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 detail to each scholar’s investigations as well as the personal dimensions that have motivated and shaped their approach. For many of the participants, the metaphor of the “rabbit hole,” from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), aptly describes the concatenation of curiosity, associational thinking, and obsession that invites following clues into the wide imaginative universe of Frampton’s art, which further leads scholars into unexpected and complex epistemological and sensual realms.
The discussion has been edited for length and clarity. Many thanks to Quentin Lepetitdidier and Swann Rembert, who provided a corrected transcript for the roundtable participants to edit.
Mike Zryd :
I will ask all members of the roundtable please to introduce yourself and describe some of your research on Hollis Frampton.
Bruce Jenkins :
I’m happy to begin. I’m Bruce Jenkins. I’m currently a professor in Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I had the real rare pleasure of working directly with Hollis Frampton, starting in the late 1970s. I first encountered his work as an undergraduate at NYU [New York University], where I was a work study projectionist (I projected in classes for Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney). It was in one of those classes, probably Sitney’s, that I would have seen my first Frampton film. I also was friends with several of the graduate students. It was a really impressive cohort, and one in particular, Paul Arthur, told me one day that he’d come up with his doctoral thesis subject, on the films of Hollis Frampton. And I thought: “Boy, that sounds cool.” I didn’t really know very much about Frampton’s work then, but I thought that that would be a great topic. Within a year or two, he changed it to a doctoral thesis on film noir and dropped Frampton. That opened up some space for me, and my first serious encounter with Frampton. I got to see him for the first time when he was on a Midwest tour in 1976, first here in Chicago and then up in Madison [Wisconsin]. In the summer of 1977 – I remember 07-07-77 [July 7th, 1977] – he invited me and my wife Janet to come out to his farm in Eaton, New York. We spent just two days staying there with Hollis. I met Marion and her son Will Faller. I got to see every aspect of Hollis’s production facility there. And it was there that we developed a bond. He would begin to lend me prints of anything I wanted from the Co-op [Film-Makers’ Cooperative]. He often would send me 35mm color images of some of what we came to call the “flat stuff,” and then out of that came a doctoral thesis, and the chance to work on his first gallery exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Recollections/Recreations, which turned out to be a posthumous show.[1] So that’s kind of where I began.
Zryd :
Thanks, Bruce. A follow up question: in what artistic, cultural, epistemological and or disciplinary contexts do you situate Frampton’s work in your scholarly work on him? I think for you, it might be all the contexts!
Jenkins :
The thing is, I had to do something that I wasn’t even prepared to do, and it was the Albright-Knox show that forced me to do it. I probably would have been content situating him solely within the regime of experimental cinema, as someone who opened up space within a notion of film experimentation previously set by figures like Stan Brakhage. But the show in the art gallery forced me to look at him within a larger realm of what’s called the visual arts, within a larger contemporary art setting. I was working very closely with a contemporary art curator, Susan Krane, who insisted that Frampton was connected to Carl Andre and to Frank Stella. There was a gallery adjacent to our Frampton galleries that had work by Andre and Stella along with James Rosenquist and Larry Poons, which was impressive. I should also say that it’s interesting to be having this roundtable now, just months after both Andre and Stella have passed. I got to meet both of them after Frampton’s death, and they both came to the Albright-Knox for that show. Anyway, I needed to open up space for contexts outside of what I used to call the “ghetto of experimental film,” and see Frampton through a much broader lens. And I have to say, that was a huge gift.
Anne Breimaier :
I’m an art historian and curator currently associated with Freie Universität Berlin. My research on Frampton is therefore a somewhat dual enterprise. On the one hand, I write about his texts, his photographs, some of his films, and his performances from an art historical angle. On the other hand, I have curated exhibitions and reenacted Frampton’s text-based performances, which I see as situated research. Exhibiting and re-performing Frampton’s work for contemporary audiences with a full range of possible questions and reactions that this generates has a significant impact on my thinking about Frampton’s practice as a whole. From an art historical angle, I ask myself about the significance of his works of art and writing in the context of his time. In my exhibitions and re-performances, I adapt Frampton’s artistic and intellectual processes to understand them better in terms of their nature as live events. In my interview with Kasper König, from which I am contributing an excerpt to this Special Issue, I learned that Surface Tension, for example, was created with Frampton saying to König (who was thinking about making a film himself at the time): “Let’s do it together. I’m interested in ‘time’ and you can talk about your film.” That’s a situational approach, which corresponds very much with my interest in the performative in Frampton’s practice.
I would like to mention one re-performance and two exhibitions. My re-performance of Frampton’s A Lecture from 1968 I was able to do in 2015 together with literary scholar Timothy Anderson in a former recording studio on the Lower East Side and in front of a young New York audience. I curated a show with Frampton’s photo series ADSVMVS ABSVMVS (1982) at Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2018, together with Matthias Gründig, a photo historian and curator.[2] The group show titled Hollis Frampton – Influence Diffuse I organized in 2026, together with Arnaud Lefebvre at his gallery in Paris, in conjunction with the Frampton Symposium.[3] The show was the result of conversations I had with the artist Katy Martin, a close friend of Frampton. We reconsidered Frampton’s legacy as part of a larger conversation featuring a selection of his works and confronted them with works by artists who had collaborated closely with him or whose practice had been influenced by his: Catherine Beaugrand, Bill Brand, Rosemarie Castoro, Nicolas Clair, Marion Faller, Robert Huot, and Katy Martin.
I’m interested in the pedagogical, brilliantly conceptual, and humorous aspects of Frampton’s practice. But my own situatedness as a researcher and woman demands distance, also from aspects of his practice that I think need to be critically reflected upon. I will mention two. The first thing is this intellectual rigor that underlies his practice, which, at times, is only accessible to insiders. And the other thing is, of course, that he was a man of his time with corresponding convictions and obsessions. In terms of contextualizing Frampton in artistic, cultural, epistemological, or disciplinary contexts, I would say I am interested to understand better how his practice was embedded in the context of contemporary art. In terms of the overall view of his work, I agree with Matt Teichman, who speaks of Frampton’s practice not in a media specific way, but as philosophy with “different forms of exposition.”[4] Based on this, I would describe many of Frampton’s works—in his own words–as stimuli to “thinking in the concrete.”[5]
I’m very grateful to three people in terms of the introduction I had to Frampton. I first came across Frampton in 2006 in a seminar at Humboldt University Berlin by curator and publisher Bice Curiger on 1960s contemporary art in New York. Bice Curiger included experimental film, which was a first for me. Second, my Frampton project wouldn’t have happened without Mike Zryd and his encouragement. The bibliography he compiled with Robert Haller was my roadmap for visiting archives and researching literature.[6] Last, but by no means least, Bruce Jenkins – I think we can all be very thankful for his groundwork and his research and his support and encouragement. For me, personally, the Recollections/Recreations catalogue was a very important introduction for my transmedial reflections on Frampton’s work.
Ken Eisenstein :
I’m almost positive that the first time I saw an image of or by Frampton was a screening of Michael Snow’s Wavelength [1967] in my introduction to film course. I had no idea anything like experimental film existed. It was an amazingly bold semester that Don Fredericksen had in store for us, with an entire third of the course devoted to the experimental mode; we watched Brakhage, and we watched Snow and we watched Bruce Baillie. We did not watch Frampton that term, nor in the few other courses that I took as an undergraduate at Cornell University, but we eventually read about him in a book that we read for Amy Villarejo’s class: David James’s Allegories of Cinema.[7] The Frampton section piqued my interest, and we started bringing prints to campus to screen through the Cornell Film Club. One of my very first gigs as a projectionist was for (nostalgia) [1971] and I was having a major, major panic attack thinking, how badly could I have threaded this film that it is so out of sync? So there was a really funny, exciting, mix at that screening of both knowing and not knowing. I’m not sure it registered that it was Michael Snow’s voice that I was hearing. Oh, the incredible tenderness in that film, really beautiful longings and phrasings, things about friendship, things about aspirations, things about one’s self. Sometimes Frampton refers to his films as hard-nosed films, but there’s also something very soft about them, and something very soft about his writing and his thinking, and especially his speaking and his teaching. There’s an amazing collection of audio recordings that are just heavenly to listen to.
One of my favorite things is this very long, elaborate anecdote Frampton tells his class – he’s teaching a seminar on Brakhage – a story that Brakhage had told him about Willard Maas, and Frampton is doing all of these vocal imitations. You have a real performer, with a real love of drama, a real love of life that comes across. One of the simplest ways of saying what, to me, is most impressive about Frampton, and I think it goes to Anne’s point about thought and things that he can distill incredibly potently is from Mental Notes, a lecture he gave in 1973. There is a quotation I wanted to include here: “what we try to learn, all our lives, is how to live.” Something as simple and as hard as that seems to me to get deeply into Frampton’s incredible power.
So, he was someone that I started to see as an undergrad, someone I continued to think about. I then went to a filmmaking program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and heard really interesting comments, like my professor Sharon Couzin saying that Frampton was a great writer, but not a great filmmaker. I then went on for my PhD at the University of Chicago, I think initially assuming I would write a dissertation on Brakhage, and that shifted to Frampton through an amazing stroke of luck, which was that my wife and I had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, even though I was not even done with coursework yet. And this comes back to Bruce Jenkins as well: a batch of Frampton’s archival materials had been deposited by Marion Faller at the Harvard Film Archive, I think because Bruce had been leading it. During a 2005 or 2006 walk through the Watertown warehouse location of the archive, there were a few boxes on a shelf labelled “Hollis Frampton.” I said to the archivist, then Julie Buck, that I would love to help catalogue things like that. It was mainly audio, some transcripts, some photographs. Julie guided me through doing that. She then put me in touch with Andy Lampert [archivist at Anthology Film Archives] and for a few years, I was going down to NYC monthly to catalog for Anthology Film Archives the bigger set of materials that had gone to them, including a lot of film outtakes. That’s where my dissertation was born: seeing this archival material latched me on to little known sides of many components of Frampton’s. I did a dissertation with Tom Gunning and Jim Lastra thinking about Frampton’s activity of the archive that looked at his writings and the fables he makes up about different archival structures. I played around with the film (nostalgia) as an archive of his youth, and then the real archive that’s now left to us, especially in the fragments of the unfinished Magellan [1972-80].
In terms of where I situate Frampton, I just think of him as a post-WWII American artist. He has these amazing stories about the abstract expressionist painters and their words of wisdom in bars like the Cedar Street Tavern, you know, run-ins on the street with them, things like that. His personal relationships, that have already been mentioned here, to Andre and Stella, and to Ezra Pound, to his loved ones, and the artists and writers from the past who meant so much, like James Joyce.
Giles Fielke :
I’m speaking to you from Melbourne in Australia, which is where I completed my dissertation on Frampton, about five years ago. I came through the art history department of the University of Melbourne in a similar way Anne and Ken describe. I was interested in writing and researching art and artists, and I always understood the filmmakers that I had encountered, mainly through the Melbourne International Film Festival’s experimental sidebar, were part of the history of art. I wasn’t particularly concerned to associate myself with the film studies department at the University of Melbourne, which I found had bracketed out all of this interesting stuff that I found in the cinemas.
So I saw Frampton’s work as artwork, and I saw the problem being how film might be figured in the history of art. That’s where I started with my dissertation. Frampton congealed as a significant figure in the theoretical and philosophical questions that I was concerning myself with early on. I’d initially thought I was going to write my dissertation on Harun Farocki and in particular, the Archive for Visual Concepts that he’d conceptualized and started to describe in the mid 1990s. He, in fact, passed away while I was working on my thesis, which gave me a pause to wait, given the incredible intensity around the end of his life. I think I found in Magellan an articulation, or a prototypical example, of what I think Farocki is trying to get at. I turned my attention to Frampton and his work, and I thought this would be a way to use Magellan as an object to tease out some of the broader questions I’d been working on in the historiography of art. In particular, I was looking at the art historian Aby Warburg, an incredibly important figure in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially for reflections on art historical effects into the 20th century. I was fixated on his concept of the Atlas, on the science of culture (Kulturwissenschaft) that he had instituted out of a library in Hamburg in the 1920s. The logic of the Atlas of memory, of an archive for visual concepts and its relationships to forms like the dictionary and the encyclopedia, shares central concerns of Frampton’s. I followed this logic, looking specifically at Frampton’s work, and so that’s where my dissertation ended up.
The resonances of Warburg’s life earlier in the 20th century with some of Frampton’s interests expressed in his writing may be coincidental, but they’re also vertiginous. In the late 19th century, Warburg comes to the United States. He goes to visit American Pueblo peoples, and there are photos of him at Oraibi, the Hopi village in the state of Arizona. The memory of this visit to the United States in 1896 forms the basis of his “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual” that he gave in 1923, when he was institutionalized in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland (in an institution where he self-admitted himself after the First World War). He was struggling not only with both the weight of his own project, but also the kind of situation the world was in at that time, which makes me think about the realities of the world we’re in 100 years later. Effectively, he delivered a lecture that is his memory of this visit to show to his physicians and doctors that he was able to gather his thoughts logically, to collect himself again. Frampton’s text, “A Stipulation of Terms From Maternal Hopi,” was written in January 1973, exactly fifty years later.[8]
I understand this as a kind of aphasia that was induced by Warburg’s thinking about the organization of images, which led to a mental crisis. So I would be thinking about this, and then I came back to Frampton, casting around for these histories of the film, of experimental film as art, and having this interest in the history of art as a historiography, and also methodologies around image atlases and so on. I think it was essentially a chance encounter with Circles of Confusion on a shelf at the library of the University of Melbourne, the Baillieu Library, where, I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I was following this logic that Warburg had stated, that books should be organized according to their nearest neighbor: the books that you’re looking for on the shelf, the books that are next to those books, are also the books that you’re looking for (which, in many senses, also holds for the Dewey Decimal System, although not as romantically). I’d been looking for a particular film book that I now can’t remember, but I saw a title next to it, which said Circles of Confusion. I thought: “What an incredible name for a book.” So, I grabbed that text. My first introduction to Frampton was, then, to his writing, his writing on photography even more so than his writing on film, whose significance took me a number of years to understand. We’re all still trying to grasp that significance.
That was my introduction to Frampton, and I then went and sought out the films. In my somewhat remote location here in Australia, I’m incredibly indebted to the Criterion Collection DVD, and to finding that some 16-millimeter prints had been deposited in the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia.[9] I was also starting to reach out and email people to ask questions, and then meeting people like Mike and Bruce. I should also say here that at the time when I pulled Circles of Confusion off the shelf and started to think about Frampton, I naively thought that I’ve found someone that no one knows about and that I’m the only person in the world who’s discovered this guy. How incredible my PhD thesis will be! It’s going to be this unique look at someone who’s been somewhat marginalized. I then discovered this incredibly rich and generous community of people related directly to Frampton’s own life and career. Subsequently, when I’d been in New York looking at the archives in Anthology Film Archives, Gerald O’Grady called me and said: “why don’t you come and meet me here at Cambridge?” He and I sat down for hours of discussion in a courtyard, I think, in front of Starbucks. He then took the trouble to post to me in Melbourne, the scrapbook Encomium that he’d prepared about a decade earlier.[10]
André Habib :
Like Ken, my introduction to Frampton was as the guy who dies in Wavelength. But then I realized that it wasn’t actually. The first time that I was introduced to Frampton was slightly before I did my graduate Master’s degree on Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma. At the very end of Chapter 4b, there’s a quote from Frampton’s essay, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” which was most probably brought to Godard’s attention via Jonathan Rosenbaum or Nicole Brenez, maybe from an informal discussion a long time ago. This text was published in an issue of Traffic that came out when Histoire(s) du Cinéma was shown in Cannes.[11] I knew the text, because it was available in translation, and then I discovered the original.
So I was introduced to Frampton as a metahistorian who was somehow in dialogue with Godard, without having seen Frampton’s films until later—and this is the pre-DVD age, where to see films was a bit tricky. But I was doing my Master’s at Concordia University in film studies, which did rent film prints. In the introduction to experimental film course, you do three weeks on Brakhage, two weeks on Snow, but where do you fit Frampton? How does one teach Frampton? Like others, I slowly discovered his films through his writings, discovering this incredible writer, these very convoluted texts, which I couldn’t completely wrap my mind around, but which I was completely fascinated and seduced by. Eventually – and I suppose this is a weird way to enter Frampton in 2005/2006 – I was doing an early cinema and experimental cinema program at the Cinémathèque Québécoise, which was loosely copying what Bart Testa had done in the 1980s at The Funnel in Toronto, using whatever was available.[12]
Showing these films, showing Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son [Ken Jacobs, 1969], and Eureka [Ernie Gehr, 1974], I was dying to see Frampton’s Public Domain [1972], on which there was only three or four lines published that Bruce Jenkins had written. It’s one of those films that has obsessed me in ways that are, you know, almost shameful to say. I’ve probably rented Public Domain more than any other human being – 15-20 times from the Film-Makers’ Co-op in New York. Indeed, I think Canada, in its entirety, has rented Public Domain fewer times than I have individually! It’s the film that I’ve been studying and teaching to students and has led me to my larger interests in Frampton and how I got more involved with the Frampton community, to help me dig the rabbit hole that I’ve been following related to Frampton’s interest in early film and early film technology. I got a list of the 125 films that Frampton bought from the Library of Congress from Mike (who got it from Frampton’s film preservationist Bill Brand), which led me to what has obsessed me: the whole Public Domain project and thinking of Frampton’s relationship with the Library of Congress. I’ve been very interested in seeing what type of films he was looking at, what could have been his interests, and trying to place that in the larger context of the rediscovery of early films in late 1960s and early 1970s, which was slightly before a whole generation of film historians got into it. I’m trying to frame how Frampton’s interests with early film are, on the one hand, instrumental to what early film historians like Tom Gunning, André Gaudrault, and Noël Burch were doing, but on the other hand, also doing something different with his metahistorical project. I’ve been following these questions, like, what are the films that Frampton showed after his lecture at the Whitney Museum symposium on early film in 1979-1980? He says it’s a selection of paper print films, but what exactly were those films? It’s a question that is hard to answer because nobody remembers the exact list of films in and maybe it’s a stupid question. But for me, a lot of seemingly stupid questions we ask about Frampton, or anything else, lead to very interesting paths. It’s clear that Frampton’s dialogue with other filmmakers of his generation that I had the pleasure to meet, whether it be Snow or Ernie Gehr, with whom I’ve spent many hours talking, reveals a very deep and keen fascination with early films.
As Ken has said, Frampton’s archive is spread out. In 2014/15, I did a little tour to Buffalo, MoMA, Rochester, and the Harvard Film Archive, looking at what’s in the Frampton boxes. You get a very intimate and delicate relationship to Frampton through the archive, whether it be the way that he would proofread or correct his manuscripts, or the way that he’s writing lab notes to film technicians, which are very careful and very sweet. His writings and correspondence with people are different from his films, which can feel (except for (nostalgia) and a couple of other films) slightly austere or cerebral. But then you realize, while they are cerebral, they also come from a soft and really generous place. That’s something that has been very important for me, going through the archive, documents that I photocopied 10 years ago, that I still am rehashing because, after all this time, they can illuminate so many things.
One of the things that I’ve been interested in is trying to think of Hollis Frampton as a found footage filmmaker, as his found footage films have a very specific quality. For example, a film like Works and Days [1969] is a very strange film. It’s literally a film he found that he just added his label to. What do you do with that type of film? Those are gestures that I find very particular and very singular and very beautiful in Frampton’s oeuvre.
I guess the last thing that I’ve been interested in is his film (nostalgia). I teach experimental film classes, including a found footage filmmaking class, and I always try to fit in Frampton films like Critical Mass [1971] or (nostalgia). Recently, I’ve been doing a seminar on nostalgia, not the film, but this emotion (which used to be a sickness when it was first invented, in 1688) and its relationship to melancholia. Nostalgia can be seen through the lens of medicine, art, through painting. It’s a window into humanity basically. We’ve a tendency to look at (nostalgia) through its dispositif and how brilliantly constructed it is. But I think the nostalgia element of (nostalgia) needs to be thought of in the context of what this word could have meant in 1970. Frampton says, “It strikes me as historically unfortunate that the word ‘nostalgia’ itself was resuscitated such a short time after I made that film,” because there’s clearly a discrepancy, a conflicting dialogue, between what he understands as being nostalgia and what was becoming a popular trend in American culture in this time.[13]
Zryd :
I encountered Frampton first in 1984 or 1985, in a luxurious, year-long class on classical film theory at the University of Toronto taught by Bart Testa, “From Münsterberg to Metz.” He chose to end the class with two weeks on Frampton because it was just after Frampton’s death in 1984. Like many of you, I encountered Frampton first through the writings, although some of the films were also screened. Thereafter, I participated in the experimental Innis Film Society and saw other experimental films that way.
My experience of Frampton has often been through the lens of ambivalence. I love the essays, but they were also very frustrating. Clearly this Frampton guy was a smart ass who was being difficult and elusive; the essays are like puzzles I wanted to solve, which is still a thread in my scholarship on Frampton. I then went on to graduate work at NYU, to work with Annette Michelson, who was a friend of Frampton and who published his work in Artforum and October magazines, and wrote the preface for Circles of Confusion.[14] She taught Frampton films and essays in a number of classes, including an illuminating course on the filmmaker as theorist. I interned at The Film-Makers’ Co-operative and at Anthology Film Archives, and so I was part of the community at that time, which allowed me to see, not only the films, which we see in public settings, but also the archival papers in filing cabinets, seeing the ways in which a whole community and discourse was being organized around the films and the filmmaker.
I didn’t do my dissertation on Frampton for a variety of reasons but continued my interest in his work. I began writing a book on Frampton that was taking so long that I said it was a running joke at my presentations at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies [SCMS] that it might just appear as a PDF some time on the internet. It did finally get published a few years ago.[15]
I do want to just say how important the community of Frampton scholars, and our subset of the experimental film community, has been to this scholarly work. For me, it’s always been a dialogue: I’m trying to understand these texts, and then I’ll talk to someone who will mention something that will lead me in a different direction, and then watching the films, cross referencing them, etc. Community has been really important and one reason I wanted to have this round table was to acknowledge how our interactions have led to a cascade of fascinating discussion – often through email chains that will start with a question, or a shared document. Sometimes we’ve been able to get together in person, like a great panel at the College Art Association in 2020 that was chaired by Bruce that Anne, Ken, Giles, Alice Lyons, and Lisa Zaher were part of. Lisa Zaher has been a central member of this mini community but unfortunately wasn’t able to join us today. She did her dissertation on Frampton and is the expert on late Frampton, looking at Frampton’s collaboration with Patrick Clancy, and some of the projects that Frampton was working on “after” Magellan, including the incomplete R.
Another occasion was a round table we did at SCMS in 2013 with Maureen Turim, Michael Walsh, and Scott Nygren, who unfortunately died soon afterwards. Nygren was a grad student at Buffalo who had close knowledge of Frampton. The slide presentation he presented at SCMS was one of the most brilliant and interesting examples of Frampton scholarship; to pick up a thread that’s been mentioned a couple of times, It was a great example of the rabbit hole approach to Frampton, where a clue will lead you to a cross reference to another book or film. It was a “tour de force” of intellectual experimentation, and it’s very sad that Nygren died without being able to publish that work. Melissa Ragona and Federico Windhausen were part of a dossier on Frampton in October magazine in 2004. Maureen Turim wrote very early on about Frampton, especially in relation to sensuousness.[16] Scott MacDonald had written extensively on Frampton’s work and published perhaps the definitive interview with Frampton.[17] The late Gerald O’Grady has already been mentioned. Lindsey Lodhie is another experimental film scholar who’s worked in very interesting ways on Frampton and science. Michelle Puetz worked on Frampton and sound in her dissertation at the University of Chicago.[18] And new people are discovering Frampton, like the art historian Molly Nesbit, through her and Frampton’s shared interest in Marcel Duchamp. Molly gave some of us an occasion to meet Alice Zimmerman, the partner of the late artist Lawrence Weiner, who we’ve discovered is the model in the photograph series A Visitation of Insomnia [1970-73] and the film INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT [1975]. A constellation of people and community comes together.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the importance of Marion Faller and, after her death, Will Faller, as the custodians of Frampton estate. Especially in the sometimes-rarefied art world where heirs cling to legacies and try to extract as much value from the estate, Marion and Will have been models of generosity, giving permission to reproduce images and inviting scholars to access Frampton’s work. At the 2004 conference on Frampton at Princeton University (organized by Keith Sanborn and Su Friedrich) that Marion attended, she had prepared a handout that listed all the research collections that held Frampton’s work, and gave it to all the scholars there to tell us where to find materials. Both Marion and Will have been amazing.
In terms of Frampton and the contexts I put him in, I’ll offer an anecdote from my relationship with my partner, who’s also a scholar of experimental film. We were thinking, how are we going to divide what we write about so that we’re not stepping on each other’s toes? She jokingly said: “you can get Frampton and I’ll get the rest of the avant garde!” I laughed, and then thought that the joke was on her, because the comprehensiveness of Frampton’s film and art meant that I wasn’t losing out on that seemingly one-sided exchange. Frampton proposes to talk about everything: an infinite cinema, an encyclopedic perspective. But of course, he can’t do everything. There’s incredible expertise in Frampton’s work, but as many people have noted, he sometimes faked it, gesturing to knowledge that he maybe didn’t have first-hand. There is a fabulist in Frampton, who is playful and ambitious.
The totality and breadth of Frampton is intimidating. Columbia University Press was astounded when I noted in my book proposal that there had been no academic monograph that covered Frampton’s career. I’ll immediately note that there had been Rachel Moore’s book, but it was specifically on one film, (nostalgia), and Bruce Jenkins has edited the amazing collection of Frampton writings for MIT Press.[19] But why hadn’t there been a critical survey book? I think it’s partly because Frampton got there first. He was such an articulate describer of his own work in so many published interviews that it was hard to get a word in edgewise. A struggle in my own approach to Frampton was trying to balance providing a comprehensive introduction with not compromising the complexity of the work. I wanted to introduce his work to audiences who don’t already get the inside jokes, to provide something for readers to latch onto to find their own rabbit holes to explore.
Part of exploring my ambivalence was to pick up what Anne mentioned, that Frampton was a man of his time. For example, the sexual politics in a few of the writings and films are symptomatic of the 1960s and 1970s. The Magellan project is embedded in both colonial and postcolonial logics. From the perspective of 2024, we have to look at Magellan through contemporary lenses. For example, for years, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, artistic director of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, and I have discussed restaging Magellan, presenting the year long cycle as a curatorial project that would fill in the gaps in Frampton’s Calendar with programming chosen by ourselves and guest curators. But we also realized that to name a global film program after one of the first colonial villains is difficult. It’s a project that may still happen, but we need to think hard about the reframing.
These are examples of the complexities that adhere to any historical figure. They don’t blunt my enthusiasm for the work, but they lead me, as Anne says, to think critically and carefully, even as my fundamental investment in Frampton is grounded in my love of the wit, the smarts, and the beauty of both the writing and the films. I’m interested fundamentally in Frampton’s epistemological and artistic project, but I realize there’s gaps in my approach. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the bodily and sensual dimensions that Turim writes about and that Ken and Anne and others are exploring.
Discussion:
Jenkins :
Picking up Mike’s point about why there was no book on Frampton, I finished my doctoral thesis before Frampton died (but I wasn’t granted the PhD until 1984, the year he did die).[20] But I decided I did not want to publish it, for two reasons. First, like many people who worked for long periods of time on their dissertations, all I could see were the mistakes, the lapses: I knew in my heart of hearts, it wasn’t complete. As soon as I got the job at Harvard Film Archive, Gerald O’Grady started saying “oh, you should publish your thesis” but I just didn’t want to do it. The second reason was that I thought it would actually block better publications, more interesting publications by having it there. You know, people saying, well, we don’t need another book on Frampton. So I purposely didn’t do it.
I also wanted to just briefly say that one thing that I love about Ken’s dissertation is that he begins with this quote about how 2015 was a great year for Frampton. Unfortunately, 2015 was my year to deal with cancer. I lost the entire year, first to lymphoma and then to a small lump in my lungs. But it pleased me to no end to realize that I could have been dead, and this whole thing would still go on. It really was an enormous testament to the fact that work on an artist should be decentralized, it should be wide ranging, it should be networked. We’ve seen how destructive it can be when one person wants to take ownership of an artist’s body of work, and I didn’t want to be that person.
Finally, let me just say one thing about Gerald O’Grady. We can’t tip our hat enough to him, but he was also incredibly competitive. Every time we’d have a conversation, he would bring up that scrapbook, which was triple the size of my meager book, with the implication, “Well, you think you’ve done something.” And each time he’d have 100 new pages to add to it – he was a completist! He also had an interesting point to make about the collected writings book I edited in 2009. In the collection of his writing from 1983, Circles of Confusion, there is a rebus-like forward of 31 black and white photographs. When I was negotiating with MIT Press, they said they didn’t want to reprint them because they would have to pay copyright fees. And I said “Well, I don’t really think it’s necessary to include them.” After the book came out, O’Grady said, “You know, you missed one of the great essays.” I said, “What are you talking about?” Gerry said, “That rebus, that’s one of the best essays in the book.” So I leave that to you to decide.
Zryd :
That rebus is one of many things I haven’t cracked, but it’s interesting that half the photographs were taken by female photographers, which seems an important intervention that Frampton was making. Also, although we talk a lot about Frampton’s relationship to art world figures like Andre and Stella, he’s also involved in the New York dance community: Lucinda Childs and Twyla Tharp appear in his Manual of Arms [1966], Frampton documents work by Simone Forti and Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer is important to him. He’s embedded in an interesting way in the fullness of that 1960s New York cultural community.
Maybe the big question for this roundtable is: Why should we continue to talk about Hollis Frampton? Why is this crazy magazine La Furia Umana doing a special issue on this old dead guy? What are the questions you still want to answer?
Fielke :
Reading the Mallarmé section of Mike’s book, I was struck by the resonance in Frampton’s work in the interaction of text and space, as in Un coup de dés [1897] and the necessity of silence or spatial vacancy around the positive material, the text, to the conceptual theorizations and formulations. So many decades after Frampton’s life, and still thinking about his work, we come back to this interaction between space/silence and the decisions made to act and to produce work. A number of us have mentioned our decisions on what to publish and what not to publish, or what to speak about, what not to speak about. Frampton’s work is not extant in the sense that it’s finished. There’s definitely an ontological aspect to Frampton’s work, which then lives on without end, whether, to pick up on what Bruce was just saying before, it’s the 1980s context or now, 40 years later.
Eisenstein :
I’m also thinking about that collection of photographs that preface the Circles of Confusion book: it’s almost another (nostalgia), another set of photographs that, if we play with it enough, will reveal its secrets.
It’s interesting that some of us are coming from art history, while some of us are coming from film studies. But I don’t know if we fully fleshed out Frampton’s interest in literature in terms of him moving to Washington, DC to sit at St. Elizabeths with Ezra Pound, and then to New York in the late 1950s, or his interest in photography when photography did not really have a place yet in art history. His essay on Paul Strand from 1972 starts with this whole issue of building a tradition, which is also what he was trying to build for film, for himself and for Brakhage, for avant-garde film, at a time when Anthology Film Archives was founding itself, when Film Culture magazine had been running. Sergei Eisenstein is for Frampton a model of the filmmaker who establishes precedents.
Breimaier :
Thanks, Ken, for bringing that up, because sometimes I feel like a heretic, because I don’t look at films as much as you guys do. I did in the beginning: I wrote my master’s thesis on Zorns Lemma [1970], and I was very diligent. But I guess the game I play at the moment is trying to find common threads in all of Frampton’s works, including his writing, and focusing on his procedures, no matter what medium. For example, there is this anecdote in the introduction to Circles of Confusion about Ambrose and St. Augustine, and Frampton goes to great lengths describing what they’re doing, recollecting probably from The Confessions. I think he’s leading us into a labyrinth, illustrating processes of thinking and making—all to raise the question of how these two are related. That’s why I was turning to media specificity and thought to myself: “Okay, let that go for a second. Think about: is he maybe doing similar things in film and in photography?”
What do you do with that? Is that a case for film history, or for art history? For me, it’s less about choosing a field of study and more about choosing a method, which in my case starts with following Frampton into his rabbit holes. From a methodological point of view, that’s a beautiful thing but also a difficult thing. I remember Ken in Chicago saying something like, “It’s impossible.” I like that very much, because the difficulty of finding your one singular way to climb the mountain that is Frampton is important to acknowledge. When you do decide what path you want to take, be aware that it can only go wrong, and then accept the frustration and find meaning in the process. But having a background in art history helps me, for example, to take seriously his references, for example to Marcel Duchamp, which I find very interesting and important.
Habib :
I agree there is this very strong desire to create a tradition and be, in a way, the writer, the inventor of this tradition. Frampton is following a tradition within the avant-garde that was probably started by Maya Deren, at least in the US, of taking film seriously, and making institutions recognize its value. Which means writing, which means teaching, which means reaching out to institutions. The institutional aspect of Frampton is super interesting, his intimate dealings with institutions, whether they be funding bodies or specific art centers, even corporate America with his involvement with early Xerox experiments. To what extent is he trying to build? What is he building for himself?
I had the pleasure of listening to some of those incredible Frampton tapes recorded when he taught a course on Brakhage. The only way to listen to the tapes is to sit in a booth at the Harvard Film Archive. But I was only there for two days – and he talks very slowly. On the one hand, I’m completely seduced by the rhythm. And on the other hand, I’m running a clock here! I only got through six hours of this 90-100 hours of stuff, but he speaks slow enough that I could transcribe. Frampton as a teacher is interesting to me. He starts teaching film as part of that first generation of experimental filmmakers who are institutionalized in the sense that they’re teaching film at universities, between roughly 1970 and 1985. And they’re not just teaching the avant garde – Ken Jacobs taught Intro to film at SUNY Binghamton, and teaching Capra and whatnot. I’m trying to think about: what’s actually going on in those classes? We have the recordings of Frampton’s lessons with the Brakhage seminar. We have some recordings of Brakhage teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which are incredible. But how does Ernie Gehr teach? How does Paul Sharits teach? What would a syllabus look like? What projectors were they using? What part of performance was involved in the teaching itself? It’s very interesting because they’re at the beginning of something, with freedom but also with institutional constraints and, again, building a tradition of teaching. Ken Jacobs at Binghamton created a teaching tradition that is still pursued today by other people teaching there. I don’t know what type of tradition Frampton left in SUNY Buffalo, but I’d like to know more.
Zryd :
Regarding Frampton’s teaching, his work on computers, which was so central to the last part of his life, involved building computers and writing code in labs with students. He assigned basic textbooks on electronics: you had to know the theory of how circuits worked before you could build them. It was a DIY [do-it-yourself] model, and everyone had to go through the process of learning principles to build your computer to have it do whatever it was going to do. Echoing Anne, you had to follow the procedures.
Breimaier :
That just made me think of this document I found from one of Frampton’s seminars titled “Cinematic Thought.” Similarly to what you’re describing with the computer manuals everybody should read, in this seminar Frampton basically asks his students to read two volumes first, Film Culture Reader and Film: An Anthology, and then use Zorns Lemma as an argument against an essay of their choice from one of these books.[21] Talk about overwhelming his audience! It’s really an impossible task he asked his students to perform. In terms of what André said about “how did he teach?” – for me, it is important to understand that Zorns Lemma could be condensed into arguments for and against, like a theoretical model.
Habib :
That’s fascinating. One thing I’ve recently obtained through Jan Sutcliffe, a student of Frampton’s in Buffalo, are some notes she took for a “Hollis on Hollis” class, during the Fall of 1977 at SUNY Buffalo. Frampton was showing basically all the films he had made up to that point, from Manual of Arms [1966] to Otherwise Unexplained Fires [1977]. Apart from the screenings of the “complete works of Frampton,” the required reading included, not surprisingly, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, Pound’s Cantos, the Collected Essays of T.S. Eliot, Marx’s Capital, Valery’s Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, Berg’s Woyzeck and Lulu, Adorno’s musical criticism. The notes are very revealing, and it got me interested to know more and collect as many syllabi as I can, from Sharits, Frampton, Brakhage, Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Tony Conrad, etc. It’s work in progress that I know Mike has also been researching for some time now.
Jenkins :
I just want to say something about Anne’s interview with Kasper König, which answers some of the questions that were floating out there. Kasper is so extraordinarily impressed with Frampton’s humility, the fact that he’s not pushing his films. He never mentions his own films, though he’s willing to make a film with Kasper. Having period recollections like that from people who were well placed to understand what was going on in the scene – to me, that’s gold. Kasper is going to be one of the top ten most important curatorial figures of the 20th and early 21st century. For him to be so taken with working with Frampton and giving this very detailed impression of Frampton’s lifestyle and work methods in the interview fills in a lot of detail that we otherwise don’t have a clear grasp of. Bless you, Anne, for doing that interview.
Fielke :
I want to go back to the disciplinary question, especially in the context of the academy, thinking about how Frampton, at the beginning of the 20th century, is pushing at the boundaries of where art might lie in relation to culture, including other cultures. Anne referred to Matt Teichman’s essay in the Film-Philosophy journal, arguing that Frampton’s films are doing philosophy, and some have mentioned Annette Michelson’s teaching on film as theory. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is philosophy, being done in the context of the cinema, the medium of film, but I think this is also what makes it difficult for us in the academy today to situate this work. Philosophy as, literally, “the love of wisdom,” covers every single discipline, suggesting encyclopedic knowledge of all the different disciplines. But that’s not the case for us, trained in film studies or art history or what have you. Frampton, in my mind, is one of the last figures that we could claim convincingly to be able to not only speak to techniques for filmmaking and the electronic engineering knowledge required for computing, but also to questions of science, literature, the arts, even political economy. All as a philosophical endeavor, which, again, is what’s so compelling about this figure, raising the burning question: “can one philosophize through film in the same way that we’ve previously expected philosophers to articulate themselves in language, in text, or spoken word?”
A related issue is the importance of performance as part of contemporary art discourse, as an emergent disciplinary question, which to me is always connected to the idea of the event. The screening is always an event, and theorizing the philosophy of the event seems to me to be a way forward in terms of how we might continue to unpack some implications of Frampton’s work.
Zryd :
Lisa Zaher’s research on the artist Patrick Clancy showed that Frampton and Clancy did performance art in the late 1970s, early 1980s. So absolutely, performance is part of the ecology that Frampton is part of.
Let’s conclude with a go around of what people are working on now.
Jenkins :
What I’m doing these days is finding in the work of younger artists (some of them are not that particularly young) a connection, a through line to Frampton. One of the most exciting ones is revisiting Chantal Akerman’s first installation piece, which I had the pleasure of working with Akerman on, but which I didn’t really give much thought to at the time. Anne knows this: when you’re curating, you’re not thinking with a scholar’s brain, you’re much more pragmatic, rushing against deadlines. It’s only in the years after it was finished in 1995, and also reading interviews with Chantal, that I began seeing the impact of the nearly two years she spent in New York, living downtown, going to Anthology Film Archives, having conversations with and seeing the films of Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, and getting what she thought was a really extraordinary education about a different way of making films. Once you put that lens on, you begin seeing Snow and Frampton, and Andy Warhol, in many places in her work. I’ve been going back and trying to find what those moments are. This is also courtesy of Olga Kobryn’s other project, on Akerman’s D’Est, which consists of 66 images, or 66 long takes. In number 65, the penultimate shot, there’s a woman playing a cello on a stage in Moscow at night. It starts with her finishing, going off camera, and then coming back for the encore. There’s a period of time when all there is on screen is a yellow chair, and it’s on screen for a long time. It’s the yellow chair from Wavelength, right? Then I’m reading this wonderful interview from 2011 or 2012 with Chantal where she’s talking about how she’s putting together all the video tracks, saying “I get this shot, and then I have three, then I have six,” as she starts to talk about the numerology. I think: she knows how Hollis works! She knows how Frampton put together matrixes that allowed him to build out complex forms. We can see the impact of someone like Hollis or Michael Snow in Chantal Akerman’s work.
More recently, I’ve been working with Aria Dean, who has a major work called Abattoir, U.S.A.! which was just sold to MoMA [New York]. It’s a very impressive 3D animation of being inside an abattoir. When I watched it, I knew immediately, “oh, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton…”. There is Snow’s camera-movement strategy used within an arena that Frampton had explored in his Autumnal Equinox. Watching it, you go: “how can this young Black woman working with what’s supposed to be a historic rendering of a Chicago based abattoir, how could she be doing this?” But she is.
I’m fascinated by the traces in the culture of Frampton’s writing, of his filmmaking, of his presence, and I see them in parallel with Snow. It’s interesting: Snow died two years ago, Frampton died forty years ago, but they’re still in some weird way together. This is testament to the future orientation that was in so much of Frampton’s perspective, as if he and Snow could be working side by side, as it were, as a kind of influence, but Michael Snow lives forty years longer.
Breimaier :
I’m wondering if I can ever take off my Frampton lens, ever… [laughs]. Thank you, Giles, for mentioning performance, which is something I want to bring more to the foreground of Frampton’s work. I put in quite some time transcribing Frampton’s lectures. One is “Reading Weston,” archived at Harvard Film Archive, which Frampton presented in 1979 at the Ruth Shartle Memorial Symposium at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In this lecture Frampton is adapting the method of rereading that Louis Althusser suggested in his introduction to Lire Le Capital. I was very fortunate to work with Étienne Balibar briefly on this, and what he told me is that Lire le Capital [1965] is the only place where Louis Althusser thinks about the concepts of reading and rereading. Apparently, he doesn’t come back to that topic later in his writings. I don’t want to nail this down, but in the end, I try to parallelize the two: To what extent does Frampton reread Edward Weston’s Daybooks and to what extent does he draw on the method of rereading (Marx) that Althusser had outlined in his own text? Performance is my topic, and this Althusser thing, at the moment, is my mountain to climb.
Zryd :
Fantastic. Let’s go to Ken. What aren’t you doing, Ken? [laughs]
Eisenstein :
Most things I’m not doing [laughs]. The two main things that I’m thinking about are, first, Frampton’s erotics, a lot of which, I think, has to do with Weston’s nudes. I’m also interested in Frampton’s relation both to Les Krims (who Anne mentioned), and his early relationship with Lee Lozano. I’m fascinated by some of the graphicness of her drawings and how some of that stuff influenced certain collages in Zorns Lemma and material like that. Second, I’m looking at the sets of photographs that are included in the very lush, heavily illustrated Artforum pieces, including his essays on Paul Strand, on two historical photography exhibits in Britain, on Muybridge, and eventually in this really wild essay, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity.”[22] I’m contrasting those Artforum essays with Frampton’s Weston essay in October, which is illustrated very minimally, with only three images.[23] Looking at these different combinations as sets of things also links up with eroticism—the “Incisions” essay, which has the story about a couple’s “pool of fecundity” and “sexual abyss.” That essay’s Artforum appearance has a photograph [1922, by Nickolas Muray] of the performer, Ruth Draper, who was part of the social circle of Henry James. The Draper photograph echoes Duchamp’s photographs of himself as Rrose Sélavy, which goes back to Duchamp’s erotics, and an interesting male-female ambiguity. How does this intersect with the last image in “Incisions” [A naked man being a woman, 1968] by Diane Arbus? Frampton ends the essay on Arbus, so she appears in the text’s illustrations, but Muray/Draper? There’s also something special about the illustrations in the Strand essay. In the Weston essay, we don’t get any of the nudes illustrated, but there’s a very phallic and very vaginal element to the images that are chosen. All of this is leading towards much more explicit things in the early 1980s, like his essay “Erotic Predicaments for Camera.” These are the things I’m most fascinated by, in terms of Frampton’s interests in sublimation, his interests in art harnessing energy.
Breimaier :
Ken, with your knowledge of the archives, when you’re talking about the Artforum publications of Frampton’s essays, were the pictures, the illustrations, chosen by Frampton?
Eisenstein :
This question also goes to the plates in Circles of Confusion, where it was definitely all within his control, sometimes to the dismay of Joan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop, who published that. That’s the only letter I recall on this question. I’d love to check the Artforum archive to see if there are letters about Frampton interacting with the editors, or Michelson when she was an editor at Artforum. The page layouts are so intricate, so involved, so Framptonian! But it is a little bit up for grabs in terms of having proof of Frampton saying, “this must go here, and it must be these two paired together” and stuff like that.
Zryd :
I looked at the differences between the Artforum texts and then what made it into Circles of Confusion. In the Metahistory essay, he has a snarky footnote about Marshall McLuhan that he excludes in Circles of Confusion, perhaps out of deference to Gerald O’Grady, who admired McLuhan (O’Grady hired Frampton at the Centre for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo in 1973).
Fielke :
We were talking about archives and the distribution of Frampton’s archives – the Paris archive at Center Pompidou was very important for me and I’m sure, for others. But there is a Frampton archive in Australia, funnily enough, which is minuscule, but relates to Frampton as a young man in the 1950s studying with Ezra Pound, who is a controversial figure, of course. Frampton writes as a young man for a journal that was published in Melbourne called Edge, which is housed in the State Library of Victoria’s collection in Australia. Frampton corresponds with Noel Stock, who became a biographer of Pound. Stock moves to Rapallo, I think, in the 1960s after having championed Pound in Australian modernist literary circles for the decades previous and became a significant Pound scholar in the academic context. Stock happened to live minutes away from where I was growing up in the City of Kingston, which is the southeast suburbs of the city of Melbourne, the largest city in Victoria, Australia. I’ll look at Noel Stock’s archive and Frampton’s correspondence with him–that’s the Australian connection!
I have also been writing about Australian filmmakers in the 1970s, who were working at a distance and in a different context, but still thinking about what is happening in the European and North American centers. It struck me how important National Geographic magazine was to these filmmakers, for Jonas Balsaitis in particular (who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after the Second World War and first came to Australia as a child in 1950.) He subsequently became a painter and a filmmaker in the 1960s and 1970s, working here in Melbourne. He, along with other filmmakers, intensely used the images that they could access through National Geographic to create film animations, particularly because of the image reproduction quality that was available to them as young students, as suburban art-interested kids, essentially. But National Geographic was also there to educate them in a popular scientific sense. I was thinking about this in relation to Frampton looking at the Magellan images in the National Geographic magazines, which is perhaps where he falls into the idea for his Magellan projects. My argument essentially is that Magellan is there before the rest of the films. I want to follow up on this idea of the influence of the National Geographic that, to me, is related to a German art historical text: a German children’s book known as a bilderbuch, or storybook, that introduces children to language. It associates the letters of the alphabet with images and illustrations, to bring children into language. I find that obviously closely related to where Frampton goes when he’s asking a similar question about how can I, in dialogue with many other sorts of projects, create a language that is articulable, using film or using images? I think it is related to what Frampton is doing pedagogically and didactically.
Finally, Bruce mentioned the significance of Kasper König and his kind of affiliation, and I was trying to remember that almost mythical pronouncement in Recollections/Recreations, where Frampton has a show in Germany in 1970 that I’ve never been able to find any information about.[24] That is maybe another connection between German art history and historiography and Frampton’s work in relation to images, which I still find fascinating and unexplored.
Zryd :
Zorns Lemma keeps coming back: Giles’s bilderbuch is like the Bay State Primer and teaching machines.
Habib :
I have two things: One is a book or larger project on experimental filmmakers teaching film, using Frampton as one of many interesting examples, and trying–because it’s a comparative experimental pedagogy approach—to have it as much as possible archival based, looking at transcripts, syllabi, testimonies. Scott McDonald has done some work around the SUNY Binghamton experience. I want to figure out who had a class with Frampton (if they’re still around), who can give us information as to how he taught, how he was introducing films, were the films shown or not? Was there a performative element to it? I would assume from the couple of hours I’ve heard of recordings of Frampton speaking, and from examples like A Lecture, that there was a level of theatricality, at least in the delivery.
The second thing is to go into that early cinema list, those 125 paper print films he purchased, and actually watch every single one of them, which I don’t think anyone has ever done. [Film programmer] Patrick Friel has watched a lot of paper print films, and I sent him the list saying, “hey, how easy is it to see those 125 films?” All these films are in the public domain. I assume some of them were chosen by title, others were chosen because he had seen them, because he says he spent a summer in Washington watching paper print films in, we guess, 1971/1972. There could be a digital humanities project around those films.
And the idea of a Magellan recreation project, which I’ve heard many people in various contexts mention: How come we’re not doing it? Obviously, there’s the political issues you mentioned, Mike, but those are not things that completely exhaust the enthusiasm. Is it a matter of the physical space? Is it something that can be done as a digital humanities, or digital art project? There’s a wonderful almanac project that was created by an association in Bologna, called “Home Movies.” We did an almanac of 365 days, a whole year of films. Each day they had one film pop up and the requisite was that the film that is shown on that day be shot on that day, although it could be any date, like 1912 or 1969. It’s pretty easy to know what’s shot on Christmas Day but trying to find a film in that archive that was shot on a specific day was kind of crazy. Wherever you are in the world, you can go to the archive and to the website, and there was a film of that day. It’s a very fun project.
The internet is full of shit, but it can also produce wonderful experiences, communal experiences of bringing people together. I don’t know how we would do a version of Magellan physically, and I don’t want to be the person to launch the idea and try and engineer it. But I’d love to attend it, and provide assistance and at least joy and enthusiasm to whoever wants to take up that endeavour.
Zryd :
To the idea of “let’s do a Magellan,” I think the late filmmaker Owen O’Toole was one of the first people to talk about doing that. When I was talking with Stefanie at Arsenal about it, we thought about doing it as a decentralized project. It might be centred in Berlin, but it would take place all around the world, part online and/or there could be moments or clusters in the Magellan calendar that could be programmed in different places. It wouldn’t be canonical–it would be open in what we hope would be interesting ways. As the saying goes, “someone should do that,” and maybe it’ll be us.
I’m working on three projects. After writing the Frampton book, I wrote an essay on Norman McLaren that I realized, in retrospect, was subconsciously a reaction-formation against Frampton. It turns out Frampton did not like Norman McLaren films, and made Heterodyne [1967] as a response to the perceived “cutesy” animation of filmmakers like McLaren. My essay is a defense of McLaren, critiquing the overly masculinist modernism that insists that “cinema shall not be fun.” I think Frampton sometimes shared that modernist attitude.
The second thing that I’m working on takes up Frampton’s description, in a 1972 interview with Peter Gidal, of the planned soundtrack for Ordinary Matter [1972].[25] The soundtrack was going to be verbal descriptions of Duchamp’s Étant donnés [1946-66], twelve of them, six by males, six by females, and then he was going to have them read aloud, but the male accounts would be read by female voice and vice versa. When Frampton makes this plan, it’s prior to when Étant donnés could be photographed and reproduced. It had to be experienced firsthand; if you couldn’t make it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, your account was secondhand. It relates to the idea of erotics, because the scene in Étant donnés is somewhat controversial, a nude woman lying in a field, legs splayed to the viewer. Some people see it as a scene of violence. Others, like Molly Nesbit, disagree and see it as in spirit of Duchamp’s playful irony. For this project, I’m working with an amazing artist/scholar Clint Enns, who is a wizard at all things digital. Instead of verbal descriptions, what we’re doing is finding descriptions of Étant donnés in art criticism and published art history scholarship – finding the twelve voices that Frampton was going to interview in published texts. Then, following the instructions that Frampton laid out regarding the alternation of sentences, Clint has found a way to read them using AI voices, including Frampton’s voice. In short, Clint has recreated a version of the planned soundtrack for Ordinary Matter and it’s very interesting.
The last project brings us back to the collective spirit of Frampton scholarship embodied in this round table: a possible biography of Frampton written by all of us. Given the multifaceted nature of Frampton’s work, it would be interesting to attempt less a definitive biography than a playful “exquisite corpse” style biography with contributions from multiple scholars and artists, incorporating documents from Frampton’s archive. For example, a recent document I came across was a science fair demonstration of the digestive system Frampton made with a classmate that was published in a science educators’ magazine, with a picture of 15- or 16-year-old Frampton in a tie.[26] We just learned of a new publication today from Giles, in Edge journal in Australia. I found a humorous reference letter from one of Frampton’s high school teachers in the Case Western University Archives. Andre and Ken and Lisa Zaher are exploring documentation of late incomplete projects like Monsieur Phot and R. There are all these fascinating kinds of documents floating around that I think would provide a constellation of the historical figure of Hollis Frampton. A digital biography could integrate text and sound and other elements and invite different ways for people to find their own rabbit holes to explore. It would have to be a collective endeavor. Someone can write a definitive biography if they want later.
Fielke :
It sounds Borgesian!
Olga Kobryn :
I’m interested in the conceptual part of Frampton art, in Duchamp’s influence and John Cage and the relationship between Frampton and contemporary conceptual artists. Anne, are you working on this conceptual part of Frampton’s work?
Breimaier :
Yes, because my background is very much in teaching minimal and conceptual art, though I’m careful with Capital T theory terms like that. But take, for example, Frampton’s mention of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making [1961], or Frampton talking about going to Philadelphia with Carl Andre to see The Large Glass [1915-1923] by Duchamp, and having these extensive discussions in the early 1960s about what I would consider the foundations of what later was called minimal and conceptual art.[27] The system of reference I create supports that notion, but I’m careful because I don’t want to blow up these references Frampton gives to seem like the “one key” to his work. I think my key to Frampton’s practice is much more about trying to go into the procedures in all the kinds of media he used, trying to understand each work on a case-to-case basis, and allowing the works to create their own contexts and then see how they correspond with each other. One of my red threads is language and another performance, which both play a big role in conceptual art of course.
But I’ve been working on this PhD dissertation for so long! What you should do in a PhD is focus on one question, and what I did instead was do multiple projects. I curated exhibitions, I staged re-performances, I wrote essays, small ones, bigger ones, I published a book. And then how do you bring it all together?
Eisenstein :
I happened to be rereading, yesterday, Frampton on a tape, I think from 1975. I’ll just read you this one line related to what you were just saying: “I invent the procedures, but who invents my capacity to invent the procedures?”
Breimaier :
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Fielke :
We didn’t talk about mathematics much today, but I think that set theory and the chance elements that Frampton is picking up on from the historical avant-garde is worthwhile reading alongside developments like David Hilbert’s proposal to do a Principia Mathematica, which Frampton turns into a Principia Cinematica. That’s where I see the conceptual aspects to Frampton’s work corresponding with what we would understand happening in art history at that moment in the 1960s and 1970s, precisely around minimalism and conceptualism. It’s very expansive, I think, in Frampton’s understanding of it, because he’s reading the 19th century mathematicians with Andre and with others, talking about set theory, this branch of mathematics that I’ve never been confident enough to involve myself with. Mathematics is very much in philosophical discourse today, in continental philosophy, in a way that we would not have been able to predict even 10 or 20 years ago, perhaps because of how the analytical or positive elements of systems of knowledge don’t correspond, to the kind of negative dialectics that we have been trained in.
Habib :
Clint Enns, the artist that Mike mentioned, is both mathematician and film scholar and has published an essay on set theory in Zorns Lemma.[28]
Breimaier :
I want to mention Erik de Bruyn as well, who is also working on mathematics, and is very much into conceptual art.
Kobryn :
I’m interested in the mathematical processes behind the montage processes of the Magellan project.
Habib :
Clint talks about how, if you modelize Magellan, it creates, on a mathematical level, a mobius strip, a creative structure.
Zryd :
To bring things full circle, Bruce Jenkins was the external examiner on Clint Enns’s PhD. So, Bruce is everywhere [laughs].
When we transcribe this roundtable, we can create a text that looks like it was…
Kobryn :
… An encyclopedia… or a mathematical transcription [laughs]
Fielke :
We joke about that, but it’s actually possible this could go on for, you know, the rest of time…
Zryd :
Not just a round table, but a Mobius table.
Edited by Michael ZRYD
Anne Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, Giles Fielke, André Habib, Bruce Jenkins, Olga Kobryn, Michael Zryd
[1] Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton, Recollections/Recreations (MIT Press, 1984). The catalogue was produced for an exhibition devoted to Frampton at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in Fall 1984 after Frampton’s death March 30th, 1984.
[2] “Hollis Frampton: ADSVMVS ABSVMVS,” accessed January 10, 2026, https://foto.folkwang-uni.de/en/info/exhibitions/hollis-frampton-adsvmvs-absvmvs-in-memory-of-hollis-william-frampton-sr-1913-1980-abest/
[3] “Hollis Frampton – Influence Diffuse,” accessed April 12, 2026: https://www.galeriearnaudlefebvre.com/hollis-frampton-influence-diffuse.
[4] Matt Teichmann, “Prelude to the Philosophy of Hollis Frampton,” Film-Philosophy 8, no. 2 (October 2004).
[5] Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues, 1962-1963, ed. B. H. D. Buchloh (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980), 34.
[6] Michael Zryd and Robert Haller, Hollis Frampton, a Resource Guide: Bibliography and Filmography (International Experimental Film Congress, 1989).
[7] David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1988).
[8] Hollis Frampton, “A Stipulation of Terms From Maternal Hopi,” Options and Alternatives: Some Directions in Recent Art, catalogue for an exhibition, curated by Annette Michelson at Yale University Art Gallery, April 4 – May 16, 1973.
[9] Hollis Frampton, A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (The Criterion Collection, 2012).
[10] Gerald O’Grady, “MENTAL NOTES: *NOSTALGIC,** EPITAPHIC,*** NECROLOGICAL,**** PEDAGOGICAL,***** ACADEMICAL,****** TECHNICAL, CALENDRICAL AND ORTHODONTAL *******, A HAND-MADE SCRAPBOOK ENCOMIUM BY A WITNESS,” unpublished manuscript, Scribbledehobble Productions, 2004.
[11] There was an off-print of issue no. 21 of Trafic that came out in May 1997, entitled: “À propos des Histoire(s) du cinéma” and included a bilingual version of both Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma” and Hollis Frampton’s metahistory article. Both these articles can be found in French in Trafic no. 21 (March 1997).
[12] Bart Testa, with Charlie Keil and Funnel Experimental Film Theatre, The Avant-Garde + Primitive Cinema, (Funnel, 1985); Bart Testa, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992).
[13] Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press, 1988). 60.
[14] Hollis Frampton prepared a collected writings book, published as Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968-1980 (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983).
[15] Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2023).
[16] Maureen Turim, Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (UMI Research Press, 1985).
[17] MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton.”
[18] Michelle Puetz, “Variable Area: Hearing and Seeing Sound in Structural CInema, 1966-1978” (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012).
[19] Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) /, One Work (Afterall Books, 2006); Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press Writing Art Series (MIT Press, 2009).
[20] Bruce Lynn Jenkins, “The Films of Hollis Frampton: A Critical Study” (Northwestern University, Film, 1983).
[21] P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970); Daniel Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).
[22] Hollis Frampton, “Meditations Around Paul Strand,” Artforum 10, no. 6 (1972): 52–57; Hollis Frampton, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Artforum 11, no. 3 (1972): 43–51; Hollis Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” Artforum 11, no. 7 (1973): 43–52; Hollis Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” Artforum 13, no. 2 (1974): 39–50.
[23] Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,” October 5 (1978): 49–69.
[24] Exhibition at Konrad Fischer Gallery, Dusseldorf, in May 1970 (Recollections/Recreations, 121).
[25] Peter Gidal and Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” in Hollis Frampton, ed. Michael Zryd, October Files 27 (The MIT Press, 2022), 1-29.
[26] Hollis Frampton and Tom Reed, “A Transparent Working Model of the Human Digestive System,” The Science Teacher 19, no. 2 (1952): 69–70.
[27] Andre and Frampton, 12 Dialogues.
[28] Clint Enns, “Frampton’s Demon: A Mathematical Interpretation of Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma,” Leonardo 49, no. 2 (2016): 156–61.