Hollis Frampton

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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Short film by Hollis Frampton

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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 a double gaze, as the two images were made at different times and with slightly different framing. The viewer is engaged in a process of double-vision that returns him to image and subject in a manner more complex, more self-aware, and more temporal than the way most of us view photographs." - Fred Camper

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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 outside the studio) against shots of rooftops superimposed in perfect scale with the billboard-like segments of an automobile, enlarged flower, and a spoon...panels of the 20' x 20' mural for the New York World's Fair in James Rosenquist's Broome Street studio–New York, mid-1960s."–Patrick Clancy

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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 Brakhage Colorado residence provided images of chickens/roosters."–Gail Camhi

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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 (filter red) leaves; then frame clusters of the backs of dairy cows; and finally frame clusters of portions of a shiny vehicle (we can see people, objects in bulbous reflection). A trip to the New York State Fair filtered through a most rarified formal film."–Scott MacDonald

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An experimental short film from the Gates of Death series by Hollis Frampton.

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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 average feature film, the two parts of MAGELLAN: AT THE GATES OF DEATH constitute perhaps the most gripping, monumental, and wrenching work ever executed on film...Frampton in 1971 began his filming of cedavers at the Gross Anatomy Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the lab four times over the course of the next two years and then spent nine months assembling his 'forbidden imagery' into an extraordinary meditation upon death."–Bruce Jenkins

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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 average feature film, the two parts of MAGELLAN: AT THE GATES OF DEATH constitute perhaps the most gripping, monumental, and wrenching work ever executed on film...Frampton in 1971 began his filming of cedavers at the Gross Anatomy Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the lab four times over the course of the next two years and then spent nine months assembling his 'forbidden imagery' into an extraordinary meditation upon death."–Bruce Jenkins

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“An exquisite homage to O’Keeffe’s ‘Radiator Building, Night’.” –Mark Webber

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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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(Formerly titled "VERNAL EQUINOX," 5 minute excerpt of Part 1 on the Criterion disc) "...Frampton explores human movement in relation to the film frame. A woman is filmed against a black background with intermittently superimposed frame lines in a motion analysis which alludes to Muybridge."–program note, Whitney Museum of American Art.

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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 things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure– the intrigue, possibly– of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching." -HF

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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 moon, and the film indeed consists of a bright sphere, sometimes white, sometimes tinted, sometimes single, sometimes doubled and overlapped.

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A pendulum swings by until it comes to a complete stop.

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A journey through a field of corn.

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A little boy celebrates his frog catch.

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A series of papers flutter in the wind.

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Clouds roll by in a static haze.

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

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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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Rain falls and reflects the light.

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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 DEMOLITION D'UN MUR (1895) in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumieres' wall. He makes reference to his own work and plays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that includes a series of appropriated 'lenses' ( a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of 'screens' a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).

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The camera pans across a field of flowers at extreme speeds.

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A series of ghost-like vehicles drive by.

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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 incremental blacking out of a nude image by photographer Les Krims." - Bruce Jenkins

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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)... visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language." (H.F.)

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