Although I’m not a conventional scholar, I hold a unique position in Hollis Frampton scholarship as his friend, younger artist peer, and, for the past 40 years, primary preservationist of his films. We had a warm relationship, and he had a significant influence on my life, as to some degree I had on his. He successfully matchmade me with Katy Martin, with whom I’ve shared a life for 50 years. Hollis and I supported each other as artists in private discussions and occasionally arranged visiting artist or teaching gigs for each other. We shared concerns for our families and especially for our aging and dying parents. Hollis loved to play with language, and we laughed a lot. He was funny.
Hollis introduced me to some of his artist peers including Marion Faller, Patrick Clancy, Bill Etra and Bob Huot who in turn introduced Katy and me to Arnaud Lefebvre whose gallery this Friday will open the exhibition Hollis Frampton: Influence diffuse that he organized with Anne Breimier in conversation with Katy Martin (Paris, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, February 20 – March 28 2026).
I met Hollis Frampton in 1971 when he was a visiting artist at Antioch college in Ohio where I was a student. We subsequently corresponded and became friends. After I moved to New York City, I sometimes served as his lab print supervisor at Filmtronics Lab and as a carpenter renovating the upstate Eaton, NY home that he shared with Marion Faller, her son Will and many cats!
When Hollis visited New York, he often stayed with me in our loft where occasionally we were each other’s first audience for new films and sometimes traded or gave each other unique copies of our films.
My first exposure to a Frampton film was at the San Francisco Cinematheque in 1970 at perhaps the first public screening of Zorn’s Lemma. The Cinematheque at the time took place at the SF Art Institute in their large, raked theatre and I remember a good size audience of a hundred or so. I sat toward the back. Once the film began. I was so completely drawn into its unfolding logic, I failed completely to notice the audience leaving and assumed that everyone else was sharing my experience of ecstatic absorption. When the house lights came back on, I was astonished to discover only three people remaining in the theatre.
A year later back at Antioch College I was excited when Hollis came as a visiting artist and showed Zorn’s Lemma and gave his premiere screening of nostalgia.
During his visit to Antioch, Hollis discovered that the school owned a Kinescope, a devise for creating a film print from video. Hollis had recently used a Portapack video camera from the Experimental Television Workshop at the State University of New York, Binghamton and he wanted to put it on 16mm film. Hollis arranged to send me the tape and raw filmstock and I had the transfer made and shipped it all back to him. This became Travelling Matte, the 4th part of Hapax Legomena.
I was the projectionist for his screening and from the booth I recorded his talk on a reel-to-reel tape deck. I kept the tape all these years;
In the weeks following his visit, in my admiration and enthusiasm, I took liberty with a dub of the recording and used a razor blade and a splicing block to make a 10-minute audio composition that I titled A Formalist’s Dream and mailed it to Hollis. In one section Ishuffled his phrases and in another I alphabetized his words.
Today, I cringe to think how Hollis may have felt hearing my tribute in 1971. But I get a clue from his letter thanking me for helping him make the kinescope for Traveling Matte where he affectionately teased me by addressing me as “Deer Bull,” spelled like the animals, “Deer Bull,” He wrote:
‘You are a King.
You are an Archangel.
Kodak loves you.
I admire you.”
And further down concludes the letter by writing:
“Your tape piece is one of the Glories of America. I repeat: Glories, Glories of America. I have recorded it with the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth.
Now what do I do with it?”
Ouch!
He kept the tape and after he died Marion returned it to me along with a folder of our correspondences.
35 years later I preserved Traveling Matte along with five other parts of Hapax Legomena for MoMA and Anthology Film Archives. In my 2008 letter to Colorlab asking for a duplicate negative, I wrote: “Please note that the original kinescope is slightly misaligned, resulting in a black margin visible within the frame. This was evidently Frampton’s intent and even if originally not, he claimed it so.”
The preservation history repeats the same notions about the alignment:
“the kinescope was misaligned, resulting in a small black margin on the right side of the frame. This was evidently Frampton’s intent and even if originally not, he claimed it so.”
Hollis was very deliberate, and he was widely curious, well read and very knowledgeable. But he could also make things up, i.e. he could indulge in BS, and he often did on any subject. He sometimes claimed intention after the fact.
However, just a few weeks ago I discovered his 1971 letter to me with explicit instruction for the kinescope clearly specifying the alignment. So much for my memory and the accuracy of my own claims to knowledge! I suppose we all do. So my skepticism was not without cause.
A case in point: in this same letter, written two months prior to the first letter I quoted with his response to my tape composition, Hollis acknowledged receiving both his videotape and my audio tape. He wrote:
“I got the tape (thanks) and your tape as well. I’ve played it a dozen times. After I got over my horror, I like it. That was a better thing I said than I thought I had. Do you want it back? Now I dread a little to send you the Palindrome generator, for fear of what you may do with it. But I’ll send it — though probably not before September… “
Hmmm.. I guess he wasn’t all that put off… Palindrome generator?
In yet an earlier letter from May 30th, Hollis wrote me about the film stock for the kinescope and other mundane news including planting asparagus, seeing Paul Sharits in New York City, and responding generously to my films ALWAYS OPEN/NEVER CLOSED and TREE, which I had apparently shown him. He ends the letter with:
“Thanks for your many past & future (!) kindnesses. I hope we can keep in touch. I said I would send you something. How would you like a print of the ‘prime’ (generator) roll of PALINDROME?””
I never did receive the PALINDROME generator roll, but the finished PALINDROME has always been one of my favorite Frampton films. I am attracted to its rich saturated colors, the lushness of its abstract imagery, and the elegance of its structural complexity. But when I saw it projected, perhaps in 2004 in conjunction with the Gloria! Conference at Princeton University, I was disappointed by the blandness of its color. It wasn’t the film I remembered, but as I’ve already demonstrated, memory isn’t always reliable.
So I was especially eager to have the chance to look at the original when I preserved PALINDROME for Anthology Film Archives in 2013. However, once I obtained the original film from MoMA, I was disappointed again because I could see that its color was faded the same as the print. Since Hollis had made the original by printing from the generator roll, both the original and the print were made on the same film stock, and time had taken its toll on both in the same way. If I had the generator roll, I thought, it might have provided a more accurate color reference.
Eventually, I determined that at least one portion of the original made from the generator roll came from a black-and-white source. So by timing this shot to appear black and white and using the same printer setting for the rest of the film, I succeeded in restoring the color to its original vibrancy. I was very pleased.
In the years after Hollis died, I helped Marion place Hollis’s film originals at MoMA, and other Frampton materials at Anthology Film Archives and Harvard Film Archive. In preparing for this conference, I discovered photos on my computer of the items I helped deliver to Anthology.
Much to my surprise I discovered among them this film labeled “Palindrome Urform” which appears to be the generator roll, though I still haven’t examined the film off the reel.
Though he never gave me a print of the generator roll for PALINDROME, Hollis did give me unique prints of STATES, AUTUMNAL EQUINOX, and copies of several other of his short films, all of which by now I have preserved from their originals. After helping Marion place his film originals at MoMA, she gifted me some of her own work and more of Hollis’s, including this photograph of her son Will catching a frog, a sister image to Hollis’s one-minute film Straits of Magellan: Pan 699.
Marion also gave me an edition of the xerox series By Any Other Name, and she gave me this short piece of film, which contains all 24 frames of Hollis’s film LESS, a remnant from his assembling the film’s original, now archived at MoMA and from which I recently did a preservation for Anthology Film Archives. Marion included in the envelope with the film strip this quote from Bruce Jenkins.
“Near the end of 1973, Frampton realized that he had not finished a single film over the course of a year. He promptly conceived and executed Less, a doubly punning work in which a minimalist Frampton generates a twenty-four frame (one second) loop of the incrementally blacking out of a nude image by photographer Les Krims.” — Bruce Jenkins, 2009
In his book The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Bruce Jenkins includes Hollis’s introduction to Les Krim’s 1975 Fictcryptokrimsographology, a book of altered Polaroid SX-70 photographs. In his introduction, Frampton muses on the simultaneous release of Krim’s book and, elsewhere, a collection of anonymous photographs from the body of evidence related to Jack the Ripper. Of course, Frampton’s erasure of Krim’s image makes obvious reference to similar acts of defacement by Duchamp and Rauschenberg, and I can imagine that Hollis would have happily seen himself as a member of this rogues’ gallery.
In preparing to introduce the film at MoMA a few weeks ago, I realized I had never seen the Krims photograph that Frampton alters in LESS other than in the film itself, and wondered if it might be in the Krims book Hollis introduced. So I contacted Bruce, and he looked at his copy of the Krims book and determined that it is not included in the book. So I still don’t know. Let me know after you’ve watched it 24 times in the next minute if you recognize the Krims photo.
Bruce also published in his book Hollis’s ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, a portfolio of 20 photographs and accompanying text that relate, among other things, to the photograph as memento mori. In the text for Image XII, titled MOURNING DOVE (Zenaidura macroura), Hollis writes that the specimen was found by me during the demolition of a wall in the Town of Eaton, New York, in July 1975. And indeed, this is when I was helping renovate their farmhouse. It was Anne Braimaier, having written extensively about this work, who a few years ago pointed out my citation in the text, leading me to speculate that Frampton had made an obscure reference not only to the 1895 Lumière film Démolition d’un mur but also to my own 1973 film Demolition of a Wall, derived from Lumière’s.
My film Demolition of a Wall takes six frames of the falling wall from the Lumière film and reorders these six frames successively in all 720 possible permutations. That Hollis was aware of my film is confirmed by a letter he wrote to me in 1975 asking for a copy of my shooting score. He wrote: “Have you by any chance, among the leftovers from DEMOLITION OF A WALL, a written-out set of permutations on the numbers 1–6, taken 6 at a time? Such permutations would save me a bunch of hours, in any form: letters, numbers, apples, beets, carrots, dates, eggplant, fennel…”
Hollis would have been pleased to see us lost in the maze of permutations he left for us through his life, his artwork, and his writing. I am looking forward to being guided through some of the passages of this maze during this symposium over the next few days. But as we advance, let’s not forget that Hollis Frampton was in dialogue with friends and peers, was flawed like all of us, could be brilliant at times, insecure at others, funny and fun but was also warm and caring. He was in the mix.
Bill Brand