Hollis Frampton is known for the broad and restless intelligence he brought to the films he made, beginning in the early '60s, until his death in 1984. In addition to being an important experimental filmmaker, he was also an accomplished photographer and writer, and in the 1970s made significant contributions to the emerging field of computer science. He is considered one of the pioneers of what has come to be termed structuralism, an influential style of experimental filmmaking that uses the basic elements of cinematic language to create works that investigate film form at the expense of traditional narrative content. Along with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, he is one of the major figures to emerge from the New York avant-garde film community of the 1960s.
An icon of the American avant-garde, Hollis Frampton made rigorous, audacious, brainy, and downright thrilling films, leaving behind a body of work that remains unparalleled. In the 1960s, having already been a poet and a photographer, Frampton became fasc ...
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Joyce Wieland: "Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of '67. We were staying at a friend's house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we ...
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In GLORIA! Frampton juxtaposes nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary forms through the interfacing of a work of early cinema with a videographic display of textual material. These two formal components (the film and the texts) in turn relate to a n ...
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A film of multiple superimpositions, utilizing the images of Solariumagelani (Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice) (1974) overlaid with the hexagonal shapes that recur throughout Frampton's Magellan cycle. ...
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"...Frampton travels to the purported birthplace of the Eisensteinian model of cinema, the fairground, with its 'montage of attractions'...ambulating wide-angled portrait of the fair, its throng of participants, its array of attractions (Belgian Waffles, W ...
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Hollis Frampton alludes to origins and creation as he cuts between a garden featuring a bride and groom and an 1902 film entitled "A Little Piece of String. ...
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"This film is composed of different and relatively commonplace subjects, but each image is a super-imposition ('double exposure') of two similar shots of the same subject, almost in the same position. The effect is amazing: one's gaze at the image becomes ...
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"Strategy and imagery combat and aid each other in pairs. QUATERNION...a spatial figure of monumental attractions...interference...an undulating gyre. Hollis superimposes a fragmenting Muybridge-like grid of Cartesian elements (details of the fire ecscape ...
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"Filmed in large part during H.F.'s lecture-screening tour in the bay area: visit(s) to the Musee Mechanique, Land's End, the Cliff House. The San Francisco fog is proclaimed, as also are the cypress trees that line parts of our local beach. A visit to the ...
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The understandable fascination with Frampton's intellect can blind one to the frequent down-home dimension of his imagery. Here, in a most rigorously formal, even mathematical procession, we see frame clusters of light blue sky, green grass, and red (filte ...
Watch NowAn experimental short film from the Gates of Death series by Hollis Frampton. ...
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"An exquisite homage to O'Keeffe's 'Radiator Building, Night'. ...
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"In the final format for MAGELLAN, Frampton had planned to disassemble these two films into twenty-four 'encounters with death' that were to be shown in five-minute segments twice a month. In their present state, seen together and roughly the length of an ...
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An analysis of film's persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema's flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus. ...
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An experimental short by Hollis Frampton who films the female form during various activities. ...
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Shot at a steel mill, Winter Solstice is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal — all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. ...
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"The operations that dislocate a film like Summer Solstice– I hope irreparably– from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy farm document, or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following ...
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Otherwise known as Magellan's Toys #1. Hollis Frampton's "Noctiluca" was a film designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle, the filmmaker's unfinished magnum opus work. The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines by night, i.e., the ...
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Filmed in a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, MN… Frampton utilizes a shooting strategy that flattens and pictorializes a palpable space of action that includes not only cattle (now seen hanging from huge meathooks), but even on occasion, figures. ...
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A sampling of forty-nine fragments from Frampton's catalogue of 'actualities', the films from STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: "DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS" are all silent and unedited. Several invoke, directly, the work of the Lumieres, as in Frampton's reworking of DEMOLIT ...
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"Near the end of 1973, Frampton realized that he had not finished a single film over the course of a year. He promptly conceived and executed LESS, a doubly punning work in which a minimalist Frampton generates a twenty-four frame (one-second) loop of the ...
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"A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)... visitin ...
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Frampton on Apparatus Sum: "A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a roomful of cadavers. ...
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"After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard… and co ...
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Poetic Justice presents the viewer with an ordinary domestic scene: a stack of papers, a cup of coffee, and a potted cactus on a table. The sheets of paper compose a script that provides handwritten, frame-by-frame instructions for a film that unfolds only ...
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"A 'baroque' summary of film's historic internal conflicts, chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space. ...
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"The frame itself, which divides what is present to consciousness from what is absolutely elsewhere, is tempered here by the breath, tremor, heartbeat of the perceiver. People this given space, if you will, with images of your own devising. ...
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"In PUBLIC DOMAIN...(Frampton) recapitulates cinema's infancy in a series of direct quotes from such notable primitive works as RECORD OF A SNEEZE (FRED OTT'S SNEEZE) and SANDOW FLEXING HIS MUSCLES, two 1894 Edison kinetoscopic shorts, as well as literal p ...
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"A portrait of the filmmaker, Paul Sharits, in particular response to energies he generated one May afternoon in 1971. ...
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A man and a woman have been living together for six months. After disappearing for two days, the man returns and acts as if nothing has happened, refusing to say where he was. ...
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"This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker's hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future. ...
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Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate. ...
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Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structuralist film by Hollis Frampton. It is named after Zorn's lemma (also known as the Kuratowski–Zorn lemma), a proposition of set theory formulated by mathematician Max Zorn in 1935. Zorns Lemma is prefaced with a read ...
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Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait-shots follow ea ...
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Light begins to illuminate the small, nipple-like end of a lemon on the right edge of the frame and gradually spreads until the entire lemon is clearly visible. Then the light recedes across the frame. ...
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An experimental short film which compares and contrasts the colors of carrots and peas. ...
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While working at a photo lab, Frampton found that the waste at both ends of the rolls of processed film—where chemicals worked on the emulsion through clips used to attach the film to the machine—produced images far too interesting to be discarded. Fo ...
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By stripping the sound from a pre-existing instructional film, Frampton conjures, with an economy of means, the everyday movements then being explored by the Judson Dance Theater. "I bought this film in a Canal Street junk shop for $1.00 and found myself i ...
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"For Black and White Film, Huot created his own photographic imagery for the first time. After a few moments of darkness, a young woman (Sheila Raj) lowers a covering of some kind, slowly revealing her naked body. She reaches outside the circle of light, w ...
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Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell's classic theory about the behavior of gas molecules is represented on-screen by a man performing a series of Canadian air force exercises. ...
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A film in three parts: a man talking while a telephone rings, a walking tour of New York, and a goldfish swimming. ...
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This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features the voice of artist Michael Snow. Frampton would place a tape deck at the front of a room, press play, and walk to the back to run a 16mm projector. Presented ...
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"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in imitation of three historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work. ...
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"No, not the United etc. but the conditions, forms in which things exist. Somewhat abstracted, a solid, a liquid and a gas: salt, milk and smoke: falling, pouring and rising are the stars of this classical film. Sheets, streaks and wisps, the protagonists ...
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"Geometric animation made entirely by sculptural methods: cutting, punching, welding colored leader. HETERODYNE is related to some of my other work as RNA to a protein or polypeptide. It was made in abject (if blissful) ignorance of Paul Sharits' early wor ...
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In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activities. ...
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Frampton on Information: "Hypothetical 'first film' for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonable principles, given: 1) camera; 2) rawstock; 3) a single bare lightbulb. I admit to having made a number of splices. ...
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An experimental short film by Hollis Frampton of contrasting colours. ...
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A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the ...
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A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order. ...
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A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas. ...
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Joyce Wieland: "Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of '67. We were staying at a friend's house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we ...
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Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Sno ...
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Begins with landscape/sunset thru mist, ends with window sill. ...
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During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the fi ...
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Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three "character" scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat brie ...
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