In 1971 Hollis Frampton published an essay in Artforum called “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses.”^[1] Like much of his writing and many of his films, this essay demonstrates his playful wit and encyclopedic knowledge of fields from theoretical mathematics to classical languages, literary modernism to relativistic physics. The essay is written as a paratactic series of aphorisms, some clearly related to an overall argument, some so tangential or esoteric as to pose a challenge to the most dutiful reader. In just the first few pages, Frampton incorporates figures as disparate as satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing (1792-1781), modernist playwright Georg Büchner (1813-1837), theoretical scientists and mathematicians Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Zeno (490-430 BCE), and Évariste Galois (1811-1832), and protocinematic technologists Henry Fox-Talbot (1800-1877), Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), and Joseph Plâteau (1801-1883) into a freewheeling argument about film historiography. Any reader not themselves a polymath with interests in modern literary history, early modern philosophy, theoretical physics, and protocinema would be forgiven for having to look up some of these references. Beyond the multiplicity of historical references, the essay is peppered with quippy phrases and bon mots, typical of Frampton’s erudite style in writing and lectures and on film.

Despite its loose structure, the disparate elements of this essay accrue into a robust argument about what it means to produce a history. Frampton’s largest theoretical contribution is his argument that, in the production of history, the historian’s role is not all that different from the artist’s. Both artmaking and history production are equally involved in creating what Frampton calls “metahistories.”^[2] Frampton would later refer to this essay as “quite openly a manifesto” for the Magellan cycle, the sprawling film project—thirty-six hours long and planned to be screened nightly over the course of 371 days—to which he would devote the last decade of his life.^[3] Magellan was Frampton’s attempt to construct a major cinematic metahistory of his own, one that he called a “resynthesis of the film tradition: ‘making film over as it should have been.’”^[4] This essay would, in other words, concretize an obsession that would take hold of Frampton’s creative output for the next fourteen years until his untimely death in 1984. (As poet Alice Lyons describes Frampton, he was “a meteoric creative intelligence that blew through the arts of the mid-twentieth century…meteor that he was, he smoked profusely.”^[5]) 

During the period Frampton spent working on Magellan, he also occupied another influential position. In 1973 he accepted an appointment as a founding faculty member of the SUNY at Buffalo (SUNYAB) Center for Media Study where he taught until his death. There, Frampton helped develop an influential pedagogical model that fellow faculty members Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel called “perhaps the most influential school for media arts in the twentieth century.”^[6] This article sees Frampton’s pedagogy as deeply connected to his formulation of metahistory and seeks to draw out connections between the metahistory essay and the pedagogical design at SUNYAB. By looking closely at the theoretical underpinnings of Frampton’s metahistory, we will unpack the long-term impact of the pedagogical innovations instituted in the early 1970s, seeing metahistory as a complex prefiguration of the model that SUNYAB would promulgate across American universities.

Rational Fictions

The metahistory essay’s strongest distinction is between history and metahistory. History, for Frampton, is a chronological amalgamation of every occurrence—it is based on fact and in order to be true and complete it must account for every fact. As such, it is nearly impossible to produce a complete history. As Frampton puts it, “The metahistorian of cinema faces an appalling problem…he is obliged to make himself responsible for every frame of film in existence. For the history of cinema consists precisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatever.”^[7] Given the impossibility of representing history completely, Frampton advocates for the slightly more achievable goal of constructing a metahistory. Frampton’s metahistory does not overly concern itself with facts, which Frampton dismisses as “fairly recent inventions,” but instead seeks to construct “an open set of rational fictions” that explore “what it felt like to reflect consciously upon the qualities of experience in the times they expound.”^[8] Described this way, metahistory is difficult to disentangle from other ways of understanding history and experience, including most centrally, art. Much of art also asks us to “reflect consciously upon the qualities of experience” whether that is achieved through the contemplation of a painting or the immersion into the diegetic world of a narrative film. And that is his core argument; because of their identical goals, art-making and history-making are functionally inseparable. 

This framing is similar to Hayden White’s 1973 book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which brought the term metahistory to wider prominence in academic circles.^[9] For White, all history should be analyzed with the tools of literary criticism, because to write history is to inject an artificial narratological form into the massive and random amalgamation of occurrences, perspectives, and facts.^[10] As White puts it, the historical work is most manifestly “a verbal structure in the form of narrative prose discourse. … they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature.”^[11] White argues for an explicit acknowledgement of the poetic structure of historical narrative and, like Frampton, argues against the positivistic framing that sees history as a science constructed out of indisputable facts: “It is often said that history is a mix of science and art. But, while recent analytical philosophers have succeeded in clarifying the extent to which history may be regarded as a kind of science, very little attention has been given to its artistic components.”^[12] Yet, White focuses his accompanying analysis exclusively on historical narratives written by self-identified historians and philosophers: Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. For Frampton, conversely, embracing metahistory means considering works outside of the conventional bounds of history to be involved in the project of history-making. White’s metahistory insists that we consider historical writing to be an artistic endeavor, while Frampton extends that notion (using the logic of algebra’s transitive property, which holds that if a=b and b=c then a=c) to add that art-making is also a historiographic endeavor.

In fact even more than White, Frampton sees history as an essential framework for any major artwork. If art-making is a form of history-making, then for Frampton, a flawed theory of history leads to a flawed, or even dangerous, work of art. This perspective is best illustrated in Frampton’s assessment of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. As has been well documented in many biographies, in 1957-58 a twenty-one-year-old Hollis Frampton spent a formative year visiting Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington DC, where Pound was working on the Thrones 95-109 section of The Cantos.^[13] Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s from 1945-1958 after being found “of unsound mind” and unfit to stand trial for treason for his collaboration with Benito Mussolini and European fascism during World War II.^[14] This year of ad hoc artistic apprenticeship with an imprisoned and disgraced high modernist panjandrum was not some purely transformative mentorship; as Frampton put it succinctly, “I came to understand that I was not a poet.”^[15] But in later interviews, Frampton argued that Pound’s immature historical philosophy was both the central flaw of The Cantos and the germ of Pound’s notorious antisemitism:

“I believe that as a poem, as a whole work of art, it [The Cantos] is a failure, as Pound believed. It represents an incredible catastrophe within modernist poetics. It is one of the supreme attempts and one of the supreme failures. It is an immense catastrophe.

I don’t think that it’s possible…or feasible to bring off a project of those dimensions without a theory of history, in a word. And I don’t think Pound had one. Thereby unfortunately depends the anti-Semitism. Pound didn’t have a theory of history; he had a child’s view of history—namely that it was quite clear that everything was going downhill.^[16]“

This interview, conducted during the period in which Frampton was working diligently on Magellan, is striking in that he sees as the central failure of The Cantos its lack of a coherent theory of history. Frampton goes on to, sympathetically, diagnose Pound’s antisemitism and fascist political allegiances as coming from this same non-systematic approach to history.

“[Pound] set out to look for the culprit. And, of course, he found the culprit, because when one sets out to look for the villain of the piece, one always finds that villain. And that villain, of course, was not the Jew; that villain was a kind of recurrent state of mind that Pound came to call “usury.”

I can also understand and sympathize with how that came about. And I think that that is very sad.^[17]“

This diagnosis of Pound demonstrates all but explicitly how Frampton’s rigorous historical framework is shaped by another major influence: Marxist historical materialism. Pound’s discontent toward various forms of oppression—Frampton cites the horror of war, inequality, and this general sense that “everything was going downhill”—end up funneled into antisemitism even though their source is genuine discontent toward something like market capitalist exploitation or commodity fetishism, which Frampton calls “a kind of recurrent state of mind” associated with “usury.” Frampton himself is aware of how his critique of Pound leans heavily on a historical materialist view of history; in the same interview he says “I suppose here my theoretical Marxist leanings begin to emerge.”^[18] And as George Derk argues in his article “Make it Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound,” Frampton’s split from Pound on the question of history may actually have been a major inflection point for the young Frampton. As Derk writes:

“Frampton never directly links his own unique conception of history to his belief that Pound’s inability to conceive of a viable theory of one resulted in the faulty underpinnings of The Cantos. Yet Frampton’s numerous essays that take up the subject convey his desire not to err as his predecessor had, and instead to crystallize history as a dynamic, complex, process, one that does not necessarily lend itself to the imperatives of the present.”^[19]

That desire not to err, and to crystallize history as a dynamic and complex process, is most apparent in the metahistory essay and the Magellan cycle in which he would try to construct his own metahistory of film.

Metahistory and “Tradition”

In constructing a metahistory, Frampton’s metahistorian is responsible for “inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art.”^[20]Metahistory, in other words, involves identifying trends, influences, interrelations and connections that together can accrue into a “tradition” and combines them into a narrative of “discrete monuments” that can together produce a form of “resonant consistency” for the field at large. As Frampton scholar Michael Zryd describes it, “metahistory gets at an underlying logic or force that shapes historical facts and events.”^[21] The role of Frampton’s metahistorian is to tie together events and ideas into a coherent narrative, a through line drawn through the scatter plot of discrete “monuments.” Plotting that line is what Frampton means by “inventing a tradition.”

Frampton borrows the term “tradition” from another modernist literary source—the poet T.S. Eliot, a close friend and collaborator of Pound, whose 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” explores the relationship between individual artistic agency and a coherent historical canon. For Eliot, the greatness of a poet is measured, almost completely, in that poet’s ability to “cohere” to the poetic tradition. As he puts it “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”^[22] This mass of dead artists make up the bulk of the tradition, in which new artists operate. But the process works retrospectively as well: “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”^[23] Eliot’s tradition, then, is shaped by each new artist whose novel approach changes the whole of that preexisting tradition, but the task of the artist is always oriented around the weight of the existing tradition. The central difference between this vision of tradition and Frampton’s metahistorical tradition is that, contrary to Frampton’s, Eliot’s tradition is singular.

For Frampton, a metahistorical tradition is not an immovable monolith, but instead the heterodox invention of a metahistorian. This view gives much more agency to individuals, and artists, to intervene in history-making and much less unitary authority to a dominant canon. Eliot’s tradition is uniform and immoveable, a concept that he famously calls “the mind of Europe.”^[24] Great artists may alter this tradition by participating in it, but for Eliot, the mind of Europe, and the canonized works contained within it, remain monumental and unimpeachable. (Under Eliot’s conception, one cannot imagine a tradition of poetry that excludes Dante’s Inferno or Shakespeare’s sonnets.) Eliot’s is a conservative conception of history, fitting for the former bank clerk who described his thought as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”^[25]

There are many ways in which the unassailable singularity of Eliot’s tradition is problematic for the historian, not least of which is the colonialist project that it sturdily undergirds. Eliot refers to this unassailable tradition as “the mind of Europe,” associating his canonical tradition with the kind of “civilizing” narratives that undergirded the European colonial project. If the tradition that all artists must engage with is the classical European tradition, then art can only be understood in relation to European cultural values, a potent narrative that serves to justify the principle that powered European colonial extraction. (Recent attempts to “decolonize” literature and art history curricula are relatively direct attempts to refute Eliot’s Eurocentric canonical hierarchy.) But beyond its connection to colonialist rhetoric, Eliot’s tradition is limited by its singularity to a conception of history that cannot be challenged or reimagined. Frampton’s metahistorical tradition is not so limited. To put it simply, Eliot’s tradition is the tradition while Frampton’s metahistorian is involved in inventing a tradition.

This subtle shift, from the definite to indefinite article, is meaningful; Frampton’s metahistory is one of many possible metahistories, and it is thus neither telos nor authority. Some other metahistorian might come along and construct a contradictory tradition, itself a self-contained “rational fiction” that gives us a different chance to “reflect consciously on the qualities of experience.” The potential multiplicity or contingency inherent in this indefinite approach to tradition turns the monumentality of the past on its head; while for Eliot, artists must pay homage to the vast canon of work by dead artists, for Frampton the history of art, culture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and other broadly-defined fields present opportunities to draw a network of connection, with the potential of disrupting hierarchically-constructed historical canons.

We might, of course, debate which metahistorical narrative provides a better, more coherent reflection, which one more compellingly contextualizes history and experience.^[26] As Frampton puts it, “As made things strong in their own immanence, these fictions [metahistories] bid as fairly for our contemplative energy as any other human fabrications.”^[27]But the whole thing is much less fixed and much less hierarchically structured than Eliot’s “mind of Europe.” Frampton is not arguing for some kind of whimsical construction of history, guided by the mercurial fancies of anyone who considers themselves to be a metahistorian. The rigor and seriousness with which he approached the task of constructing a metahistory of film is evidenced by the fourteen years he spent working diligently on the Magellan cycle. But the movement from the singular definite tradition to the potential for contention between multiple metahistories is a significant challenge to Eliot’s conclusion. Eliot’s essay is about putting art into the context of history; Frampton’s puts history into the context of art.

Awaiting Invention: Magellan, Marx, and the Future

It may seem ironic to suggest that a filmmaker whose culminating work is called Magellan is cutting against the grain of a colonialist historical project, but Frampton’s relationship to Ferdinand Magellan and to Eliot’s “mind of Europe” have significant layers of irony and nuance that are instructive in understanding how metahistory shaped Frampton’s art production and teaching. Take for instance Frampton’s description of the Magellan project:

“The central conceit of the work derives from the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, first circumnavigator of the world, as detailed in the diary of his “passenger,” Antonio Pigafetta, and elsewhere. During his five-year voyage, Magellan trespasses (alive and dead) upon every psycholinguistic “time zone,” circumambulating the whole of human experience as a kind of somnambulist. He returns home, a carcass pickled in cloves, as an exquisite corpse.”^[28]

Here already, one can see Frampton’s uneasy (dis)identification with his eponymous conquistador. The film as described follows Pigafetta more closely than the titular Magellan, as it continues in its circumnavigation of the globe even beyond Magellan’s death at the hands of Filipino warriors he sought to Christianize. And the quotation marks surrounding Pigafetta’s title as “passenger” suggest an ironic eye roll—how can anyone be a passenger, a guest, of a carcass pickled in cloves? And indeed, how would we know Ferdinand Magellan’s story if not for Pigafetta’s journal documenting it? The closing reference to the famous surrealist game, exquisite corpse, in which individual authorship is denied in favor of collective creative production, further suggests a critical approach to great man theories of history. Magellan the exquisite corpse is both dead and an amalgam of the many people he encountered, exploited, enslaved, and attempted to convert to Catholicism during his final voyage. And by Frampton’s own account, the film isn’t really about Magellan at all; as he put it in an interview: “If you look for a persona of the Renaissance explorer within the film, you are not going to find it.”^[29]

The revision of Eliot’s conservative, colonialist view of history into a version built on contention is also consistent with Frampton’s self-avowed “theoretical Marxist leanings.”^[30] Indeed, if we identify one pole of Frampton’s influences as deified high modernist artists and poets like Eliot, Pound, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce, then we can also identify a strong tendency toward the kind of structural hermeneutics that animates Marxist analysis. There is no doubt that Frampton was deeply familiar with Marx; take for instance, the punny title of a talk Frampton delivered at a 1974 conference: “The Withering Away of the State of the Art,”^[31] a portmanteau of Friedrich Engels’s promise that communism would lead to the state’s irrelevance (“The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.”^[32]) and the “state of the art” technology represented by video. And Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov deeply shaped Frampton’s thinking about both artmaking and teaching. As he described it:

“My work does not come out of a narrative melodrama tradition. It essentially comes out of a documentary tradition in which, within a situation or a set of situations, one makes a great deal of footage and then, as it were, constructs the puzzle afterwards by the process of editing. And that very generally, I think, is something that could be said of much of what has been called the New American Cinema, which is to say that it traces its antecedents to Vertov ultimately, to a very great extent.”^[33]

Even within Magellan, the emphasis on process, work, and the lives of working people is foregrounded in a way that resembles early Soviet films. Three of the larger seasonal films included in the Magellan cycle, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice were shot in a dairy farm, a slaughterhouse, and a steel mill, respectively, all focused on the (often tedious) manual work from the perspective of the worker. Frampton himself had worked in dairy farms, slaughterhouses and steel mills, as well as in film labs, and so this focus on workers and their skilled tasks also serves as further evidence of Frampton’s “theoretical Marxist leanings” and connection to the early Soviet documentary tradition. But it is in his materialist conception of history that we can see the strongest ties between Frampton and Marxism.

In essence, we can understand Frampton’s metahistory essay as a text that applies a historical materialist perspective to Eliot’s concept of tradition. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in a passage with surprising resonances to Eliot’s:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”^[34]

Like Eliot, Marx is focused on how history-making puts the living into contact with the dead. But while Eliot’s tradition was a series of high culture artworks that simultaneously dwarf and assess the value of each individual artist’s contribution, Marx’s tradition “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” limiting the possibilities for the contemporary history-maker with the violent and exploitative inheritances of our shared human heritage. Frampton’s metahistorian is also involved in the endeavor of making history—although perhaps not in the same active sense as Marx means it, as Marx goes on to reference armed revolutions. Even so, the focus on inheriting a series of disparate historical occurrences from the past and trying to change our understanding through a new rational fiction is very much in keeping with Marx’s overall understanding of the socially produced qualities of experience, knowledge, and history; as he put so incisively in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”^[35]

Frampton’s metahistory intends to similarly change the world through remaking history; as he describes it elsewhere in his “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” the film would be a “resynthesis of the film tradition: ‘making film over as it should have been.’” But Frampton’s metahistorical framing adds a metaphysical recursion to Marx’s man making his own history by emphasizing that, even the history we make is up for contention and debate—histories are, after all, still stories. The metahistorian is still grounded in material history like Marx’s historical materialist, but Frampton removes the teleological destiny that is so dominant in Marx’s thinking, replacing it with a fabulist’s understanding of the ways in which the historical narrative itself is a useful deception that does work upon conceptions of material reality. Marx might call this perceived material reality “the praxis of life,” and Frampton would call it “the qualities of experience.” 

And, as film philosopher Noël Carroll has observed, Frampton’s metahistory offers a uniquely non-teleological metatheoretical framework to think about these questions. For Frampton, film history doesn’t end in its perfection, and that is precisely because he locates the film historical tradition in the future. As Carroll elaborates:

“The metahistorian of film, though open to the history of film, does not see film history as converging on the present. The actual history of film is mongrel; there is no destiny inscribed within it.…The crucial consequence of this maneuver is that it places our filmic tradition, oddly enough, in the future. Our tradition, in an admittedly disorienting way of speaking, awaits invention.”^[36]

As Carroll emphasizes, Frampton’s metahistory builds beyond both Eliot’s and Marx’s teleological historiographic visions to construct one that emphasizes agency, creativity, reinterpretation, and invention.

Metahistory and/as Pedagogy

This incorporation of a Marxist-inflected historical materialist vision of history extends not just to Frampton’s notion of metahistory, but also to his understanding of teaching. Indeed, an emphasis on creative praxis, a pedagogical model requiring students to engage as both scholar/theorists and as makers is baked into the program design at SUNYAB. And although he wrote about it rarely, Frampton certainly understood himself as a teacher as well as an artist—as he put it in a conversation about his Soviet film influences: “If I talk about Eisenstein more than I talk about Vertov, it is probably because Eisenstein himself taught more than Vertov did.”^[37] Not to be lost in all of this discussion of heady social theory is the mechanism through which Frampton’s metahistory operates. 

In the conclusion of the metahistory essay, Frampton suggests that we might derive “a complete tradition from nothing more than the most obvious material limits of the total film machine.” In other words, Frampton suggests that we might solve the metahistorian of cinema’s key problem, the overwhelming scale of the total cinematic archive, by creating a representative sampling of that history that serves as a metahistorical “rational fiction.” He uses the example of the Knight’s Tour—a complex math and computer programming problem in which a knight must visit every square of a chessboard without ever landing on the same square twice:

“The problem [facing the metahistorian of film] is analogous to that of the Knight’s Tour in chess. Understood literally, it is insoluble, hopelessly so. The paths open to the Knight fork often (to reconverge, who knows where). The board is a matrix of rows and columns beyond reckoning, whereon no chosen starting point may be defended with confidence.

Nevertheless, I glimpse the possibility of constructing a film that will be a kind of synoptic conjugation of such a tour—a Tour of Tours, so to speak, of the infinite film, or of all knowledge, which amounts to the same thing. Rather, some such possibility presents itself insistently to my imagination, disguised as the germ of a plan for execution.”^[38]

This passage is, of course, a central example of the ways in which the metahistory essay serves as a manifesto for Magellan. This “germ for a plan of execution” Frampton is describing is the Magellan cycle. With Magellan, Frampton hoped to find a way to create a film that would double as a metahistorical narrative, reconstructing film history ‘as it should have been.’”^[39]

But as a part of his reflection on “Knight’s Tour” Frampton describes a series of other films that might give us a sense of what such a metahistory might look like. In this concrete example, Frampton writes: “It should be possible…to pass from The Flicker through Unsere Afrikareise, or Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, or La Région Centrale and beyond, in finite steps (each step a film), by exercising only one perfectly rational option at each move.”^[40] Like the knight on the chessboard, whose complex tour of the totality of the board is made up entirely out of simple, rational moves, Frampton describes a metahistorical through line that operates through simple, sequential film screenings.

This concrete list of films, mostly made by Frampton’s friends and colleagues in the “structural film” movement, serves both a metahistorical and pedagogical purpose.^[41] That is, in addition to drawing a series of rational steps that can accrue into an overarching narrative about the nature and history of film, each film in this series teaches something to its viewers specifically by focusing on the “obvious material limits of the total film machine.” Tony Conrad’s The Flicker(1966) teaches about the materiality of the filmstrip or the essentially illusory quality of film projection by which a series of still images seem to move; Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (1966) teaches about ethnography, about film’s role in colonial history, about representation, and about the arbitrariness of synchronous sound; Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969/71) teaches something essential about film spectatorship, about what it means to watch a film closely and about the semantic richness of the film frame; and Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971) teaches about camera movement, the hand of the artist, and, like all of Snow’s films, wit. All of these films work together to challenge dominant understandings of film as a fundamentally narrative and immersive medium by focusing on the material quality of film itself, and they all suggest a film history powered by experimentation and transgression that can continue to push boundaries toward aesthetic and conceptual innovation.

Michael Zryd argues that the anti-illusory films in what he consistently refers to as the “so-called structural film” movement served a key pedagogical purpose:

“Ultimately, these films become useful by being anti-useful, by opposing utilitarian, instrumental pedagogy in favor of an approach that invites open, complex, and sometimes discomfiting experience. Many experimental films expressly reject the dominant mode of cinema spectatorship—that is, consumption, embodied in commercial Hollywood cinema. Instead, experimental filmmakers construct a cinema that addresses viewers in radical ways, ambitiously offering new forms of experience and invitations for reflection. … much experimental cinema, performs a particular kind of pedagogical work, forcing students to reflect on their activities as viewers.”^[42]

Thus we might see Frampton’s construction of a metahistory of film as already involved in a pedagogical project. That is, the films he sees as essential viewing for constructing his own concrete example of a metahistory are the same films that serve a particularly pedagogical purpose and that have been screened primarily in the context of the college classroom. Zryd argues that such films, “construct the viewer as student…simultaneously and paradoxically wanting the viewer to have both an immediate experience of the film and a profound reflection on the film through multiple viewings, historical and aesthetic contextualization, and, crucially, the convention of post-screening discussion.”^[43] We might see Frampton’s metahistorian, then, as always-already a teacher, assembling exactly the kind of cinematic tradition that would be screened in classes at SUNYAB.

Indeed, Frampton called this essay his manifesto for Magellan, but we would be forgiven if this concrete description, a construction of a historical through line from the selection of single films that present an overarching historical narrative, sounded less like a modernist epic and more like a syllabus for a film class. In fact, most of these films appear on the syllabus for the first film class Frampton taught at SUNYAB in fall 1973, “Cinematic Thought.”^[44]The course description from the college catalog reads: “Beginning to see films. A study of film art as mimesis and embodiment of modes of vision, perception, thought. Film as illusion and as object.”^[45] This similarity between metahistorical construction and pedagogical design emphasizes another democratized aspect of the metahistorical schema. In the contested space of metahistory, the tradition is not the sole responsibility of a few artistic and intellectual luminaries but is in fact shared with every instructor of a film class, every programmer of a repertory screening, and every student, cinephile, and film reviewer on Letterboxd. To try to tell a history of film, from its mongrel, incomplete history, is to occupy the role of the metahistorian.

Whether Frampton intended it or not (he wrote and spoke very little about his own teaching), his formulation of metahistory would very closely mirror the pedagogical structure that would become the signature at SUNYAB. A metahistory of film combines scholarly writing and art production as two concurrent modes of understanding lived experience. Because of that, the metahistorian of film is expected to occupy both positions as well, both artist and historian, contributing to a metahistory of film by shooting their own films. As Frampton put it, “it may be possible for the metahistorian to take old work as ‘footage,’ and construct from it identical new work necessary to a tradition. Wherever this is impossible…new footage must be made.”^[46] The construction of just such new work in service of a metahistory of film was his overarching goal with Magellan. 

But the same hybrid structure became the hallmark at SUNYAB. The Center for Media Study put a strong emphasis on agency and activity of its students and attempted to productively blur the boundary between the arts and sciences, theory and practice, and creative production and scholarly analysis. The program consciously rejected the separation of film studies from film practice, opting instead for a hybrid model that put every student into the role of the metahistorian, asking them to invent the tradition. Its founder, literature professor Gerald O’Grady, wrote in an initial proposal that: “The Media Studies Program would reestablish the sciences as part of a humanistic education (no more arts versus science).”^[47] The other founding faculty member, Paul Sharits, would describe his own work as its own mode of creative praxis, writing: “I view my activity as prototheoretical and I view myself as an artisan of infrastructural cinema.”^[48] Other than O’Grady, all members of the Buffalo faculty were both practitioners and theorists.^[49]

And the students attending this new Center would be trained to make the same kind of anti-illusory, intellectual cinema. Many of those enrolled in the first few years at SUNYAB—including Leslie Thornton and Keith Sanborn—would go on to careers in academic film study, experimental film production, museum curation, and other fields related to the mission of Frampton’s metahistorical mission. In both its pedagogical and employment structure, SUNYAB enacted the goals set out in Frampton’s metahistory essay. From this perspective, we can see the metahistory essay as, as Frampton put it, “quite openly a manifesto” not just for Magellan but also for Frampton’s pedagogical approach and contributions to the broader field of film study. Because of the influence of this pedagogical model and the openness of Frampton’s metahistory, the tradition of film study still awaits invention.

Jeremy Meckler

Works Cited:

Carroll, Nöel, “A Brief Comment on Frampton’s Notion of Metahistory,” Millennium Film Journal, No. 16/17/18, Fall/Winter 1986-87

“Class and Course Materials Unsorted”, Department of Media Studies Records, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections. 

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Perspecta, 1982, Vol. 19 (1919).

Eliot, T.S. “Preface” to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Faber & Gwyer, London, 1928.

Engels, Friedrich, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring], Tr. Emile Burns, Ed. C.P. Dutt, 1894, New York International Publishers.

“Fall ‘73 Film Schedule Frampton/Sharits 1973,” Department of Media Studies Records Box 8 Folder 21, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections.

Frampton, Hollis, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” Artforum, Vol. 10, No. 1, September 1971, republished in Circles of Confusion: Film Photography Video Texts 1968-1982, Ed. Annette Michelson, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983.

Frampton, Hollis “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009.

Frampton, Hollis “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009.

Frampton, Hollis, Lecture titled “The Withering Away at the State of the Art” delivered at the conference “Open Circuits: The Future of Television” held January 23-25, 1974, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Frampton, Hollis voiceover in Hollis Frampton Documentary, Kline, Kathy, producer. 1981; The Television Laboratory at WNET/THIRTEEN, New York Public Media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkWHC2JmPyEMarx, Karl The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1963 (1852), International Publishers New York.

Lyons, Alice “A Keyboard Mind: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem,” Poetry Magazine, March 11th, 2016

O’Grady, Gerald “Proposal for a Program in Media Studies” in “Program Proposal in Media Studies 1971,” University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections.

Simon, Bill “Talking About Magellan: An Interview” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009.

Sitney, P. Adams “Structural Film,” Film Culture. No. 47, Summer, 1969; revised, Winter, 1969

Vasulka, Woody and Peter Weibel, Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.

Vasulka, Woody, Steina Vasulka, and Peter Wiebel, “MindFrames. Media Study at Buffalo,” ZKM, accessed March 16, 2026, https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2006/12/mindframes-media-study-at-buffalo.

White, Hayden Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Zryd, Michael Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, Columbia University Press, 2023.

Zryd, Michael “Experimental Film as Useless Cinema” in Useful Cinema, Ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, Duke University Press, 2011.

^[1] Frampton, Hollis, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” (“FAMOF”) Artforum, Vol. 10, No. 1, September 1971, republished in Circles of Confusion: Film Photography Video Texts 1968-1982, Ed. Annette Michelson, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983, pp. 107-116.

^[2] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 107. The plural framing of metahistories is, as will be argued later, essential to Frampton’s understanding.

^[3] Simon, Bill “Talking About Magellan: An Interview” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, [OCACM] Ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 241.

^[4] Frampton, Hollis “Statement of Plans for Magellan”, OCACM, pp. 226

^[5] Alice Lyons, “A Keyboard Mind: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem,” Poetry Magazine, March 11th, 2016

^[6] Vasulka, Woody and Peter Weibel, Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008, back cover.

^[7] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 113.

^[8] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 107, Italics are original to Artforum’s publication, although dropped in Circles of Confusion.

^[9] It is worth noting that Frampton’s metahistory essay precedes the publication of White’s book by two years. Frampton doesn’t reference White in this short essay, and White doesn’t cite or reference Frampton in his book, but it is near-certain that in the metahistory of metahistory, their thought is intertwined.

^[10] White, Hayden Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, pgs. 1-42.

^[11] White, Hayden Metahistory, pp. ix.

^[12] White, Hayden Metahistory, pp. x-xi.

^[13] Frampton, Hollis, “Curriculum Vitae”, 1974, “Frampton H Vitae 1974-1981”, Department of Media Studies Records Box 44 Folder 42, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections.

^[14] Moody, A. David Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work. III: The Tragic Years 1939–1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2015), 213.

^[15]  Frampton, Hollis, “Curriculum Vitae”, 1974, “Frampton H Vitae 1974-1981”, Department of Media Studies Records Box 44 Folder 42, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections.

^[16] Frampton, Hollis “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, pp. 183.

^[17] Frampton, Hollis “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, pp. 183.

^[18] Frampton, Hollis “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, pp. 183.

^[19] Derk, George “Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound” October 164, Spring 2018, pp. 32.

^[20] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 113, Italics are original to Artforum’s publication, although dropped in Circles of Confusion.

^[21] Zryd, Michael Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, 2023, Columbia University Press, pp. 74.

^[22] Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Perspecta, 1982, Vol. 19 (1982), 37.

^[23] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” pp. 37.

^[24] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” pp. 38. The colonialist undertones (or perhaps overtones) of this concept have been the target of well-deserved ire from generations of artists and scholars. But it is undeniably influential both on Frampton and on broader conceptions of art and art history.

^[25] Eliot, T.S. “Preface” to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Faber & Gwyer, London, 1928, pp. ix.

^[26] For Frampton at least, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake both provide more coherent reflections upon the quality of experience, than Pound’s Cantos. As he put it in a 1977 interview: “historically in the twentieth century your chances of finishing a very, very large work, if you undertake it, are certainly no better than fifty-fifty and they’re probably not fifty-fifty. … James Joyce actually brought it off twice—incredibly.” Tuchman, Mitch. “Frampton at the Gates: Interviewed by Mitch Tuchman” from Film Comment, Sept/Oct 1977, pp. 57.

^[27] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 107.

^[28] Frampton, Hollis “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” OCACM, pp. 229.

^[29] Simon, Bill “Talking About Magellan: An Interview” in OCACM, pp. 234.

^[30] Frampton, Hollis “Interview at the Video Data Bank” [1978], OCACM, pp. 183.

^[31] This talk was delivered at the conference “Open Circuits: The Future of Television” held January 23-25, 1974, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

^[32] Engels, Friedrich, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring], Tr. Emile Burns, Ed. C.P. Dutt, 1894, New York International Publishers, pp. 315.

^[33] Frampton, Hollis voice over in Hollis Frampton Documentary, Kline, Kathy, producer. 1981; The Television Laboratory at WNET/THIRTEEN, New York Public Media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkWHC2JmPyE

^[34] Marx, Karl The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1963, International Publishers New York, pp. 15.

^[35] Thesis number 11, a quote so central to Marx’s work that it is inscribed on his tombstone.

^[36] Carroll, Nöel, “A Brief Comment on Frampton’s Notion of Metahistory,” Millennium Film Journal, No. 16/17/18, Fall/Winter 1986-87, pp. 204.

^[37] Simon, Bill “Talking About Magellan: An Interview” in OCACM, pp. 240. My emphasis.

^[38] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 116.

^[39]  Frampton, Hollis “Statement of Plans for Magellan”, OCACM, pp. 226

^[40] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 116.

^[41]  Sitney, P. Adams “Structural Film,” Film Culture. No. 47, Summer, 1969; revised, Winter, 1969 

^[42] Michael Zryd, “Experimental Film as Useless Cinema” in Useful Cinema, Ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 317.

^[43] Michael Zryd, “Experimental Film as Useless Cinema” in Useful Cinema, pp. 321.

^[44] “Fall ‘73 Film Schedule Frampton/Sharits 1973,” Department of Media Studies Records Box 8 Folder 21, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections. The course description in the college catalog read: “Beginning to see films. A study of film art as mimesis and embodiment of modes of vision, perception, thought. Film as illusion and as object.”

^[45]  “Class and Course Materials Unsorted”, Department of Media Studies Records Box 2 Folder 13, University at Buffalo Archival & Manuscript Collections. 

^[46] Frampton, Hollis, “FAMOF,” pp. 114.

^[47] O’Grady “Proposal for a Program in Media Studies” in “Program Proposal in Media Studies 1971,” pp. 2.

^[48]  Sharits, Paul “Cinema as Cognition: Opening Remarks” in Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 301

^[49] Woody Vasulka, Steina Vasulka, and Peter Wiebel, “MindFrames. Media Study at Buffalo,” ZKM, accessed March 16, 2026, https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2006/12/mindframes-media-study-at-buffalo.