A Hollis Frampton Odyssey

A Hollis Frampton Odyssey

2012 · ★ 5.0

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

Directed by Hollis Frampton

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A Hollis Frampton Odyssey

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)

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Grand Opera: An Historical Romance

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance · 1979

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance

MovieDocumentary

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

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia) · 1971

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)

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.

Zorns Lemma

Zorns Lemma · 1970

MovieDocumentary

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

Artificial Light

Artificial Light · 1969

Artificial Light

MovieDocumentary

Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait-shots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lap-dissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon... There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. That chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis; his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formulae. -- P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture Reader

Surface Tension

Surface Tension · 1968

Surface Tension

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

Wavelength

Wavelength · 1967

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice · 1974

Winter Solstice

MovieDocumentary

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.

Heterodyne

Heterodyne · 1967

MovieDocumentaryAnimation

“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 work.” –Hollis Frampton

Lemon

MovieDocumentary

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.

Process Red

Process Red · 1966

MovieDocumentary

An experimental short film by Hollis Frampton of contrasting colours.

Snowblind

Snowblind · 1968

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

Pan 1

MovieDocumentary

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

Less

"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

Pan 698

Pan 698 · 1974

MovieDocumentary

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

Pan 699

Pan 699 · 1974

MovieDocumentary

A little boy celebrates his frog catch.

A Pentagram For the Narrative

A Pentagram For the Narrative · 2026

A Pentagram For the Narrative

Adapting an unpublished screenplay by Hollis Frampton, Charli explores and challenges the perceptions of trans women at their most intensely dysphoric.

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