice must have been “an extremely attractive person,” in contrast to Dante’s “discorporate” dedication, he dedicated Magellan to his “Irish Grandma with the style of a drunken sailor” in order to bring the work “down into some human scale” against the “monumentality” of the “mammoth work.” Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 233. Frampton, “Metahistory,” 135. This outlier impression is underlined since all the other propositions cluster on the early parts of the alphabet (A to H). Details of his family history are available through many interviews and recorded discussions in which he tells his myth of the family. See Barry Goldensohn, “Memoir of Hollis Frampton,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 35-46; and Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 122.

Conclusion277

109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114. 115. 116. 117.

118.

Frampton was afraid of his mother, who suffered from an unspecified mental illness; when she reported having a dream in which she harmed Hollis, he applied to Phillips Academy. Frampton dedicated a photography series, ADSVMVS ABSVMVS (1982), to his father; the texts that accompany the images adopt a scientific tone describing desiccated “specimens.” Hollis Frampton, ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, OCACM, 106– 21. Sitney points out that Cross’s “pet pigs suggest Circe of the Odyssey.” Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 265. In The Tempest, Caliban is the son of the sorceress Sycorax, who had imprisoned Ariel; Prospero’s magic is fed by Ariel, whom Prospero freed. Pigafetta, Voyage of Magellan, 15, 17. In the 1906 English-language edition of Pigafetta’s diary, Magellan’s Voyage around the World, a footnote states, “Arber says in his introduction to The first thre English books on America says that Shakespeare had access to The Decades of the Newe Worlde of [Richard] Eden, and created the character of Caliban (who invokes Setebos) in the Tempest from the description of the Patagonian giants.” Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 233. Sitney suggests Cross was a “benign version of the witch Sycorax,” Caliban’s mother, who is never seen in the play. Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 265. In their interview, when Bill Simon lists the themes of Gloria!, Frampton adds, “language.” Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232. Krane, “Chronology,” 107. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232. P. Adams Sitney points to the Paper Print Collection itself as a “miracle of resurrection,” as the films were recreated from rephotography of the long photographs deposited at the Library of Congress. Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 267. Simon, “Talking about Magellan,” 232.

CONCLUSION 1. Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 16–18 (Fall/Winter 1986/1987): 282. 2. Hollis Frampton, transcript of lecture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, December  1977, Anthology Film Archives, Hollis Frampton artist file, 2. 3. Hollis Frampton, “Statement of Plans for Magellan” [1978], OCACM, 226. 4. Lexico [Oxford English Dictionary], s.v. “Virtual,” https://www.lexico.com/definition /virtual/, accessed 5 April 2021. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); Annette Michelson, “On Reading Deren’s Notebook,” October 14 (1980): 47–54; Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading ‘Capital,’ ” October 2 (1976): 26– 38.

278Conclusion

6. “Anthology has Frampton’s unfinished films and outtakes, papers, correspondence, and ephemera. MoMA holds the elements to Frampton’s finished films. Harvard Film Archive stores a number of audio recordings made by Frampton, including interviews, performances, and public and class lectures. Frampton’s collection of computer-related books is maintained by the Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While this parceling of Frampton’s collection creates some difficulties for researchers as it necessitates multiple trips, it has apportioned the workload and economic costs of caring for these items across multiple institutions, to the positive benefit of the collection itself.” Andy Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab,” Moving Image 12, no. 1 (2012): 40. 7. “Other work” is part of the subtitle of Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, ed. Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane [catalogue for the exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). 8. For a definitive discussion of film prints as artist’s proofs, see Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 9. Frampton, lecture at Carpenter Center, 3. 10. Michael Zryd, “Hollis Frampton’s ‘Other Work,’ ” Necsus, Autumn 2015, https://necsus -ejms.org / hollis-framptons-work/. The CEPA Gallery was originally known as the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts. 11. See also Bill Brand, “Introduction to the Algorithmic Aesthetic: Frampton as Digital Pioneer,” in Results You Can’t Refuse: Celebrating 30 Years of BB Optics, ed. Andrew Lampert, 79– 84 (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2006). 12. Unless otherwise noted, I have transcribed Frampton’s handwritten notes, often originally on index cards that have been photocopied onto 8 ½″ x 11″ paper. 13. Jenkins’s note in Hollis Frampton, “Phrases.Mag,” OCACM, 231. 14. Frampton, “Phrases.Mag,” 230– 31. 15. Bruce Jenkins, More Than Meets the Eye [1979], in Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 7 (New York: Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1989), 177. 16. Hollis Frampton collection, Anthology Film Archives. 17. Justin Remes, Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 18. Starke R. Hathaway and J. Charnley McKinley, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Minneapolis: Psychological Corporation/University of Minnesota, 1943). 19. “Hilbert’s address of 1900 to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris is perhaps the most influential speech ever given to mathematicians, given by a mathematician, or given about mathematics.” David E. Joyce, “The Mathematical Problems of David Hilbert,” March  1997, https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/ hilbert/#:~:text=Hilbert’s%20 address%20of%201900%20to,studied%20in%20the%20coming%20century/, accessed 5 April 2021. 20. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future” [1979], OCACM, 181.

Conclusion279 21. Brian Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” in Michael Zryd, ed., Hollis Frampton, October Files (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 124. 22. Lucy Fischer, “Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor,” American Film 4, no. 7 (May 1979): 63. 23. Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema,” 33. 24. Uhrich, “Pressed into the Service of Cinema,” 33. 25. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 26. Clint Enns, “Frampton’s Demon: A Mathematical Interpretation of Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma,” Leonardo 49, no. 2 (2016): 156– 61; Clint Enns, “A Brief Analysis of Hollis Frampton’s Palindrome, and How to Construct Five Types of Film Palindromes,” artists pages, Millennium Film Journal, no. 63 (2016): 65– 69. 27. Hollis Frampton, Hollis Frampton—ADSVMVS ABSVMVS in memory of Hollis William Frampton, Sr., 1913–1980, abest, ed. Anne Breimaier and Matthias Gründig (Essen, Germany: Folkwang Universität der Künste, 2021). 28. “Barbara Lattanzi—HF CRITICAL MASS,” https://htmlles.net/2003/call/jury_maid2003 / lattanzi_critical.html/, accessed 22 July  2022.; Barbara Lattanzi, “HF Critical Mass Software,” 2015, https://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/hfcriticalmass/indexframeset .html/. 29. Frampton’s essay “A Withering Away of the State of the Art” is published in Damian Moppett, Melanie O’Brian, and Lisa Robertson, The Bells: Damian Moppett (Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University Gallery, 2014), 62– 74. 30. Clint Enns, “Lost, Unrealized and Aborted: Guy Maddin,” Spectacular Optical, 1 September  2011, http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2011/09/guy-maddin-lost-unrealized -and-aborted/. 31. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [1971], OCACM, 139.

Bibliography

Where possible, references to texts by Frampton are taken from his collected writings, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press Writing Arts Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), abbreviated as OCACM below. For reasons of historical specificity, the date of composition for the text appears in brackets, e.g., Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film” [1975], OCACM. ARCHIVAL SOURCES Anthology Film Archive, Hollis Frampton artist file, and Magellan film and paper collection, New York, NY. Carnegie Museum of Art, Department of Film and Video Archive, Hollis Frampton artist file, Pittsburgh, PA. Harvard Film Archive, Hollis Frampton collection, Cambridge, MA. Hunter College, City University of New York, Archives and Special Collections, Hollis Frampton employee file, New York, NY. Museum of Modern Art Archives (MoMA), and Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center, Hollis Frampton collection, New York, NY. School of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives, Hollis Frampton artist file, Ephemera Files, Flaxman Library Special Collections, Chicago, IL. Yale Beinecke Library, Ezra Pound correspondence with Hollis Frampton, Ezra Pound fond, New Haven, CT.

OTHER SOURCES Andre, Carl, and Hollis Frampton. 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963. Ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980.

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292Bibliography Weisstein, Eric W. “Goldbach Conjecture.” Wolfram Mathworld. https://mathworld.wolfram.com /GoldbachConjecture.html/. Accessed 11 March 2021. Wilhelm, J. J. Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Windhausen, Federico. “Syncretic Practices and the Idea of Didactic Cinema: The Significance of the Non-Cinematic Arts for the Work of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits.” PhD diss., New York University, 2007. ——. “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice.” In Zryd, Hollis Frampton, October Files, 145– 69. Originally published in October 109 (2004): 77– 95. Zaher, Lisa. “By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton’s Photographic Modernism.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2013. Zryd, Michael. “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America.” In Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, 182– 216. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. ——, ed. Hollis Frampton, October Files Series 27. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022. ——. “Hollis Frampton’s ‘Other Work.’ ” Necsus, Autumn 2015. ——. “Professor Ken.” In Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, 249– 61. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ——. “ ‘The Rise of a Film Generation’: Film Culture and Cinephilia.” In Wiley-Blackwell History of American Cinema, ed. Roy Grundmann, Cindy Lucia, and Art Simon, 362– 86. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2012. Zryd, Michael, and Robert Haller. Hollis Frampton: A Resource Guide: Bibliography and Filmography. Toronto: International Experimental Film Congress, 1989. Zucker, Gregory. “Cinema and Critical Reflection: A Conversation with Ken Jacobs and Family.” Logos 4, no. 3 (Summer 2005), http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_ 4 .3/jacobs.htm/.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. All titles by Hollis Frampton (HF) unless otherwise indicated. A & B in Ontario (HF and Wieland), 244n53 Abstract Expressionism, 61, 72, 246n2 abstraction: and Greenbergian modernism, 29– 30, 32– 33; in Hapax Legomena, 22, 27– 32; in symbolist poetics, 205. See also axioms of film Adair, John, 159 ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, 229, 276– 77n108 Agassiz, Louis, 133– 35 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), 17 algorithmic operations, 35, 70, 78, 229– 30, 239n37, 250n65; and Clouds of Magellan (film series), 69, 189, 192 alphabetization, 26, 121– 28, 182, 189; absurdity of, 125; disjunctive potential of, 125– 26; and encyclopedism, 124– 27, 259n91; in Gloria!, 213–14; Kenner on, 125; in Library of Congress, 122– 23; in Manual of Arms, 26, 126– 27; and mathematics, 127; in Public Domain, 23, 121, 121– 24, 126; in Zorns Lemma, 63, 96, 123, 127, 189 Andre, Carl, 126, 171, 173, 244n53, 246n2; “Brancusi’s true heir,” 92; dialogue with HF, 141, 198, 273n45 animation, 59, 62; HF’s opinion of, 65– 66; HF’s use of, 30, 66– 67, 69, 99, 195, 206

Anthology Film Archives, 11, 49, 70, 222, 225, 245n69, 278n6 anthropology, 21, 23, 140, 264n44; and Frobenius, 152– 53; and “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi,” 159, 161 Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH), 50 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 172 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 198 Apparatus Sum (Studies for Magellan #1), 50, 53, 222 appropriation, 22, 73, 86– 89, 224–25; adaptations of HF’s work, 230; and “inventing a tradition,” 86, 89; in non-Magellan films, 86– 88; self-consciousness of, 101–2; and “quoting” Brakhage, 88. See also early cinema; specific films archaeology, 23, 140– 75, 264n44; allegory of “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” 140, 153– 58; allegory of “Impromptus on Edward Weston,” 140, 163– 66; allegory of “A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi,” 140, 158– 63; and Frobenius, 152– 53; and indigeneity, 159; and millennial time frame, 140, 143, 151, 220; in other HF writings, 151; and

294Index

archaeology (continued) Pound, 151– 53; and speculation, 166– 67; and the “Western view,” 162 archives: activating HF’s archive, 221– 30; and Borges, 98; and databases, 229; and the digital, 81, 228; in HF’s Atlantis, 154– 55; and human consciousness, 98– 99; vs. junk shops, 87; Magellan as “archive in motion,” 224; the universe as “vast film archive,” 22, 97– 99, 113, 115; and Weston’s oeuvre, 163, 165. See also early cinema; Frampton, Hollis: archives Aristotle, 225 Arnar, Anna, 105– 6, 110, 116, 125, 131, 254n12 Arnold, Martin, 226 arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, L’ (Lumière brothers), 84 Artforum, 1, 26, 84, 141, 153, 169, 206 Arthur, Paul, 29, 52, 206 Artificial Light, 26, 64, 128, 226, 229, 244n53 “artistic fathers,” 22, 73, 90– 93, 101, 235n56 “artistic mothers”: Rrose Sélavy, 101; Venus Genetrix, 93, 162, 252n99 artist’s documents: auratic/expressive, 222–24; four categories of HF documents, 224– 27; informational, 222–23 Art Workers’ Coalition, 141, 171 Asch, Tim, 226 Ashton, Dore, 27 Atkins, Ed, 17 Atlantis, 135, 140, 152, 265n63, 267n88; in “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” 153– 58 authorship in art, 63, 222; “great man” theories of art, 4, 145, 147–48; “thumbprint composition,” 59, 61, 64, 127– 28 Autumnal Equinox, 26, 49, 51, 66, 233n31 Ax Fight, The (Asch and Chagnon), 226 axioms of film, 22, 28–29, 32–46; the frame, 32–40; narrative, 46; the plausibility of the photographic illusion, 40–46, 207

Babbage, Charles, 246n7 Barry, Robert, 27, 61 Barthes, Roland, 63 Bazin, André, 55, 155– 56, 256n42 Beckett, Samuel, 8, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 55, 155– 56; Arcades Project, 15, 220 Benning, James, 52 Bentham, Jeremy, 108, 128– 29, 131, 261n118 Berg, Alban, 59 Bergreen, Laurence, 132– 33, 179– 80 Berkeley, Bishop (George), 116 Bershen, Wanda, 29 Big Swallow, The (Williamson), 82, 249n50 Birth of Magellan, The (film series), 100, 192, 199; Common Knowledge (incomplete), 201, 202, 226– 27; Hexachordum Apollinis (incomplete), 95, 197; Ludus Luminos, Ludus Chromaticus (incomplete), 94, 201, 203, 226; Master Magellan in the Hall of Mirrors (incomplete), 198; place in Magellan Calendar, 48, 94– 95, 241–42n5. See also Cadenzas (film series); Mindfall (film series) Blinkity Blank (McLaren), 66 Blue, James, 27 Borges, Jorge Luis, 8, 15, 22; and archives, 98; and constellations, 185– 86; and encyclopedism, 113, 116–20; “Funes the Memorious,” 185– 86; on Go (board game), 192– 93; “The Library of Babel,” 56, 98, 113, 119, 197; “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 95; and the spectator, 116; on Wilkins’s invented language, 118–20 Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert), 15, 254n6 Brakhage, Stan, 3, 52, 67, 91, 184, 243n40, 258n74; The Book of the Film, 14, 234n33; on communication, 170– 71; homage in Matrix I, 50; and Magellan: At the Gates of Death, 251n76; and Otherwise Explained Fires, 64, 88

Index295

“Brakhage’s Theorem,” 46 Brancusi, Constantin, 78, 91– 92, 104, 133, 141 Brand, Bill, 82, 121, 224, 236– 37n1 Breimaier, Anne, 21, 229 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The (Duchamp), 95, 100–101 Broodthaers, Marcel, 201, 275n66 Brown, Barbara, 244n53 Büchner, Georg, 74 Burch, Noël, 82 Burnham, Jack, 127, 141 By Any Other Name, 195 cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer), 131 Cadenzas (film series, also The Birth of Magellan: Fourteen Cadenzas [I & XIV]), 66– 67; Cadenza I, 22, 94–102, 253n122; Cadenza XIV, 94, 96, 99; creation stories in, 96, 100, 187; early cinema in, 87, 89, 93, 95, 99–100; metaphor for Duchamp, 95, 100–102, 226; place in Magellan Calendar, 94– 95; sound in Cadenza I, 96; sound in Cadenzas I & XIV, 67 Cage, John, 23, 31, 59, 93, 167– 69, 175 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 19 Cantos, The (Pound), 7, 19, 49, 264– 65n50; Chinese characters in, 90; failure of, 15, 91; as voyage, 253n122 Capital (Marx), 14, 220 Carroll, Noël, 89, 247n16 Carrots & Peas, 26, 58, 67, 86– 87 Castoro, Rosemarie, 163, 244n53 catalogue (bottom-up approach to knowledge): and cabinet of curiosities, 131; defined, 105– 6; and inventory, 108, 131– 33; in Library of Congress, 123; in Magellan, 106– 9; problem of categorization, 107– 8; vs. summa, 22– 23, 105– 6, 133 cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, 212

Center for Media Study (SUNY Buffalo), 2, 27, 127, 229 CEPA Gallery (Buffalo, NY), 223 Cervantes, Miguel de, 95 Chagnon, Napoleon, 226 Chambers, Ephraim, 124 chance (also aleatory) operations: and Cage, 167, 169; in Clouds of Magellan (film series) matrices, 189, 191, 191– 92; and Un coup de dés, 197– 98, 204; and early cinema, 258– 59n77; HF’s control of, 122, 128; in Surrealism, 7 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19 Chave, Anna, 171– 73 chemistry of cobalt, 18, 53– 54, 120 chemistry of dirt, 18–19, 53– 54, 120 Cherchi, Paolo, 125 Child, Abigail, 3 Childs, Lucinda, 163, 244n53 Christie, Ian, 16, 20, 180 Circles of Confusion, 17, 162– 63 Clouds Like White Sheep (lost film), 200– 201, 230 Clouds of Magellan (film series, incomplete), 47–48; and algorithmic operations, 69, 189, 192; and computing, 69, 189, 192, 195, 197; and constellations, 187– 97, 217; production notes/matrices, 69, 187– 97, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 204, 222; sound in, 189 Clouds of Magellan (planned installation), 9–10, 53, 101, 181, 184 Cocteau, Jean, 12, 78, 233n28 Coggeshall, Bob, 69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 110, 125 colonialism. See under Magellan, Ferdinand; Magellan cycle color in HF’s films, 39, 66– 67, 195, 196, 200–201, 212, 276n103 Columbus, Christopher, 136 communication, problem of, 169– 71, 173

296Index

computing: and adaptations of HF’s work, 230; and algorithmic operations, 69, 78, 189, 192; and Clouds of Magellan (film series), 69, 189, 192, 195, 197; computer design, 51, 68; continuous form computer paper (computer scrolls), 24, 211–12, 276n101; and databases, 229; DEMON, 69; and digital convergence, 17, 228; electronic and digital computing tools (goal of Magellan), 22, 68– 70; and future work on HF, 24, 219, 228–29; in Gloria!, 64, 212–17; HF’s publication of computer code, 245n74; history of, 246n7; IMAGO, 69, 195, 228; and language-image relation, 228; as “metamachine,” 70; “photo-filmvideo-computer,” 4, 186; “Phrases.Mag,” 224; role in Magellan, 5, 227– 28; use of digital tools to finish HF’s work, 229. See also Digital Arts Lab (DAL) Conrad, Tony, 3, 27, 114 constellations, 23– 24, 176– 217; and the active reader, 211; and Borges, 185– 86; and Clouds of Magellan (dwarf galaxies), 179, 181, 198; and Clouds of Magellan (film series), 187– 97, 217; and Clouds of Magellan and Straits of Magellan (installations), 181, 184– 85; and contingency, 184, 204; and Un coup de dés, 197– 98, 204; cultural and political dimensions of, 181; and the digital, 186; in European vs. Pacific Islander navigation, 179– 80; finding meaning vs. making meaning in, 183– 84; Flamsteed’s number system, 189; and Gloria!, 215, 217; and image making, 182– 83; importance to Magellan, 185; and language, 182– 83; as master metaphor, 24; and meaning making, 180– 81, 183– 84, 204; references in HF’s writing, 180– 84; relation to the moving image, 186, 207; in sea navigation, 178– 81; and spectator’s role in Magellan, 217; and totality, 185– 86

continuous form computer paper (computer scrolls), 24, 211–12, 276n101 Cooper Union, 27 Cornell, Joseph, 86 coup de dés, Un (Mallarmé), 24, 197–201, 204, 207– 8, 210–11, 275n85 Criterion Collection, 17, 255n23 Critical Mass, 27, 30, 35; algorithmic patterns of, 35, 230, 239n37; autobiography in, 45; language in, 43, 63; sound in, 35, 43, 239n37 Cross, Fanny Elizabeth Catlett, 64, 213–17 Cubism, 151 d’Alembert, Jean, 105, 124 Dante, 19, 113, 276n106 Davies, Ivor, 84 Deanimated (Arnold), 226 Death of Magellan, The, 48, 50, 100, 192, 216, 241–42n5; intended ending for, 200, 276n103 decorum, aesthetic question of, 167– 68, 205– 7, 217 DEMON (computer language), 69 Deren, Maya, 3, 143, 220 Derk, George, 56, 91– 92, 135, 153, 253n122 déroulement, 24, 208–12, 217 Descartes, René, 118, 130 Diderot, Denis, 105, 124, 129 Digital Arts Lab (DAL) (SUNY Buffalo), 2, 69– 70, 195, 211, 223, 228 “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” 23, 134, 140, 153– 58 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 19, 113 Dixon, Sally, 243n40 Dog Star Man (Brakhage), 50 Dreams of Magellan, 48, 94, 252n104 Du Bois, W. E. B., 152 Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 14, 22; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 95, 100–101; Étant donnés, 150, 240n68;

Index297 The Green Box, 9, 101; as “heresiarch,” 31, 93, 95; and hoaxes, 184; and language, 11, 61, 101; as metaphor in Cadenza I, 95, 100–102, 226 Duras, Marguerite, 52 Dusinberre, Deke, 20, 180 dynamism of film, 18, 62, 71, 150, 186; and déroulement, 24, 207–10; vs. still photography, 160– 61, 207 “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” 84 early cinema, 22, 54, 56, 73, 79– 89, 249n52, 258n76; and chance operations, 258– 59n77; in cinema studies, 81– 82, 248–49n47; and experimental film, 81– 83; HF’s purchase of, 83; impact on other arts, 84; in non-Magellan projects, 84; role in metahistory, 79– 89; and vernacular culture, 55– 56, 86. See also Library of Congress; specific films Eastman Kodak Company, 154, 266n85 Edison, Thomas, 54, 123 Eggeling, Viking, 59, 66 Eichenbaum, Boris, 160 Eisenstein, Ken, 21, 155, 229, 236– 37n1 Eisenstein, Sergei, 3, 78, 169, 233n31, 267n86; Capital, 14, 220; Ivan the Terrible, 39, 44; theory, 55, 67, 92, 136, 160. See also vertical montage Elder, Bruce, 3, 14 Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison), 121, 249n53 Eliot, T. S., 61, 86– 87, 165, 177; HF’s paraphrases of, 77, 79, 93; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 73, 75– 81, 148; The Waste Land, 73, 167, 205– 6 Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert), 23, 104– 5, 123– 26, 129 encyclopedism, 22–24, 103– 39, 254n12; and alphabetization, 124–27, 259n91; and Borges, 113, 116– 20; and cabinet of

curiosities, 131; and cross-references, 125– 26; and dictionary form, 188– 89; and the Enlightenment project, 104– 5, 112, 123– 26, 129– 30, 254n6; and failure, 116; in HF’s early films, 30, 46, 127; and HF’s erudition, 103; historicity of, 104; and “infinite cinema,” 110; and the internet, 220; and invention of facts, 259n91; Kenner on, 103–4, 254n6, 259n91; and knowledge-power intersection, 104– 5; and the labyrinth, 115; and “the Last Machine,” 109–16; and libraries, 259n81; and the “metaencyclopedic,” 110, 116; vs. minimalism, 22; and Public Domain, 120– 24, 126; in Renaissance and Baroque culture, 125; and still photography, 155; and Straits of Magellan (film series), 105– 9; summa vs. catalogue, 22– 23, 105– 6; totality vs. contingency in, 115; and Weston’s oeuvre, 104, 156, 163– 64. See also inventory Enlightenment: and certainty, 116–18; colonial project of, 128– 30; and encyclopedism, 104– 5, 112, 123– 26, 129– 30, 254n6; HF’s ambivalence to, 5, 23, 128– 30; and instability, 125; Kenner on, 111–12, 254n6; and observation, 23, 111, 125; pre-Enlightenment version of history, 117; and total representation, 97– 98, 112–13 Enns, Clint, 229 “Erotic Predicaments for Camera,” 21, 235n56 Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . .  (Duchamp), 150, 240n68 Faller, Marion, 27, 51, 163, 173, 237n4; collaborations with HF, 84, 145, 234n46 Faller, Will, 107 Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF), 81 feminism, 243n28

298Index

feminist film theory, 162 Fernandez, Robert, 177 Field, Simon, 35, 170 Fielke, Giles, 21 Film Culture magazine, 26, 161 “Film in the House of the Word,” 11, 52, 161 film theory, 11, 40, 55, 77, 159– 62, 227 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 7, 101–2, 232n15; compared to Magellan, 99–100; complexity of, 15–16; as epic, 19; and Gloria!, 216–17; as utopian, 93, 174 Fischer, Lucy, 103, 242n16, 259n82 Fischinger, Oskar, 59 Flamsteed, John, 178, 189 Flaubert, Gustave, 15, 254n6 Flicker, The (Conrad), 114 “For a Metahistory of Film,” 17, 22, 53, 84, 89, 96, 160– 61, 230; and Borges, 95; critique of the Enlightenment, 116–17; historical vs. essentialist nature of, 247n16; and Kantian purposelessness, 143; and Knight’s Tour, 114; and “the Last Machine,” 110–11; and photographic illusionism, 41; summarized, 74– 75 For Georgia O’Keefe, 64 Forti, Simone, 163 Foucault, Michel, 63, 128, 161 found footage. See appropriation; early cinema Fowler, Luke, 17 Fowler, Robert, 106, 124 Frampton, Hollis: archives (location), 221–22, 278n6, 281; critical reception, 17, 21, 26– 27, 229; employment (nonacademic), 3–4, 173, 275n80; influence on artists, 17, 229– 30; periodization of career, 25– 26; politics/Marxist leanings, 23, 53, 91, 153, 168– 72; schooling, 2, 61, 246n2, 262n8; teaching appointments, 26– 27; workingclass identification, 65, 173, 269– 70n142 Franki, Bob, 69

Fred Ott’s Sneeze (Dickson), 121 Fried, Michael, 40 Friedrich, Su, 17 Frobenius, Leo, 133– 35, 152– 54, 265n51 Froula, Christine, 152 Gallop, Jane, 13 Galois, Évariste, 74 Gates of Death, The (Rodin), 14 Gatten, David, 230 Gaudreault, André, 82 Gehr, Ernie, 26, 82 gender, HF’s relation to, 52, 65, 162– 63, 243n28, 246n7. See also “artistic fathers”; “artistic mothers” Gidal, Peter, 3, 82, 171 Gloria!, 24, 26, 67, 211–17, 213, 215; alphabetization in, 213–14; autobiography in, 64, 213–17; color in, 212, 276n103; computing in, 64, 212–17; and constellations, 215, 217; early cinema in, 84, 87, 89, 212–14, 217; and Finnegans Wake, 216–17; and language, 216; Meaney’s remake of, 230; sound in, 67, 213–14, 217; and The Tempest, 215–16 Go (board game), 192– 93 Godard, Jean-Luc, 17 Goldbach’s Conjecture (mathematical theorem), 157 Goldensohn, Barry, 12, 244n53 Goossen, E. C., 27 “great man” theories of art, 4, 145, 147–48 Great Train Robbery, The (Porter), 226 Greenaway, Peter, 17 Greenberg, Clement, 29– 30, 32– 33, 40 Griffith, D. W., 78 Grosseteste, Robert, 97– 98, 115, 271n14 Gunning, Tom, 82, 248–49n47 Hammid, Alexander, 143 Hanlon, Lindley, 12

Index299

Hansen, Mark, 21 Hapax Legomena, 15, 25, 53, 73, 119–20, 224, 234n33; and abstraction, 22, 27– 32; axioms of film in, 32–46; and language, 42–44, 62– 63; overview of sound in, 42; preservation of, 223– 24; scholarship on, 237n15; and structural film, 29. See also Critical Mass; (nostalgia); Ordinary Matter; Poetic Justice; Remote Control; Special Effects; Travelling Matte hapax legomena (Latin term), 28 Harvard Film Archive, 11, 222, 278n6 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 39, 44 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 105, 110 Henderson, Brian, 6– 8, 54, 99–100, 136– 37, 227–28 Hesiod, 87 Heterodyne, 66, 226 Hilbert, David, 227 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 17 Hoffman, Hans, 167, 246n2 Holbein, Hans, 133– 34 Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations, 234n46 Hollywood film, 39, 55, 67, 144, 169 Houston, Helene, 69 Hunter College (City University of New York), 11, 27, 141, 173 Huot, Robert, 27, 64, 126, 244n53 IMAGO (computer language), 69, 195, 228 “Impromptus on Edward Weston,” 23, 92– 93, 140, 163– 66 “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” 57, 100, 243n28 “Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy,” 93, 168 indigeneity, art world’s sense of, 159 “infinite cinema,” 96; vs. Bazinian realism, 256n42; and computing, 70; defined, 3; as déroulement, 209; and encyclopedism, 110;

and protocinema, 83– 84; and still photography, 208– 9; “synoptic conjugation” of, 115. See also metahistory INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, 48, 50– 52, 84 “Invention without a Future, The,” 79– 81 inventory (approach to knowledge), 131– 35; and catalogue, 108, 131– 33; dangers of, 135; defined, 108; and encyclopedism, 131– 36; in Magellan, 107– 9; Pigafetta’s diary as, 132– 33; and still photography, 155; vs. summa, 131; in Ulysses, 108; in Weston’s oeuvre, 165– 66 Irby, James, 113 irony, 5– 9, 89– 93 Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein), 39, 44 Jacobs, Ken, 26, 82, 114, 170– 71, 250n68, 251n72 Jakobson, Roman, 160 James, David, 21 Jean, Marie-Josée, 10 Jenkins, Bruce, 3–4, 25, 88, 224, 236– 37n1, 237n4, 242n16 Jost, Jon, 52 Joyce, James, 22, 61, 102, 150; as “heresiarch,” 31; Kenner on, 108; overview of influence on HF, 15–16; Ulysses, 7, 15, 19, 108, 206. See also Finnegans Wake Keller, Marjorie, 3 Kenner, Hugh, 23, 106, 130; on alphabetization, 125; on encyclopedism, 103–4, 254n6, 259n91; on the Enlightenment, 111–12, 254n6; on Joyce, 108; on Pound, 205– 6; on symbolist poetics, 204– 7 King, Daniel, 119 Kipling, Rudyard, 84 Kline, Franz, 233n31 Knight’s Tour (chess), 114–16, 257n49 Koenig, Kaspar, 58 Krane, Susan, 12, 173, 236n1

300Index

Krauss, Rosalind, 73 Krims, Leslie, 235n56 Kubelka, Peter, 59, 114 Kubler, George, 23, 140– 53; “form-classes,” 145–46; history of art and “history of things,” 142–43, 152– 53; on iconographic analysis, 148; influence on artists, 141; millennial view, 151; The Shape of Time, 23, 140– 51; on tradition, 147–48; use of math and physics metaphors, 149– 50 labor, art as, 23, 64, 141, 166– 74 labyrinth, 115–16, 180 language: absence in Magellan, 51– 52, 63; and constellations, 182– 83; and Duchamp, 11, 61, 101; in early HF projects, 26; in film theory, 159– 61; in Gloria!, 216; as goal of Magellan, 61– 63; in Hapax Legomena, 42–44, 62– 63; and the image, 11, 23– 24, 98, 198– 200, 228; linguistic relativity, 161– 62; natural and artificial, 257– 58n61; in 1960s art, 61; in non-HF experimental films, 52; and play, 11–12; in semiotics, 159– 61; and titling, 102; Wilkins’s invented language, 117–18; written word as graphic sign, 66; in Zorns Lemma, 25, 96– 97. See also Mallarmé, Stéphane; symbolist poetics Large Cloud of Magellan, The (incomplete), 23, 48, 176, 178, 187, 272– 73n37 Large Glass, The (Duchamp). See Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The “Last Machine, the,” 23, 70, 109–16, 256n35 Lattanzi, Barbara, 230 Lautréamont, Comte de, 119 Lawder, Standish, 249n50 “Lecture, A,” 11, 173– 74 Lee, Pamela, 145 LeGrice, Malcolm, 82 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 105 Lemon, 64, 230, 268n112

Lenin, Vladimir, 169 Less, 242n7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 207 Leuthold, Steven, 159 Lewis, Wyndham, 133– 34 Lewitt, Sol, 27, 61 Library of Congress, 50– 51, 89, 93, 101, 130; experimental filmmakers at, 82– 83, 259n82; organization of, 87, 122–23; Paper Print Collection, 82, 84, 121–22, 214, 259n78 Life of an American Fireman, The (Porter), 82 Lovelace, Ada, 246n7 Lowder, Rose, 59 Lozano, Lee, 163, 244n53 Lucretius, 93 Lumière, Louis, 80, 136 Lumière brothers, 54, 75, 82– 84, 89, 123, 207; catalogue of films, 258– 59n77; inspiration for Straits of Magellan (film series), 49, 83, 106– 7, 128, 259n77; inspiration for Zorns Lemma, 97 Lunenfeld, Peter, 21 Lyons, Alice, 91 MacDonald, Scott, 12, 15, 17, 21, 37, 167, 200, 233n27 Maddin, Guy, 230 Magellan, Ferdinand, 113, 136, 223, 232n13; and colonialism, 90, 128– 29, 180; death of, 5, 198; as “exquisite corpse,” 7; as metaphor, 4– 6, 8– 9, 65, 110, 124, 130; natural phenomena named after, 178– 79; in Pigafetta’s diary, 132 Magellan: At the Gates of Death, 50, 197, 224, 225; and Brakhage, 251n76; The Green Gate and The Red Gate, 52, 59– 60, 187; structure of, 16, 48–49, 51– 52 Magellan Calendar, 47– 52, 128, 178, 189, 197– 98, 201, 221; as computer paper scroll, 211–12; organization of, 47–48,

Index301 94– 95, 108, 178, 187, 188, 241–42n5; palindromic ordering in, 59, 187, 242n18; shuffling of films in, 50– 51; special days in, 49– 50, 212, 250n69; and the spectator, 52, 183– 84 Magellan cycle: as “archive in motion,” 224; autobiography as goal, 63– 65; colonial context of, 4– 5, 7, 23, 65, 77, 90, 105, 128– 30, 136– 37; comic nature of, 112–13; critical reception to, 17–18, 26, 51– 53, 242n16; electronic and digital computing tools as goal, 22, 68– 70; exhibition of, 49, 50, 52, 210; and failure, 19– 20, 73, 114, 116, 151, 218; film art as a model for human consciousness as goal, 70– 71; as “genuinely complex,” 18, 120; goals of, 53– 71; grant proposals for, 5– 6, 53, 65, 223, 241n2; graphic and plastic elements as goal, 65– 67; hexagons in, 197; language as goal, 61– 63; metahistory as goal, 54– 56; origins of, 10, 53; procedural parameters (serial music) as goal, 58– 61; as self-ironic epic, 5– 9; sound as goal, 67– 68; spectator as protagonist of, 113–14, 124, 126, 169– 70; status report on, 51; structural iterations of, 47–49; time as goal, 57– 58; as utopian project, 7, 14–16, 115–16, 163, 174, 218, 220, 270n146; as video release, 174– 75. See also specific films; “Statement of Plans for Magellan” Mallarmé, Stéphane, 176, 273– 74n57; “L’Azure,” 200, 274n62; Un coup de dés, 24, 197–201, 204, 207– 8, 210–11, 275n85; interest in cinema (déroulement), 207–10; and language-image relation, 198– 200; Le Livre, 15, 24, 177– 78, 207, 209–11; preference for film over still photography, 208; references in Magellan, 198 Manovich, Lev, 17, 21, 228– 29 Manual of Arms, 10, 26, 64, 126–27, 244n53

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 120 Marchand, Suzanne, 152 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 198 Marx, Karl, 14 materiality: of art, 31– 32; of computer/ electronic arts, 24, 62, 211–12; of film, 24, 26, 37, 62, 65– 67, 114, 206– 7, 212; of music, 62; of painting, 31, 40; of poetry, 24, 204, 212; of sculpture, 10, 185; of video, 36 mathematics in HF’s films, 68, 227; Clouds of Magellan (film series), 189– 97; Common Knowledge (incomplete), 226; Heterodyne, 66; States, 26; Zorns Lemma, 127 Matrix (also The Birth of Magellan: Dreams of Magellan: Matrix I), 50, 252n104 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 14 Maxwell, James Clerk, 87 Maxwell’s Demon, 67, 86– 87 McLaren, Norman, 66 Meaney, Evan, 17, 230 Mekas, Jonas, 55, 57 Menne, Jeff, 21, 70 Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren and Hammid), 143 metahistory, 72–102; and appropriating/ remaking modernist masterworks, 95, 100–102; and Borges, 95, 98; and Cadenza I, 94–102; defined by HF, 54, 74; and early cinema, 79– 89, 94–102; as goal of Magellan, 54– 56; historical necessity of, 72– 79; and “inventing a tradition,” 75– 79; and inventing the future, 80, 218– 30; and irony, 89– 93; and light, 97– 98; as metacritique of modernism, 73; and the “mind of Europe,” 90– 93; subject in history/subject to history, 79. See also “For a Metahistory of Film” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 62 Metz, Christian, 159 Michelson, Annette, 3, 55, 73, 158, 169, 262n5

302Index

Millennium Film Workshop, 161 Mindfall (film series, also The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall I & VII), 58, 66– 68, 77– 78, 84, 94, 128, 249– 50n53; Mindfall VII, 23, 136– 37, 138; sound in Mindfall I & VII, 58, 67– 68, 77; sound in Mindfall VII, 136– 37 “Mind over Matter,” 23, 128– 31, 136, 246n7 minimalism, 29, 60, 68, 127, 140, 172– 73 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, 201, 226– 27, 274n65 Mirror (literary magazine), 61 Mitchell, W. J. T., 29– 30 modernism, artistic: appropriating/remaking modernist masterworks, 95, 100–102; and “artistic fathers,” 90– 93; commodification of, 168; and complexity, 14–16; and the film medium, 3, 6–7, 27–28, 54, 61, 71, 206; and “great man” histories of art, 4; Greenbergian form of, 18, 29– 30, 32– 33, 40, 150; and Hapax Legomena, 28– 30, 44–46; and “heresiarchs,” 31– 32, 93, 95; HF’s critique of high modernism, 53–56, 73; and irony, 8; Magellan in tension with, 53–71; “make it new,” 78; and photographic illusionism, 40; political modernism, 169–70; racism and reactionary politics in, 134; and the ruin, 165– 66; and selfdefinition/medium specificity, 3, 30, 35– 36, 47, 61, 65; serial music, 58– 61; and tradition, 76; universal vs. historical perspectives in, 109–10; and utopian artworks, 14–15; and vernacular culture, 200, 265n59; and video, 35– 36. See also postmodernism; specific artists, topics Monsieur Phot: A Film by Joseph Cornell (incomplete), 51, 220 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 14, 145, 222 Moore, Rachel, 21, 27 Moppett, Damian, 17, 230 More Than Meets the Eye, 224– 25

Morgan, Maud, 246n2 Morgan, Patrick, 246n2 Morris, Robert, 27, 75, 140–41, 171, 173 Motherwell, Robert, 233n31 Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (NYU), 223 Mulvey, Laura, 3, 52, 162 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 11, 41, 172, 222, 278n6 Muybridge, Eadweard, 83– 84, 250n56 National Film Registry (U.S.), 17, 27 Navajo Eyes project, 159 Needham, Joseph, 90 Newton, Sir Isaac, 223 New York Art Strike against War, Racism and Repression, 171 New York Film Festival, 26 New York University, 55 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 74 Noble-Olson, Matthew, 21 Nodelman, Sheldon, 264n44 (nostalgia), 1, 4, 28, 30, 33, 149, 229; autobiography in, 45; critical reception to, 21, 27, 237n9; didactic nature of, 16; and the frame, 33; and language, 63; and Mallarmé, 273– 74n57; satire in, 148; sound in, 42–43, 45, 57; still photography in, 33, 42–43, 57, 148–49; and time, 57 “Notes on Composing in Film,” 29, 47, 167, 238n24 Nygren, Scott, 233n32 Obelisk Ampersand Encounter (lost film), 62, 67 October magazine, 1, 17, 26, 52, 169 Odlin, Reno, 78, 133, 148, 181, 184, 232n19, 272n26 O’Grady, Gerald, 2, 27, 127 O’Keefe, Georgia, 64 “On Light, or the Ingression of Forms” (Grosseteste), 97, 271n14

Index303

Ono, Yoko, 61 On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, 17 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 161 Ordinary Matter, 30, 36– 37, 37, 239n44; autobiography in, 45; sound in, 43–44, 240n68 Otherwise Unexplained Fires, 12, 64, 84, 87– 88 Paik, Nam June, 245n69 Paik–Abe analog video synthesizer, 245n69 Palindrome, 26, 229, 252n104 panopticon (Bentham design), 108, 128– 29 panopticons (“pans”). See under Straits of Magellan (film series) Paper Print Collection. See under Library of Congress Pas de Trois, 52 “Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative, A,” 32, 150 Phillips, Christopher, 235n56 Phillips Academy (Andover, MA), 2, 61, 246n2, 276– 77n108 photography, still, 2, 17, 62, 74, 83, 96; Agassiz’s use of, 134– 35; and amplitude, 111–12; as art and technology, 157– 58; art world’s disregard for, 40, 154; Bazin and Benjamin on, 156– 57; and contextual knowledge, 112; “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” 153– 58; vs. dynamism of film, 160– 61, 207; and encyclopedism, 155; “Erotic Predicaments for Camera,” 235n56; HF’s defense of photographic illusionism, 40–42, 65, 206– 7; and inventory, 155; link with sculpture, 134; Mallarmé’s preference of film over, 208; in (nostalgia), 33, 42–43, 57, 148–49; place in “infinite cinema,” 208– 9; in Poetic Justice, 34; and simulacral desire, 155; “Some Propositions on Photography,” 92; taking vs. making an image, 271– 72n24; as “witness,” 100; as writing,

36. See also specific photographic works; Weston, Edward “Phrases.Mag,” 224 Piaget, Jean, 98 Pierson, Ryan, 66 Pigafetta, Antonio, 132– 33, 179, 188, 198, 216, 232n13 Plateau, Joseph, 74 Pliny, 105 Poetic Justice, 21, 27, 30, 34; autobiography in, 45; and the frame, 34; and language, 43, 63; and space, 43; still photography in, 34 poetry, 61– 62, 224; and the active reader, 210–11; as art of time, 207; and decorum, 167; link to painting, 198. See also Eliot, T. S.; Mallarmé, Stéphane; Pound, Ezra; symbolist poetics Pollock, Jackson, 233n31 Poons, Larry, 126, 244n53 Porter, Edwin S., 226 postmodernism, 8, 23, 105, 109, 168, 268– 69n124 Pound, Ezra, 49, 61, 90, 133– 36, 165, 232n15, 238n24, 252n90, 253n122, 269– 70n142; archaeological perspective, 151– 53, 161; as “artistic father,” 3, 22, 73, 91– 92, 101; correspondence with HF, 15, 91, 135, 152, 264– 65n50; Kenner on, 205– 6; and new creation, 31– 32, 56; and observation, 133– 35; “paideuma,” 153; racism, 134– 35, 251n72. See also Cantos, The Prince Ruperts Drops, 84, 85 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 227 Procession, 225 Public Domain, 120– 24; and alphabetization, 23, 121, 121–24, 126; and encyclopedism, 120– 24, 126; and Library of Congress, 50– 51, 84, 87, 89, 121– 23, 259n78 Puetz, Michelle, 21, 45–46

304Index Quaternion, 64, 254n2 R (incomplete), 51, 63, 220, 229, 244n46 Ragona, Melissa, 21, 68 Rainer, Yvonne, 3, 52, 61, 87– 88, 102, 167– 68, 250n69 Rauschenberg, Robert, 167 Razutis, Al, 82 Région Centrale, La (Snow), 114 Reinhardt, Ad, 75, 140 Remote Control, 30, 36, 38, 239n45, 250n65; autobiography in, 45; and montage, 37, 39; silence in, 44–45; and television, 44–45; video in, 37 Removed (Uman), 226 Rhodes, Lis, 3 Richie, Donald, 172 Richter, Hans, 59, 66 Rimbaud, Arthur, 225 Rites of Passage (Faller and HF), 145, 146 Robbins, Christa Noel, 13 Rodin, Auguste, 14 Rosenquist, James, 64 Rosler, Martha, 52 Ross, Alex, 197, 208 Russell, Bertrand, 227 Ruttmann, Walter, 59 Sainsbury, Peter, 170 Sanborn, Keith, 3, 21, 69– 70, 88, 228 Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity, 161– 62 Schoenberg, Arnold, 59 School of Visual Arts (New York City), 27 Senghor, Léopold, 152 Shakespeare, William, 215–16 Shape of Time, The (Kubler), 23, 140– 51 Sharits, Paul, 3, 27, 50, 59, 64, 66 Sheehan, Rebecca, 21 Simon, Bill, 217

Sitney, P. Adams, 8, 11, 93, 232n15, 238n23, 273– 74n57; on Magellan, 51– 52, 234n33; “Structural Film,” 26, 29, 151 Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (Faller and HF), 84 Small Cloud of Magellan, The (incomplete), 23, 48, 176, 178, 187, 272– 73n37 Smithson, Robert, 14, 75, 140–41, 265n63 Snow, Michael, 26, 64, 82, 161; gift of “time,” 57; HF’s comment on, 89– 90, 114, 151; work in HF films, 42, 45, 132, 244n53 Snowblind, 64 Sobral Campos, Isabel, 248n31 SOLARIUMAGELANI, 49– 50, 58 Solnit, Rebecca, 250n56 “Some Propositions on Photography,” 92 sound in HF’s films, 52, 68, 223; Cadenza I, 96; Cadenzas I & XIV, 67; Carrots & Peas, 58, 87; Clouds of Magellan (incomplete), 189; Common Knowledge (incomplete), 226– 27; Critical Mass, 35, 43, 239n37; Gloria!, 67, 213–14, 217; as goal of Magellan, 67– 68; Hapax Legomena in overview, 42; Maxwell’s Demon, 67; Mindfall I & VII, 58, 67– 68, 77; Mindfall VII, 136– 37; (nostalgia), 42–43, 45, 57; Obelisk Ampersand Encounter (lost film), 62; Ordinary Matter, 43–44, 240n68; Remote Control (silence), 44–45; Special Effects, 30, 45–46; Straits of Magellan (incomplete), 109; Surface Tension, 58, 63; Works and Days (sound removed), 87; Zorns Lemma, 97, 271n14 Special Effects, 28, 30, 39, 39, 41, 45–46 “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 88 Stanford, Leland, 84 “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” 163, 220– 21; and computing tools, 69, 228; development of, 71; goals, 22, 47, 53– 71, 242n20; as grant application, 53, 65, 223, 241n2; territories of investigation, 110 States, 26, 222

Index305

Steina, 27, 229 Steinbrecher, Marcia, 243n28, 244n53 Stella, Frank, 173, 246n2 Stendhal, 225–26 Steyerl, Hito, 3 Still, Clyfford, 233n31 “Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi, A,” 23, 63, 140–41, 153, 158– 63, 230; and anthropology, 159, 161; and indigeneity, 159; and linguistics, 159– 62; overview, 158– 59; as utopian, 163 Straits of Magellan (film series), 23, 47–48, 51, 58, 178, 188, 212; and encyclopedism, 105– 9; Garden/Bridge/Path and Path/Bridge/ Garden (incomplete), 187; HF work on, 49– 50; “images for ‘prefaces’ to,” 224; Lumière brothers inspiration for, 49, 83, 106– 7, 128, 259n77; panopticons (“pans”), 108, 128, 187; sound planned for, 109 Straits of Magellan (planned installation), 9, 53, 101, 184– 85 Straits of Magellan: Drafts and Fragments, 49, 83, 200–201, 201 Strand, Paul, 156 structural film, 26, 29, 52, 151 structural-materialist film, 170 summa (top-down approach to knowledge): vs. cabinet of curiosities, 131; vs. catalogue, 22– 23, 105– 6, 133; defined, 105; and the Enlightenment, 130; vs. inventory, 131; in Library of Congress, 123; in Magellan, 106–10, 115; problem of categorization, 108 Summer Solstice, 49, 51, 66 SUNY Binghamton, 35, 55 SUNY Buffalo, 2, 21, 27, 55, 127, 229–30; Digital Arts Lab (DAL), 2, 69–70, 195, 211, 223, 228 Surface Tension, 18, 26, 53, 58, 63, 66– 67 Surrealism, 7, 68, 119 Swift, Jonathan, 111–12 symbolist poetics, 24, 172, 198, 204– 9

Talbot, William Henry Fox, 74, 155 Tatlin, Vladimir, 14, 145, 222 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 215–16 Tennyson, Alfred, 77 Testa, Bart, 249n48 Tharp, Twyla, 163, 167, 224–25, 244n53 Tiger Balm, 50 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Jacobs), 82, 114 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 73, 75– 81, 148 Travelling Matte, 30, 35– 37, 36, 42, 45, 239n44 Tremblay, Tony, 153 Trenet, Charles, 200 Tribe, Kerry, 17, 230 Trotsky, Leon, 14, 169 Tuchman, Mitch, 51, 103, 116, 242n16 Turim, Maureen, 21, 242n16 12 Dialogues (Andre and HF), 141 Uhrich, Andy, 21, 69– 70, 221, 228, 245n69 Ulysses (Joyce), 7, 15, 19, 108, 206 Uman, Naomi, 226 Unsere Afrikareise (Kubelka), 114 Varèse, Edgard, 59 Vasulka, Woody, 27, 69, 211, 223 Védrès, Nicole, 84 Vernal Equinox. See INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT

vertical montage, 58, 68, 77– 78, 136, 223 Vertov, Dziga, 3, 55, 67, 120, 169 video, HF’s use of, 2, 62, 150; and Magellan, 5, 51, 174– 75; Paik–Abe analog video synthesizer, 245n69; “photo-film-videocomputer,” 4, 186; in Remote Control, 37; in Travelling Matte, 35– 37, 45. See also computing; Digital Arts Lab (DAL) Visitation of Insomnia, A, 84 Wade-Giles syllabary of Mandarin Chinese, 43–44

306Index

Wallis, Brian, 134– 35 Wall-Romana, Christophe, 24, 177– 78, 207–11, 275n85 Webern, Anton, 59, 66, 78 Weiner, Lawrence, 61 Weiss, Allen S., 21 Weston, Edward, 140; and archives, 163, 165; as “artistic father,” 22, 73, 91– 93, 235n56; and encyclopedism, 104, 156, 163– 64; photographs as “nouns,” 160, 163– 66 Whitehead, Alfred North, 227 Whitney Museum of American Art, 49– 51 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 161, 267n101 Wieland, Joyce, 26, 82, 126, 163, 244n53 Wikipedia, 13 Wilkins, John, 118– 20 Williams, William Carlos, 238n24 Windhausen, Federico, 21, 103, 113, 256n35, 270n146 Winter Solstice, 49, 51, 66 wit, 31, 40 “Withering Away of the State of the Art, The,” 35, 239n41, 267n86

Wodening, Jane, 251n74 Wordsworth, William, 214 Works and Days, 87– 88, 102 Worth, Sol, 159 Woychek (Büchner), 74 xerography, 2, 4, 68, 195, 196 Yale University Art Gallery, 140–41, 158 Yellow Springs (Vanishing Point: #1), 50, 64 Zaher, Lisa, 21, 229, 244n46 ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 229 Zorns Lemma, 1, 4, 64, 66, 106, 115, 132; alphabetization in, 63, 96, 123, 127, 189; critical reception to, 21, 27, 29, 237n9; didactic/schematic nature of, 16, 18, 119–20; and Joyce, 15; language and image in, 25, 96– 97; Lumière brothers inspiration for, 97; mathematics in, 127; at New York Film Festival, 26; and other structural logics, 229; sound in, 97, 271n14

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