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 Library of Congress Paper Print Collection and films by Frampton that either included, were made of, or help explore his relationship to early cinema and in particular, Paper Print the films. The program featured the following films[2] :
An Artist’s Dream (unknown, copyrighted by Edison, 1900)
The Artist’s Dilemma (1901, J, Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, Vitagraph production copyrighted and distributed by Edison)
The Artist’s Dream (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1899)
A Nymph of the Waves ([Frederick S. Armitage], American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1900)
Pas de trois (Hollis Frampton, 1975)
Public Domain (Hollis Frampton, 1972-1973)
Cadenza I & XIV (Hollis Frampton, 1977-1980)
A little Piece of String (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1902)
Murphy’s Wake (Alf Collins / Gaumont-British, copyrighted and distributed by American Mutoscope & Biograph, c. 1903)
Gloria (Hollis Frampton, 1978)
The paper has globally remained untouched (except for a few minor changes to strip the text of some more familiar or oral expressions). Footnotes were added when required. Only a small selection of the slides presented during the talk were included, for the sake of rhythm and rights. (AH, April 9th 2026)
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Thanks first and foremost to Olga Kobryn for believing in this symposium, to Michael Zryd, Bruce Jenkins, Marie Rebecchi, Swann Rembert, thanks to Lynanne Schweighofer from the Library of Congress who provided us with the wonderful scans of the Paper Prints you will see, and of course my friend Enrico Camporesi, with whom I share many fascinations and obsessions of which this program is somewhat an externalization and extension.
I should probably for starters mention that fragments of these thoughts and mumblings have been uttered in oral and written form in the past, in various contexts[3]. So I can only hope that I haven’t left a lasting impression on those who heard me in the past so that it may sound fresh and new.
So I’m here to present this program of films which is the first thing that sprung to my mind when I was asked to contribute something to this symposium. My initial much more mad idea would have been to screen – or present as an installation – all 125 films Frampton acquired from the Library of Congress in the beginning of the 70’s and that I will address in a moment. The intention would have been to look at these 125 films as “things” that interested Frampton enough for him to want to own them, and see how our knowledge of Frampton’s interest in turn transformed these texts (which is of course the way Frampton sought to invent a “tradition” by remaking the films of the past through the lens of his own re-arrangings).
Since it was revealingly harder to get those 125 films as it had been for Frampton it seems in the 70’s, we simply picked some off the top of the list – almost haphazourdly – that offered an interesting yield into Frampton’s exploration of early cinema and the Paper Print film collection of the Library of Congress.
As often with Frampon, the films we are going to show do not in fact speak for themselves, but trying to speak about them ie. explain them seems somewhat superfluous and would be tedious for the time we have, if only because much of the greatest scholarly work ever produced on these films has been provided by the great minds in this room to which I am utterly indebted. My idea is to simply then retrieve some context to these texts, in hope that these remarks free your eyes and minds even more (which should be the task of anything we do in life in general).
Frampton’s engagement with early cinema, photography and cinema archaeology is quite known, Ken, Bruce, Michael and others discuss these matters at length[4]. Examples of this are his reading of the Archaology of Cinema (mentioned in this interview with Snow), where he writes :
“There’s a great book by a fictitious person named C.W. Ceram whose team of researchers do handsome popularizations of the archaeology of practically everything and this fictitious person has done a book on the archaeology of cinema—where he discusses the antecedents of the cinema at great length and has a lot to say about slide shows which combined colored lights and musicians playing and so forth[5].”
We can mention the infamous Sixteen studies on Vegetable locomotion he created with Marion Faller, as well as this 1979 xerox collage called If Muybridge was alive he’d turn in his grave (simply to quote works that may not have been mentioned up to now in the papers delivered during this symposium).
As we can attest from this 1969-1970 picture, showing Frampton, Gehr and Snow, shot by Joyce Wieland, after – as Gehr revealed to me – a screening of Lumière films at the Museum of Modern art, Frampon was not alone.
Film Culture (issue No. 53-54-55, Spring 1972) Standing : Michael Snow ; sitting : (left): Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton. (right) Photo : Joyce Wieland (undated, c. 1969-1970 ?).
Ken Jacobs’ masterpiece Tom, Tom The Piper’s son (1968-1971) made, we know, a very strong impression on Frampton when he saw it (the first version comes out in 1969 and he was probably in that Chambers Street loft watching Ken tinker with the film on his Victor Animatograph before that)[6]. This film is also the thing — most probably — that got him interested in the collection. And clearly the Paper Print Collection as an “archive” of 3,000 early films popping up all of a sudden, its very limbo existence between film, photographic paper and back film, between copyright laws and its access in the public domain, as well as the notion that buried there was the so-called “birth” of cinema, could maybe even been instrumental to the development of Magellan in the first place.
The Paper Print collection’s rediscovery spans from 1939, from the library clerk Howard Walls’ salvaging and early attempts with Carl Gregory to transfer to 35mm film, through to Kemp Niver’s and Bill Ault’s 15 year project of transferring the rolls of paper films back to film as it where, on 16mm, and that came to completion in 1967, with around 3,000 films transferred and made available through various catalogues, screenings and distribution outlets[7].
We all know that the 10 year and more researches and investigations of filmmakers such as Jacobs, Gehr, Le Grice, Brand, and Frampton into early cinema in the 70’s was an eye openers or eye fresheners for scholars like Gunning and Burch and others before the 1978 Brighton conference, and that “made possible for us today simply to read many of the phenomena encountered in the earliest films””[8]. And Gunning’s famous quote:
“It was my encounter with films by these and other avant-garde filmmakers that allowed me to see early films with a fresh eye [by] freeing them from the ghetto of primitive babbling to which the progress-oriented model of film history had assigned them to.”[9]
Back to Frampton. We know, from a January 1980 interview with Bill Simon, that he spent, some time, half a summer in Washington (my guess is the summer 1971-1972), as the Magellan project was in full throttle, looking at films on a Steenbeck and he selected 125 that he hoped to use in the cycle. He says :
“I have gone through the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress like Levi-Strauss went through the distant cultures of South America and the Pacific, deseperately seeking primitive film. Of course, I haven’t found one yet because all film assumes from the moment it comes into the world, as the child does, that it has a complete grasp of the universe. […] The experience of sitting there on a Steenbeck machine looking at those films is like the experience of encountering the thirty meter Lumière films. One is not impressed by their primitiveness but instead overawed but their subtlety, by their appalling depth of implication—to such an extent, of course, that one is left, to a certain extent, critically speechless. […] I spent a lot of time, half a summer, looking at them in Washington, made a lot of notes, as they say. The material is in the public domain and I bought one of each of one I wanted. […] But out of the one-hundred and twenty-five films I bought, probably a hundred I will use[10].”
Fig. 1. List of 125 Paper Print Films ordered by Hollis Frampton from the Library of Congress. Courtesy of Hollis Frampton Estate.
This is the list that was given to me by Michael or Bill, which has mind-boggled me for years (as do all lists of films, especially a list-of-a-list-obsessive-artist like Frampton). One of the things I’ve started doing recently – and I’d gladly share my excel sheet – is to start compiling the list of titles and using Niver’s 1967 catalogue, verify dates, attribute sources, genres, etc.
One is also struck by the fact that for instance, all the films, were made prior to 1906, when we know that films in the collection go up to 1912. For about 95% of them I would guess, they are all made of one “tableau” or shot. They often “show” something. reduced to one “motif”, often very short, rarely more than a minute or 2. Three of them have the word baby in their title (we will seem them in Public Domain), there are two executions, many physical strength exhibitions and exposures of fit body (akin to the footage used in Maxwell’s Demon which we wanted to include in the program) ; you have films dealing with industrial technology and transportation, workers, small vaudeville acts, peep show films. There is a wide variety of “types” of films – and in that sense, a wider lens than the 1900-1906 focus at Brighton that only showed fiction films. Frampton’s interest was vast and the list is a fascinating way to enter his creative process and what he was digging (no pun intended).
Since Magellan is a metahistorical, reflexive project, there is a keen interest in those titles in the collection that refer to the artist, photography, cameras, film apparatus. There are also in this list a happy bunch of what Frampton calls “soft-core Edwardian porn”, peep show stuff like A Little Piece of String (which features in Cadenza #1) that does get indeed its own subclassification in the catalogue Frampton was consulting. The issue of voyeurism, performance for the camera are all things Frampton was investigating and the stripping bare of bodies, sometimes brides – with reference to Duchamp – was obviously stuff that titillated his mind. This is evident in his Pas de trois – a troubling, sexually reactionary film as Scott Macdonald’s admits – but which I think is interesting to consider in the wake of early cinema’s obsession with sexuality, exhibition of dancing bodies with a film like Nymph of the Waves. Puns also are part of Frampton’s rhetoric, and it seems that the inclusion of certain films is solely based on their titles, including films like Murphy’s Wake or Wake in Hells’ kitchen which both are winks at Finnegans’ Wake (Joyce’s novel being a major intertext of Magellan, as well as Duchamp, Borges, etc.).
Both Birth of Magellan – Cadenza #1 – which begins the cycle and Death of Magellan – Gloria that ends it, contain one or two Paper Prints, and we will see how, in which fashion. Now, it is not absolutely clear, how those other early films were to be used within Magellan. He simply says to Bill Simon that he planned on using “probably a hundred”.
As some of you know, the most obvious presence of the Paper Print films in the Frampton distribution catalogue at the Filmmaker’s COOP which will also show is the title Public Domain, made up – as you’ll see – of 16 films (which are all in the 125 list). I’ve always considered Public Domain as an independent, autonomous film, at best a “trailer” or allusion to the presence of the 100 paper print films throughout the Magellan cycle, incorporated into films or sandwiched in the calendar between other films. Like his Drafts and Fragments of 1974, which is a collection of 49 “pans” or “panopticons”, these 1 minute films in the spirit of Lumière, that Frampton had planned to make 720 of and disperse across the Straights of Magellan.
In any case this is a film– which I am probably responsible for the most individual rentals at COOP over the past 20 years –that has always obsessed me and that is strangely enough rarely shown.
Michael Zryd in his marvelous book mentions spending a lot of time trying the piece together the internal logic binding the films that make up Public Domain — trying to find patterns, rimes, etc. — before Bill Brand — spoiler alert, sorry — showed him the list of films.[11] The films, as can be seen, are strategically strung together by alphabetical order, in the order they would appear in a catalogue, a dictionary or an encyclopedia. It is also, maybe for this reason, as Mike mentions, a kind of “catalogue of human experience” that shows us “things people could be interested in at the time.” It’s also a wonderful window into what Frampton was interested at the time.
Fig. 2. List of 16 films from the Paper Print Collection used in Public Domain (1972). Courtesy of Hollis Frampton Estate.
Now there is a little puzzle here, that maybe some of you will help us unpack. Public Domain appears in various Frampton filmographies dated either 1972 or 1973 but doesn’t seem to enter distribution, until after Frampton’s death (I found an announcement, in the George Eastman House archive, for a December 2nd 1985 screening in Buffalo). To my knowledge, the first time the title “Public Domain” appears (albeit not in a public context) is on an April 4th 1978 letter to Filmtronics labs, I found in the archives at MoMA: he is calling the “print job”, Public Domain part 1 (which is probably the epileptic seizure footage (“needed at the same time as Mindfall”, since he showed some of the footage along side sections of Mindfall in 1978 or 1979). Public Domain Part 2 is described as sixteen very old-time movies strung together separated by a couple of seconds of black leader. This is Public Domain as we know it (it’s unclear if the HF logo was attached then).
Now an important piece of the little enigma around this film is the 1979 Whitney Symposium, Research and Investigations into Film : Its Origins and the avant-garde, where notable scholars, historians and filmmakers, gave talks, showed films and performances. Hollis Frampton presented his famous talk, An “Invention without a Future’” which ends with this incredible sentence:
“I have brought along thirty minutes or so of such rubbish […] This is simply a roll, upon which I won’t comment at all, from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress. […] My principle of selection is so embarrassing that I don’t propose to tell you anything about it at all, but it demonstrates something of the past which, like all pasts, is self-proclaiming, repetitive, redundant, naughty, sometimes astonishing, and, in this case, on the principle that nothing much was made of if at the time, essentially impenetrable to us. It is by that mechanism that this body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it[12].”
I won’t try and unpack this, but my interrogation is much more prosaic: what did Frampton show ? Nobody’s sure (nor Tom, nor Sitney, nor Hanhardt) but up until recently I took for granted what he showed were the images that make up Public Domain, although he did not present it as a film of his, nor under that title, and the 30 minutes or so doesn’t fit with the 18 minutes (unless maybe there were showing them at a slower speed or if some of the Epileptic Seizure footage was also shown).
Another piece of this ongoing enigma came in the winter of 2022, when I was contacted by Bruce Posner who pointed to me the existence of this roll of 20 films from the Library of Congress, in the Flaxman Library of the Art institute of Chicago. It has the 1905 Chase Epileptic Seizure footage (which we won’t show, don’t worry), plus the 16 films that we find in Public Domain (the whole thing is around 40 minutes). The films have titles (as would films from the Library of Congress) and Frampton’s logo of course is not there.
My friend Ken Eisenstein sitting in this room – to which I turn to for these things – found this letter by Frampton to Brakhage dated July 3rd 1973, where Frampton writes:
“Dear Stan,
Herewithin as I promised the list of goodies from the Paper print collection. If the response is as speedy as usual, Chicago will have plenty of time to get’em, and them send them out to you for a look, and for arrangement in whatever order you think appropriate.”
And clearly, alphabetical was appropriate (and you have the same list)
By contacting the person in charge of the Flaxman Library in Chicago with questions, Carolyn Faber, we may have resolved in part the issue. Indeed, she pointed to a November 12th class 1973[13], given by Stan Brakhage in Chicago who lectured (magnificently) on those precise films. We hear him say:
“We’ll see the rest of them [the epileptic seizure footage], plus a reel of other films that were copyrighted and preserved on paper negative [sic] and have been transferred now to safety film as of a congressional project launched several years ago and they were ordered, most of them purely by title in a phone conversation between myself and Hollis Frampton. He had seen enough of this material and I had seen one or two pieces to be able to attempt to judge by title what might be a more interesting yield along the lines of our thoughts in a variety of telephone conversations on the subject of document. And I am much more amazed by this reel than I ever expected to be and I hope you will be to.”
The footage also used for Public Domain here appears in a university library as course material for a class Brakhage was giving in Chicago around the notion of “Document”, in a kind of collaborative venture with Frampton over the phone. Does this explain why Frampton decided to “copyright” the film after the fact (and after their falling out, in the mid-1970’s), as an (almost) posthumous “joke” on Brakhage ?
In any case, the three iterations of these Paper Print films : 1) as a Frampton “logoed” film in distribution, 2) as (possibly) an appendix to a conference at the Whitney in 1979, 3) as material in a 1973 class by Brakhage on the notion of “document”, offer us three ways of reinventing and seeing these films, and three entry points into Frampton’s creative mind and life.
There are sufficient things in here to munch on as you watch this program of films that we tried to interlace in such a way to not give to many headaches to the projectionist (he needs to switch from 16mm to digital). I hope you enjoy this circumnavigation into the Paper Print Collection and Frampton’s negotiations and remaking’s of these sometimes naughty films, that become – as you’ll see, it’s my hope – grand metaphors for cinema.
André Habib
[1] Sincerest and deepest thanks to Olga Kobryn for heading the organization of this conference. My thanks also go to Michael Zryd, Ken Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, Enrico Camporesi, Lisa Zaher, Bill Brand, Bruce Jenkins, Carolyn S. Faber (Flaxman Library, School of the Art institute of Chicago) who have provided archival documents, insights and friendship into this ongoing research and investigation. My warmest thanks, as well, to Will Faller, who generously gave us permission to reproduce the documents that are found in this article, and that have been foundational for my own understanding of Frampton’s oeuvre.
[2] My warmest thanks go to Patrick Friel who provided some corrections (dates, producers, etc.) to the list of Paper Print Titles. I was using Kemp Niver’s 1967 catalogue (which is also what Frampton had before him). Scholarship has evolved considerably since that time.
[3] See « Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigations », dans Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe (dirs.), Provenance and Early Cinema, Indiana University Press, 2020, p. 261-274. « Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son Through the Lens of a 16mm Projector: Thoughts on technology and experimental pedagogy », Found Footage Magazine, no. 9, Fall 2023. « Drafts and Fragments. Reflections around Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection », The Films Of Bill Morrison : aesthetics of the archive, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2017, p. 31-50 ; « Archives, mode de réemploi. Pour une archéologie du found footage », CiNéMAS, « L’attrait de l’archive », vol. 24, n° 2-3, Spring 2014, p. 97-122.
[4] Among others, see Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 2023, p.81-89.
[5] “Hollis Frampton Interviewed by Michael Snow,” Film Culture, 48-49 (1970), p. 10.
[6] In a letter to Sally Dixon, dated May 21 1971, Frampton writes: “Tom, Tom sorts the sheep from the goats. You gotta Love FILM to dig it. […] Tom, Tom is an entirely seminal film, + I envy it”. (Carnegie Museum of Art,
[7] On the history of the Paper Print collection, see the classic Charles “Bucky” Grimm’s “A Paper Print Pre-History,” in Film History (Vol. 11, No. 2, 1999).
[8] On this topic, see among others Bart Testa, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992.
[9] Tom Gunning, “An Unseen energy Swallows Space; The space in early cinema and its relation the American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, John L. Fell (ed.) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1983) 355.
[10] Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Bill Simon” (1980) in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 251.
[11] See Zryd, 2023, p. 120-124.
[12] Frampton 2009, p. 181-182.[13] The classes can be listened to here : https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/node/90915 (Side A) and here : https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A53039 (Side B)