Editors’ Introduction: The Lab of Thought

• Conversations • Collaborations • Confluences

Roundtable Interview: Anne Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, André Habib, Bruce Jenkins, Giles Fielke, Olga Kobryn, Mike Zryd, Curiouser and curiouser: Into the rabbit hole(s) of Hollis Frampton scholarship

Marie Rebecchi, Introduction to Bruce Jenkins

Bruce Jenkins in conversation with Olga Kobryn and Swann Rembert, Encountering Frampton

Anne Breimaier, Interview with Kasper König

Katy Martin, An Interview with Bob Huot about his Friendship with Hollis Frampton

Bill Brand, Hollis Frampton in the Mix                                                                                                                           

• Frampton and Cie

Ken Eisenstein, “Lacing a Terrain”: Hollis Frampton’s Knockout Layouts

André Habib, Epics of Re-use: Hollis Frampton and Early Cinema

Swann Rembert, “JB after HF”: Emprunts, résonances, copie

• Metahistories Revisited

Toni D’Angela, Frampton before Zorns: La superficie di tensione tra audio e visione

Pedro Florêncio, Sobre Informacion (1966), de Hollis Frampton

Figures of Style: Film and the Other Arts

Érik Bullot, Figures de style

Giles Fielke, Unprepossessing Apostrophes: Joyce, Frampton, and the Spectre of Narrative

Rebecca A. Sheehan, Unfolding a Tesseract: Sculpture, Cinematic Plasticity and Frampton’s Inventive Eye

• Film and its Politics 

Jeremy Meckler, For a Metahistory of Film Studies: On Hollis Frampton’s Metahistory and the Development of Film Pedagogy at SUNY at Buffalo

Olga Kobryn,The artist-run Film Lab : film and its politics 

• New Technologies

Clint Enn, Circumnavigating Frampton’s Magellan: Charting a Self-Conscious Cinema

Fern Silva, Critical Mass and the Age of the Prompt

Miriam Ouertani, Le film comme dispositif techno-sémiotique : Hollis Frampton et la genèse computationnelle de l’image en mouvement?

Edited by Toni D’Angela, Bruce Jenkins, Olga Kobryn

At the beginning of his Returning to Benjamin. Art in the Age of AI (MACK, 2025), Victor Burgin asks if the digital reproducibility, finally, makes true and real the confidence that Walter Benjamin expressed in his seminal and influential The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, in the middle of the […]

Although I’m not a conventional scholar, I hold a unique position in Hollis Frampton scholarship as his friend, younger artist peer, and, for the past 40 years, primary preservationist of his films. We had a warm relationship, and he had a significant influence on my life, as to some degree I had on his. He […]

Ce texte s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’une communication présentée lors du colloque international Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea. Critical Thinking and Metahistory as Acts of Research-Creation. Prenant pour point d’appui Zorns Lemma (1970) et Poetic Justice (1972), il interroge le statut du film à partir de son organisation procédurale, de ses conditions matérielles de fonctionnement […]

November 2025 Katy Martin talks with Bob Huot about his friend, Hollis Frampton, focusing on what each of them were doing and how their art, teaching and everyday lives overlapped. Bob and Hollis met each other, in the 1960s, in the vibrant, burgeoning art scene in downtown Manhattan. Later, they owned farms within a few […]

Toni D’ANGELA, Bruce JENKINS, Olga KOBRYN (dir.)  with the assistance of Swann REMBERT Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller. Editors’ Introduction: The Lab of Thought by Bruce JENKINS, Toni D’ANGELA, Olga KOBRYN “Cinema is a Greek word that means ‘movie.’ The illusion of movement is certainly an accustomed adjunct to the film […]

Fig.1 Zorns Lemma (Frampton, 1970). « JB after HF » pourrait désigner, au-delà du rapport entre ces deux figures que sont James Benning et Hollis Frampton – rapport de proximité, de fraternité, de parenté esthétique, de prise de relais, d’inspiration, tout ce que l’on pourrait imaginer exsudant de ce « after » – une œuvre qui n’existe pas, ou […]

This paper was read on February 18th 2026 at l’INHA/Pompidou, during the Paris symposium « Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea », as a somewhat elaborate introduction to the film program “Épique du remploi : Hollis Frampton et le cinéma des premiers temps”[1]. The program, a blend of films from the […]

Spring 2026 Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller. “It was a time when the boundaries between intellectual life, artistic life, and everyday social life felt much more porous than they do now. The atmosphere was informal, intense, and very alive. People would sit for hours listening, arguing, smoking, watching films, and […]

In 1971 Hollis Frampton published an essay in Artforum called “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses.”[1] Like much of his writing and many of his films, this essay demonstrates his playful wit and encyclopedic knowledge of fields from theoretical mathematics to classical languages, literary modernism to relativistic physics. The essay is written as a paratactic […]

This text was not written by a literary studies expert, nor a close reader of James Joyce (1882–1941). The following remarks are intended to be read as from an art historian thinking through the legacies of photography and film. They are, more specifically, thought through a kind of technical language enunciated by Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). […]

Prologue: Abstract Goals Hollis Frampton’s “Statement of Plans for Magellan” sets out nine goals for his unfinished magnum opus. In this article, I will focus on the first and last goals and suggest some of the ways in which they might be conceptually intertwined and interconnected. Frampton first goal, which film theorist Michael Zryd refers to as […]

Hollis Frampton begins his 1973 essay, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract” by lamenting “an irksome paradox of public consciousness” that, “to be accorded the status of a legend is to be whittled down to a microscopic point, a nonentity at the intersection of a random handful of idiosyncrasies, tidbits of gossip, shreds of advertising […]

The following roundtable discussion took place online January 10th, 2025, with participants Zooming in from North America, Europe, and Australia. The roundtable included some, though by no means all, of the most active English-language scholars of Hollis Frampton’s writings, films, and other artistic work. The discussion revealed the central importance of methodology, interdisciplinarity, and historical […]

Bruce Jenkins’s engagement with the work of Hollis Frampton spans several decades and takes multiple forms, including essays, exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and interviews. Among the most significant are his role as editor and author of the introduction to On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009), as well as […]

Figure 1. A still from Frampton’s Drafts & Fragments (1974) and Zorns Lemma (1970) astride an image from Duane Michals’s The Lost Shoe (1969). Strides might glide on strolls, but rambles are best with wobbling folds. Rock, bend, reach out for balance; attention below…collapses and curves forward’s flow. The art of Hollis Frampton pulls at […]

#8 Hollis Frampton, Phenakistiscope, S.M.S 4, 1968.“Ball” (Side 1) & “Lollipop” (Side 2) Kasper König (1943-2024) was one of the preeminent German exhibition organizers in postwar history. His career as a curator began in New York City, where he lived between 1968 and 1975. He established close contacts with key figures in recent American art […]

Il grecista Jean-Pierre Vernant mi disse: “Gli spartani di Eschilo ci commuove. Perché evoca qualche complesso psicologico, oppure perché è la tragedia stessa a commuoverci?” Per lui, ci commuoveva la tragedia. Ma cosa significa “è l’opera stessa a commuoverci”?

Anni fa conversai con un amico su un film d’autore, che a me non piacque molto. All’amico invece piacque, e analizzò tutti i sensi sottintesi, le correlazioni sottili del film, in modo brillante. Al che risposi: “Anche io avevo colto questi sensi. Ma il film non mi è piaciuto lo stesso”.

La figure de Hollis Frampton suscite souvent chez ses exégètes une aura de fascination. Différents traits biographiques confèrent à sa personnalité un brio  mythologique, qu’il s’agisse de son éducation dans des écoles pour élèves surdoués, de  son étude des langues ou des mathématiques, de la fréquentation du poète Ezra Pound à Washington, de sa culture scientifique, de l’érudition vertigineuse dont témoignent ses  écrits et ses entretiens. Difficile d’échapper à ce jeu de séduction. Le style de ses essais,  elliptique, érudit, nous captive.