Toni D’ANGELA, Bruce JENKINS, Olga KOBRYN (dir.)
with the assistance of Swann REMBERT
Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller.
Editors’ Introduction: The Lab of Thought
by Bruce JENKINS, Toni D’ANGELA, Olga KOBRYN
“Cinema is a Greek word that means ‘movie.’ The illusion of movement is certainly an accustomed adjunct to the film image, but that illusion rests upon assumption that the rate of change between successive frames may vary only within rather narrow limits. There is nothing in the structural logic of the filmstrip that can justify such an assumption. Therefore we reject it. From now on we will call our art simply: film.” — Hollis Frampton[1]
“Developers. Well, there are probably thousands of them. Ascorbic acid – vitamin C – is a weak reducer. It’s possible to entertain a fantasy of exposing your film at night and developing it the next morning in your orange juice.”— Hollis Frampton[2]
This special issue was born from a series of encounters, undoubtedly shaped by a shared passion for [experimental] cinema, for memory and the love of archives; for the political force of images as acts of resistance — an infinite tribute here to Gilles Deleuze[3] — and for theory itself, understood as a form of writing that takes a position and resists consensus, as Pascal Bonitzer wrote:
“Cinema has nourished itself, from the very beginning — perhaps even before — through theories; its greatest inventors were also theorists (they invented its language […]), and cinema has never been greater, more fertile, more alive than at the time when theories traversed it and confronted one another […][4]”
Or, as Frampton himself wrote, bringing intellectual montage, the machine, and the concept of democracy onto the same plane (a nearly mathematical one):
“As one recalls that the two are mutually congruent [universal natural language & perfect machine], one remembers that Eisenstein was at once a gifted linguist and an artist haunted by the claims of language – and also, by training, an engineer. It seems possible to suggest that he glimpsed, however quickly, a project beyond the intellectual montage: the construction of a machine, very much like film, more efficient than language, that might, entering into direct competition with language, transcend the speed, abstraction, compactness, democracy, ambiguity, power – a project, moreover, whose ultimate promise was the constitution of an external critique of language itself.[5]”
Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller.
There was also the encounter with Bruce Jenkins’s edited volume On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (2009) as well with Michael Zryd’s Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (2023). But before anything else, this project emerged from a human encounter — one grounded in shared passions, intellectual affinities, and friendship between Toni, Bruce, and Olga — later extended to a wider circle of “Framptonians”: André, Anne, Bill, Enrico, Giles, Ken, Mike, and enriched by the invaluable contributions of Clint, Erik, Fern, Jeremy, Katy, Marie, Miriam, Pedro, Rebecca, and Swann.
The conference Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea — Critical Thinking and Metahistory as Acts of Research-Creation[6], held in Paris from February 18 to 20, 2026, at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Centre Pompidou hors les murs) and the University of Chicago Center in Paris, unfolded alongside the preparation of this special issue, which preserves traces of these friendships and of this collective laboratory of thought.
Our sincerest and deepest thanks go to all the authors who contributed to this special issue. We are especially grateful to Swann Rembert for his invaluable editorial assistance and to Enrico Camporesi for his commitment to the organization of the symposium. We also wish to thank all the symposium participants, and we hope that the full range of contributions generated by this event may eventually be published in a printed volume.
Our warmest thanks as well to Will Faller, who generously granted permission to reproduce the documents featured in this issue, and whose friendship, generosity, and unwavering support sustained this project throughout.
We would also like to pay tribute to Marion Faller’s gaze upon Frampton—his intimacy, his strength, and his sensitive presence behind the camera. Frampton’s story is also the story of Marion Faller’s gaze.
Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller.
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As Michael Zryd writes in Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema:
“Frampton belongs to a long tradition in experimental film of the filmmaker as theorist and was well versed in this tradition through his knowledge of figures like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, and Stan Brakhage. He was part of a generation of filmmakers and artists for whom writing was an important supplement to their investigations of the medium, among them Tony Conrad, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, Yvonne Rainer, Lis Rhodes, and Paul Sharits, and later figures like Abigail Child, Bruce Elder, Marjorie Keller, Keith Sanborn, and Hito Steyerl.[7]”
Both practitioner and theorist of cinema, Hollis Frampton maintained a constant dialogue with the history of the medium, its materials, techniques, and forms through his films, projects, and critical writings.
This type of investigation has never been a mere conjunction, a simple connection between the visible and the sayable. Frampton—like Blanchot, or Godard—forces, and stresses the medium (better to say: forcener le subjectile) to disjunct audio and vision. Foucault showed that knowledge is the tussle between words and things. There is a Frampton’s Demon, a matrix of exercises—reminiscent of early cinematic experiments—that provoke interference. Frampton’s devilry challenges linear, or logical connection; it is an intensification capable of reversing the Kulesov effect, thus producing discord between images. Hollis Frampton’s films are a reflection and an expression of what Deleuze calls agencement, the Foucaultian struggle between audio and vision.
For Frampton, practice and theory were inseparable. His unfinished project Magellan (1972–1980) stands as an exemplary illustration of this approach. Today, as Bruce Jenkins writes, Frampton emerges as one of the most prescient thinkers of twentieth-century cinema:
“…one can sense that these writings were destined for a future — the future, in fact, in which we now reside. There is a time-release aspect to the discourse that, while attempting to historically ground the paradigm-shifting practices of his own times, in many ways prefigures those of our current era.[8]”
The collection On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (The MIT Press), edited by Jenkins, opens with the following remark:
“The dozen essays contained in the book [Circles of Confusion], written over as many years, chronicled his concerted efforts to develop an engaged, intellectually resonant, and distinctly modernist form of critical discourse for the fields of photography, film, and video — a discourse for which he sought equivalence not only with critical thinking in literature and the visual arts but, audaciously, in the philosophies of history and science as well.[9]”
Nearly half a century later, Frampton’s critical ambitions frame this wide-ranging set of essays, interviews, dialogues, and reassessments that confirm the continued relevance and agency of his writings, films, and artworks for a new generation of artists and scholars.
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Table of contents
Editors’ Introduction: The Lab of Thought
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Conversations • Collaborations • Confluences
Roundtable Interview
Participants: Anne Breimaier, Ken Eisenstein, André Habib, Bruce Jenkins, Giles Filke, Olga Kobryn, Mike Zryd
Transcription: Swann Rembert and Quentin Lepetitdidier
Editing: Mike Zryd
Curiouser and curiouser: Into the rabbit hole(s) of Hollis Frampton scholarship
Marie Rebecchi — Introduction to Bruce Jenkins
Bruce Jenkins in conversation with Olga Kobryn and Swann Rembert
Encountering Frampton
Anne Breimaier
Interview with Kasper König
Katy Martin
An Interview with Bob Huot about his Friendship with Hollis Frampton
Bill Brand
Hollis Frampton in the Mix
Frampton and Cie
Ken Eisenstein
“Lacing a Terrain”: Hollis Frampton’s Knockout Layouts
André Habib
Epics of Re-use: Hollis Frampton and Early Cinema
Swann Rembert
“JB after HF”: Emprunts, résonances, copie
Metahistories Revisited
Toni D’Angela
Frampton before Zorns: La superficie di tensione tra audio e visione
Pedro Florêncio
Sobre Informacion (1966), de Hollis Frampton
Figures of Style: Film and the Other Arts
Érik Bullot
Figures de style
Giles Filke
Unprepossessing Apostrophes: Joyce, Frampton, and the Spectre of Narrative
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Unfolding a Tesseract: Sculpture, Cinematic Plasticity and Frampton’s Inventive Eye
Film and its Politics
Jeremy Meckler
For a Metahistory of Film Studies: On Hollis Frampton’s Metahistory and the Development of Film Pedagogy at SUNY at Buffalo
Olga Kobryn
The artist-run Film Lab : film and its politics
New Technologies
Clint Enns
Circumnavigating Frampton’s Magellan: Charting a Self-Conscious Cinema
Fern Silva
Critical Mass and the Age of the Prompt
Miriam Ouertani
Le film comme dispositif techno-sémiotique : Hollis Frampton et la genèse computationnelle de l’image en mouvement?
[1] Hollis Frampton, “For Metahistory of Film : Commonplace Notes and Hypothesis,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009, p. 137.
[2] Hollis Frampton, « Processing Parameters » (1976), Millenium Film Journal, n° 56, « Material Practice – From Sprockets to Binaries », Automne 2012, p. 81. Texte traduit en français par Benoit Turquety : Hollis Frampton, « Paramètres de traitement », n° 87, revue 1895, 2019.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, « Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? », in Trafic, n°27, automne, 1998, pp. 133-142.
[4] Pascal Bonitzer, « Qu’est-ce qu’un plan », in Le Champ aveugle. Essai sur le cinéma, 1982. Translation from the French by Olga Kobryn.
[5] Hollis Frampton, « Film in the House of the Word », October 17, summer 1981, p. 63-64.
[6] “Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea: Critical Thinking and Metahistory as Acts of Research-Creation,” international symposium, Centre Pompidou hors les murs–INHA and the University of Chicago Center in Paris, Paris, 19–20 February 2026, organized by Enrico Camporesi (Centre Pompidou), André Habib (Université de Montréal), Olga Kobryn (Université Paris Cité), Marie Rebecchi (Aix-Marseille Université), Swann Rembert (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Sylvano Santini (UQAM), and Michael Zryd (York University). https://www.inha.fr/agenda/hollis-frampton-colloque-et-projections
[7] Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema, “Introduction”, Columbia University Press, 2023, p. 3.
[8] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, op. cit., p xi.
[9] Ibid., p ix.