Hollis Frampton
Encyclopedia
Hollis Frampton was an American avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 filmmaker, photographer, writer/theoretician, and pioneer of digital art.

Early years

Frampton was born March 11, 1936 in Wooster, Ohio. An only child, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandparents.

School years

At the age of 15 he entered Phillips Academy
Phillips Academy
Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...

 in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was accepted on full scholarship. At Andover, Frampton’s classmates and friends included the painter Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

 and sculptor Carl Andre
Carl Andre
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...

. Widely read already as a youth, he had a reputation at Andover as a “young genius” but was also unpredictable: he failed to graduate from Andover, and thus forfeited a National Scholarship to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, when he failed his history course on a bet that he could pass the final exam without ever reading the textbook. Entering Western Reserve University in 1954, Frampton took a wide variety of classes (Latin, Greek, German, French, Russian, Sanskrit, Chinese, mathematics) but had no declared major. He recounts that when he was called in front of the dean after three and a half years of study and 135 hours of credits and asked, once again, if he intended to take a degree, he was told that if so, he needed to take speech, western civilization, and music appreciation. He replied that “I already know how to talk, I already know who Napoleon was and I already like music” and noted that “For that reason I hold no bachelor's degree. I was very sick of school." During this time he had a short-lived radio show at Oberlin College.

Ezra Pound - Washington D.C.

In 1956 Frampton began correspondence with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 after becoming interested in the literary generation of the 1880s. In the fall of 1957 he moved to Washington D.C. where he visited Ezra Pound almost daily at St. Elizabeth’s hospital where Pound was finishing part of his Cantos. There, Frampton writes that he was “privy to a most meaningful exposition of the poetic process by an authentic member of the ‘generation of the ‘80’s.’At the same time, I came to understand that I was not a poet.”

Move to New York

Early the next year, Frampton moved to New York. He renewed his friendships with Andre and Stella, sharing an apartment first with the two of them and then with Andre only. He began photographing artist friends; early projects included documentation of Andre’s work,The Secret World of Frank Stella 1958-1962, and portraits of artists such as Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...

 and James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...

.

Film

As Frampton's photography moved toward exploring ideas of series and sets, it was natural that he begin filmmaking. He based a lot of his early films on concepts, which he applied clearly and cleverly. All of his very early works were either discarded or lost. His earliest surviving work was Information (1966). His early works were reasonably simple in construction. A few of them including Maxwell's Demon, Surface Tension, and Prince Rupert's Drops were based on concepts from science, a subject he was well read on. As he got on, his films gradually increased in complexity.

His most significant work is arguably Zorns Lemma (1970), a film which drastically altered perceptions towards experimental film at the time. He was seen as a structural filmmaker
Structural film
Structural film was an experimental film movement prominent in the US in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the UK in the 1970s.-Overview:The term was coined by P...

, a style that focused on the nature of film itself. In an interview with Robert Gardner he stated a discomfort with that term because it was too broad and didn't accurately reflect the nature of his work.

Zorns Lemma remains the most widely known of this films. It is formed in three different sections. The first is a reading (by Joyce Wieland
Joyce Wieland
Joyce Wieland, OC was a Canadian experimental filmmaker and mixed media artist.-Life:Joyce Wieland was an experimental filmmaker and artist, whose work challenged and bridged boundaries among avant garde film factions of her time...

) of the Bay State Primer, a puritan work for children to learn the alphabet. The sentences used had foreboding themes such as "In Adams fall, we sinned all." The second section is based on a text based work by Carl Andre, which started out with an alphabetical list of words for each letter in the alphabet. Each subsequent list is replaced with a letter until it is just letters. In Zorns Lemma, the concept is reversed. It starts off with a twenty four letter alphabet (I/J and U/V are considered one letter), each letter shown for one second of screentime and then looping. The second cycle replaces each letter with a word that starts with each letter. Gradually the word stills are replaced by an active film shot, such as washing hands or peeling a tangerine until there are only moving images. The third section contains a seemingly single shot of a couple walking across a snowy meadow. The sound is of six women reading one word at a time from Theory of Light.

One interpretation of Zorns Lemma was that it was a comment on life's stages, the morality of the Bay State Primer being childhood, the sets of numbers representing maturing and interaction with the world, and the third part representing old age and death.

After Zorns Lemma, he made the Hapax Legomena films, a series of seven films of which (nostalgia) is the most well known. Several of these films explored the relation between sound and cinema, an area often disregarded in American avant-garde film, by demonstrating a disjointed relationship between the two. Poetic Justice explores a "cinema of the mind", wherein the film takes place in the viewers' imagination(s) as they read title cards. An extremely rare artist book edition of Poetic Justice was printed by the Visual Studies Workshop.

His final major film project was a monumental project called Magellan, named after the explorer who first circumnavigated the world. Magellan was intended to be shown as a calendrical cycle, one film for each day of the year. One film from the cycle, Magellan: Drafts and Fragments, is exemplary of Frampton's ambition to create a personal "meta-history" of film; in Drafts and fragments, he remade the cinema of the Lumieres in 51 1-minute films.

The last few years of his life, Frampton taught at SUNY Buffalo, writing, working on Magellan and ongoing photographic projects with fellow artist and wife Marion Faller, and investigating the relationship between computers and art. He did some initial work with video and sound reproducing with an Altair 8800
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...

 computer.

Alongside Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....

, Hollis Frampton was a leading pioneer of abstract expression in American film, akin perhaps to John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

 and Morton Feldman in contributions to their art.

Frampton died of cancer in 1984.

Film study, restoration and print availability through Filmmakers Co-op NY, Anthology Film Archives and NY MoMA.

See also American "structural" filmmakers Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer...

, Paul Sharits
Paul Sharits
Paul Jeffrey Sharits Paul Sharits was a visual artist, best known for his work in "experimental" or avant-garde filmmaking, particularly what became known as the Structural film movement, along with artists such as Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow.His film work primarily focused on...

, Ernie Gehr
Ernie Gehr
Ernie Gehr is an American experimental filmmaker closely associated with the Structural film movement of the 1970s. A self-taught artist, Gehr was inspired to begin making films in the 1960s after chancing upon a screening of a Stan Brakhage film. Gehr's film Serene Velocity has been selected...

, George Landow, Canadian filmmaker and artist Michael Snow
Michael Snow
Michael Snow, CC is a Canadian artist working in painting, sculpture, video, films, photography, holography, drawing, books and music.-Life:...

 and European filmmakers Malcolm LeGrice (UK), Peter Gidal (UK), Gábor Bódy
Gábor Bódy
Gábor Bódy was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.- Biography :...

 (Hungary) and Ladislav Galeta (Croatia).

Filmography

  • Clouds Like White Sheep (1962) 25 min 16mm (reported destroyed)
  • A Running Man (1963) 22 min 16mm (reported destroyed)
  • Ten Mile Poem (1964) 33 min 16mm (reported destroyed)
  • Obelisk Ampersand Encounter (1965) 1:30 min 16mm (reported lost)
  • Information (1966) 4 min 16mm
  • Manual of Arms (1966) 17 min 16mm
  • Process Red (1966) 3:30 min 16mm
  • Heterodyne (1967) 7 min 16mm
  • Maxwell's Demon (1968) 4 min 16mm
  • Snowblind (1968) 5:30 min 16mm
  • Surface Tension (1968) 10 min 16mm
  • Artificial Light (1969) 25 min 16mm
  • Carrots and Peas (1969) 5:30 min 16mm
  • Lemon (1969) 7:30 min 16mm
  • Palindrome (1969) 22 min 16mm
  • Prince Rupert Drops (1969) 7 min 16mm
  • Work and Days (1969) 12 mins 16mm
  • States (1967, Revised 1970) 17:30 min 16mm
  • Zorns Lemma ( 1970) 60 minutes 16mm
  • Clouds of Magellan (1971) 16mm
  • Critical Mass (1971) 25:30 min 16mm
  • (nostalgia) (1971) 36 min 16mm
  • Travelling Matte (1971) 33:30 min 16mm
  • Appartus Sum (1972) 3 min 16mm
  • Given: . . . (1972) 28 min 16mm
  • Hapax Legomena (1971–1972) 3 hrs 22 min 16mm
  • Ordinary Matter (1972) 36 min 16mm
  • Poetic Justice (1972) 31:30 min 16mm
  • Public Domain (1972) 18 min 16mm
  • Remote Control (1972) 29 min 16mm
  • Special Effects (1972) 10:30 min 16mm
  • Tiger Balm (1972) 10 min 16mm
  • Yellow Springs (1972) 5 min 16mm
  • Less (1973) 1 sec 16mm
  • Autumnal Equinox (Solariumagelani) (1974) 27 min 16mm
  • Banner (1974) 40 sec 16mm
  • INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT (1974) 61:30 min 16mm
  • Noctiluca (Magellan's Toys: #1) (1974) 3:30 min 16mm
  • SOLARIUMAGELANI (1974) 92 min 16mm
  • Straits of Magellan (1974) 51:15 min 16mm
  • Summer Solstice (1974) 32 min 16mm
  • Winter Solstice (1974) 33 min 16mm
  • Drum (1975) 20 sec 16mm
  • Pas de Trois (1975) 4 min 16mm
  • For Georgia O'Keeffe (1976) 3:30 min 16mm
  • Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate (1976) 54 min 16mm
  • "Magellan: Drafts and Fragments"
  • "More Than Meets The Eye"
  • "Otherwise Unexplained Fires"

External links

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