Palindrome

Palindrome

1969 · 22 min · ★ 6.0 · Animation

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. For Palindrome, Frampton selected images which he described as “tending towards the biomorphic,” resembling abstract surrealist painting. However, the rigid palindromic structure that Frampton imposes on the images—a motorized sequence based on “twelve variations on each of forty congruent phrases”—deviates from the subjective aesthetic of the expressive, demonstrating Frampton’s interest in the “generative power” of films composed by rules and principles.

Directed by Hollis Frampton

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Palindrome

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.

A and B in Ontario

A and B in Ontario · 1984

A and B in Ontario

MovieDocumentary

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 were going to make a film about each other - and we did”. A & B in Ontario was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton's death, the film was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators shoot each other with cameras.

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

Hapax Legomena IV: Travelling Matte

Hapax Legomena IV: Travelling Matte · 1971

Hapax Legomena IV: Travelling Matte

“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.” – Stan Brakhage

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.

Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice

Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice · 1972

Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice

MovieRomanceDocumentary

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 in the mind of the viewer.

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.

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 4

MovieDocumentary

A series of papers flutter in the wind.

Carrots & Peas

Carrots & Peas · 1969

MovieDocumentary

An experimental short film which compares and contrasts the colors of carrots and peas.

Pan 1

MovieDocumentary

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

Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”

Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema” · 1973

Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”

MovieDocumentary

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 film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

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