This text was not written by a literary studies expert, nor a close reader of James Joyce (1882–1941). The following remarks are intended to be read as from an art historian thinking through the legacies of photography and film. They are, more specifically, thought through a kind of technical language enunciated by Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). In this sense the intention is to approach the figures of speech discussed here as approximating an image, or, as Frampton realised in correspondence to his friend Reno Odlin (1932–2005) on the 11th of March 1964 (Frampton’s 28th birthday), a “constellation.”[1]
I want to revisit here the claim that a certain type of filmmaking—specifically Frampton’s—has been strained through language, to paraphrase his close confidant, Stan Brakhage (1933–2003). It is in the same birthday letter to Odlin that Frampton registers his growing interest in the work of Brakhage, whose Metaphors on Vision had been published as a special edition of Film Culture in the Fall of 1963.[2] It would take nearly a decade until they first began corresponding with one other in late 1971, however. Furthermore, the additional claim that film, in an academic sense, has been strained through literary studies is apposite. Here, I have approached Frampton’s filmmaking and writing through the discourse on images, specifically a history of art based on the recognition of icons, materials, and the somewhat amorphous notion of cultural forms (cf. Henri Focillon).[3]
The relationship between Hollis Frampton and literature is established by the notes to the symposium held in Paris in February 2026, Hollis Frampton: From Form to Idea to Form of Idea. It is the principal Frampton scholar, Bruce Jenkins, who recognised, crucially, that Frampton was “from the first, a writer,” and an obsessive on the question of natural languages. However, this would seem to be against Frampton’s own better judgement. His correspondence with Brakhage throughout the 1970s, now in the archives of the University of Colorado Boulder, reveals just how opposed to writing Frampton was, despite his abilities, and gives a clear sense of why he preferred photography and filmmaking to writing.[4] In fact he saw in them an antagonistic relationship which will be examined below.
Let’s begin with the writing of Joyce, which had such a profound influence on the work of Frampton as a filmmaker and theorist of photography, that it must be understood to be ubiquitous. Here is what Michael Zryd has had to say on the matter:
“Perhaps the closest model for Frampton’s drive toward modernist complexity is the oeuvre of James Joyce, the artist whom Frampton invokes more frequently than any other and whose late work was epic in scope and difficulty.”[5]
There may be a very straightforward answer to why this was or became so fundamental for Frampton. The James Joyce Collection was established at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1950.[6] Joyce’s library, manuscripts, and memorabilia were thereafter assembled at Buffalo by 1968 and it was therefore proximate to the Center for Media Study initiated also at Buffalo by the medieval scholar and pioneer of “mediacy,” Gerald “Gerry” O’Grady (1931–2019) in 1972. O’Grady’s advocacy for teaching film at both college and graduate level also links his earlier work with Beryl Smalley, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis at Oxford.[7] I was lucky to meet with Gerry at Harvard Square while undertaking my graduate work. He was one of the nicest people—amongst a host of nice people!—whom I’ve met on my journey through Frampton’s career. Gerry even followed up by sending me his “Scrapbook Encomium,” an enormous samizdatpublication of Frampton materials he had prepared for “Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton” held at Princeton in 2004, all the way to Caulfield in Australia, for my edification.[8]
Frampton was at the Center for Media Study from 1973, and what became the final decade of his life was spent working as an Associate Professor there alongside experimental filmmakers Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, and the pioneering video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka. Importantly, it was also during this decade that the majority of Frampton’s writing appeared in print. Having launched his career as a published critic and theorist only a few years earlier with the Artforum essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” in 1971 (at the sensible age of 35), Frampton’s published output steadily increases into the 1980s, eventually including the addition of juvenilia in the form of 12 Dialogues 1962–1963, between the artist and prep-school buddy Carl Andre (1935–2024), and Frampton, appearing as a collection of writing edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in 1980.[9] Following his death in 1984, edited collections of his writings began to appear in print and his private correspondences began to be catalogued in archives as far flung as the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Extending from his earlier film, Lemon (1969), through to specific elements in his unfinished film cycle, Magellan (1964–1984), Joyce’s presence imbues Frampton’s formal approach to film with a comic sensibility. Yet film had already influenced Joyce. When he returned to Trieste with his sister Eva, in September 1909, they had discovered twenty-one cinemas in operation (the first, Il Cine Americano, had opened in 1905 just after Joyce had first arrived there with Nora Barnacle). As there were none in Dublin at the time, Joyce then made the decision to locate partners and open the first cinema in Ireland in December 1909. The Volta Electric Theatre was named after the cinema in Budapest that was owned and operated by Joyce’s Triestine partners in the Dublin venture.[10]
I have imagined that these events would have tickled Frampton’s metahistorical mind to no end—although I remain unsure of what he understood, or knew, of the connections between Joyce and the cinema. Given these events have since been well covered in the literature on Joyce, I’ll seek instead to examine the links between Joyce’s cinema-literacy and Frampton’s literate-filmmaking, by paying specific attention to the apostrophe-less examples of Frampton’s film Zorns Lemma (1970), and Joyce’s final book Finnegans Wake (1939).
Zorns Lemma is perhaps Frampton’s best known film, and with this work Frampton effected a shift from photography to ciné-film, evidenced by the transformation of an earlier work, a series of black and white photographs called Word Pictures (1962/3), into what would become Zorns Lemma, a one-hour work in colour which also incorporated sound. Initially, after living for five years in New York, Frampton appears to have exhausted his immediate interest in practicing still photography and turned to the question of montage and the relationships between the film frame rate of 24 frames per second, and language, by positing the 24-letter Latin alphabet (where the letters U/V and I/J are combined) as a “maximal fully ordered” subset for all letters. The title of Zorns Lemma is both a reference to a mathematical axiom of choice that ordered hierarchically the selection of given elements from a set, and is also, amongst other things, a play on words: zorn in German means anger.[11] The first public screening of the film was at the Museum of Modern Art on the 14th of April 1970, it went on to become the first long-form experimental film shown the New York Film Festival in September of that year. Originally titled Work In Progress, Joyce’s 1939 text Finnegans Wake was an important source for Frampton in general, and for his work on the ambitious, 36-hour long Magellan cycle of films that remained unfinished at the time of his death in March 1984. This is especially so because Frampton attributes to that work the characteristic of the loop. Reading the novel from the last line into the first, the “Doublends Jined” as already noted by Brian Henderson in relation to Frampton’s Magellan cycle, allows for the possibility that the narrative has been “cut into,” as Frampton himself put it, rather arbitrarily perhaps by Joyce.[12]
It is “in this sense”—shifting now to Frampton’s early interlocutor, Scott MacDonald, and forgetting Andre, Odlin, and perhaps a few other, private correspondences for the moment—that Magellan, which I have argued inaugurates Frampton’s work on film, rather than being the apotheosis of his work, “offers a challenge to the current state of film accessibility, a challenge based on Frampton’s admiration of epic literature, and particularly for Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.”[13] For Frampton,” MacDonald continues, “the challenge was to extend cinematic horizons so that the pleasures and revelations of cinematic thought could be as flexible, in terms of accessibility, as the experience of reading serious literature.”[14]
I am attempting to position myself here not as Frampton’s last interlocutor, but one who has only more recently engaged with his work—Magellan in particular—but also as someone with a special interest in Frampton’s relationship to art history, apropos his notorious and oft-repeated provocation that: “the whole history of art is no more than a massive footnote to the history of film.”[15] This is especially so, considering that we, as the “janissaries and devotees of Frampton esoterica,” as Federico Windhausen so stoically put it in 2004, are left to reconcile with what Frampton meant by this enigmatic formulation.[16]
Addressing Frampton today, might we consider that it is literature which must be extended, given the spirit of his provocation, if it is to be made as accessible as watching serious film. The challenge here is also serious to the extent that even mildly inaccessible works will now often end up being designated as art: “One problem of complexity is the prospect of illegibility,” Zryd writes, describing Magellan in his recent monograph on Frampton’s work.[17] It is worthwhile turning at this point to the way that Alain Badiou positions Joyce in his short study, The Century (2005), in which he sets out to extract precisely “how the century thought its own thought,” that is, how it became legible.[18] In translating the work, Alberto Toscano elaborates what Joyce symbolises here in his notes to the book:
“In Joyce’s perversely erudite “corruption” of the English language, the young Beckett (in his single extended essay of criticism’, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico… Joyce’, from Disjecta) already discerned something that would end up serving as the counter to his own linguistic strategies of “leastening” and “worsening”: a saturation and corporealization of language, the transformation of the store of universal language into an inexhaustible, quasi-somatic reservoir of affective materials, symbolic allusions, delectable opacities.”[19]
Toscano has hit the nail on the head when he writes that: “for both [Beckett and Joyce] there was no access to a universal language, but only a universalising gesture: the invention of a language bearing a determinate relation to the multiplicity of spoken tongues and the capacity for thought and speech.” This, he states, is an “all-embracing impurification” of language, which is akin to Frampton telling Scott MacDonald that he is interested in the chemical complexity of dirt. For Badiou, when thinking through Joyce, it is “formalization” that is the “great unifying power of all the century’s undertakings.”[20] And if we allow that the current status of this “universalising gesture” is presently trading at an all-time low, we might be forgiven for returning to this interest in “impurification” that seems all but lost to our histories of modernism, especially in the fine arts.
From the archives at Buffalo, Frampton cites Joyce in his 1974 essay for Artforum, “Incisions in History / Segments of Eternity”:
“Question: If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow (say) has he made a work of art?
Answer: The image of a cow made by a man hacking in fury at a block of wood is a human disposition of sensible matter but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter for an aesthetic end. Therefore, it is not a work of art.”
(Paris Notebook, March 28, 1903).
Not long before Joyce made this note to himself, Friedrich Nietszche had argued that it was nothing less than life itself that existed for aesthetic ends.[21] Here we might glimpse the modern dialectic of art as the ultimate dispositor of human life. (Indeed, as Frampton asks, when responding to Joyce seven decades later: “Are children, excrements and lice works of art?”[22])
In 1965, Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983), whose work with Expanding Cinema from the 1930s in New York was more recently included in the Pompidou’s Women in Abstraction show, won the Best Debut at the 18th Cannes Film Festival for her first and only feature film, Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As the first adaptation of Joyce for the screen, Bute’s version was framed by critic Roger Ebert as a “literal illustration” of the “epic night’s journey through the dreams and semi-conscious waking mind of H.C. Earwicker,” in his review from the 9th of May 1968, awarding the film three-and-a-half stars. Apart, perhaps, from the double entendre of Ebert’s use of the word night/knight here, Bute’s work seems not to have figured at all in Frampton’s mind, as someone who rarely if ever wrote about more mainstream films, let alone deemed them particularly worthy of his interest (Will Faller informs me that they did go to see blockbuster releases together, however). In his correspondence with Brakhage, he notes his disgust at being invited to Cannes in 1974.
As cinema proprietor, and as a writer who adapted, for the novel, the earlier cinema of a culturally-specific “wake”, namely, A Wake in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ (1900) directed by Arthur W. Martin for American Mutoscope, and Murphy’s Wake (1903) directed Alf Collins, Joyce becomes a central conduit for the transformation, or the re-invention rather—as Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted in 1945 at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques)—of “real films”. Here is another sentiment that prefigues Frampton’s metahistorian of cinema “inventing a tradition,” in the Metahistory essay for Artforum, first published in September 1971.[23]
Of course, as Colin Gardner and others have more recently pointed out, the formal origins of Finnegans Wake is to be found in the publication of the Irish-American folk ballad in New York in 1864. This link to the United States, and to the origins of the cinema, is also important as a touchpoint here: it is in the Americas that these modern precursors first appear, before Europe. It was between 1924 and 1939 that the Work in Progress became Finnegans Wake, and was remediated by Joyce from lyric to novel. That is, we might consider how the Finnegans (ie. everyone) are commanded to wake. From there we then might be tempted by Frampton in 1970 to continue towards an understanding of how the Zorns (ie. everyone), must lemma. The structure proposed is “analogous to that of the Knight’s Tour in chess,” Frampton suggests, again in the Metahistory essay, written at Frampton’s home in Eaton, New York in June 1971, immediately following the debut screenings of Zorns Lemma.
A lemma being, naturally, a building block, or a foundational theorem for mathematics, or a basic linguistic element (ie. a technical support). From this, Frampton’s method, if we can call it that, sought “axioms” for filmmaking, asking “What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film?” and finding three by 1972. This comes in his short text for the Vancouver Art Gallery, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” in which Frampton names “the frame,” “the plausibility of photographic illusion,” and “narrative.”[24] It is perhaps this last axiom that brings us closest to Joyce (of all the other references within Frampton’s work that could be made), for if we recall that Joyce concerned himself with aesthetic ends (and denying photography the status of art whilst doing it), the expansion of the very possibility of narrative is precisely what motivated the author at the beginning of the cinematic age. It is also worth noting here the fact that P. Adams Sitney, who had annotated Brakhage’s “Metaphors on Vision” (1963) for the Film Culture journal and also written the pivotal text for the period, “Structural Film” for the same journal in 1969, reads this important early text by Frampton as against his contemporaneous work in the series Hapax Legomena (1971–2), essentially seven formal experiments on film.[25]
Frampton explains that “a story is a stable pattern of energy through which an infinity of personages may pass, ourselves included,”[26] and it is by expressing this formulation that the characters of history—for example, Magellan, on one hand, or Caliban on the other—that we can see how it is that the subject remains. This helps to explain why Frampton’s entire oeuvre is centred around biography, I believe. For the structural filmmaker, the spectre of narrative is a very real and constant presence. It is an embodied presence, and thus it is heroic by default.
Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959), Das Zwölftonspiel, Philips LP 6599 333, 1973, 33 1/3 rpm [Image 1].
At the end of his essay, he also gives an image of what the “Polyhedron of the Storyteller” might look like. I’d propose the following image that adorns the cover of “Das Zwölftonspiel” by the Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) (the designer for this Philips release, from 1973, deserved a raise) [Image 1]. Frampton’s words from the previous year seem to will it into being: “let us imagine every myth as a crystalline regular polyhedron, suspended, weightless, in a void, with each of its vertices touching, in perfect geodesic equilibrium, the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere.”[27]
In the Brakhage Archive at Boulder, there is some further evidence of how he received the work which Frampton would further elaborate on from the pentagram (the five-part text) he’d assembled for the Vancouver Art Gallery. Annette Michelson had already noted, by 1985, Frampton’s proximity to Brakhage, and his inheritance of an American avant-garde that begins with Whitman and extends through Brakhage’s thetic filmmaking. “Frampton initiated,” she claimed, “in solitude—and it is this that defines his singular place within this movement—a dialogue with contemporary theory of language and of narrative.”[28]
In an impassioned, eight-page letter that comes before the break that resulted from a public offense taken by Frampton towards Brakhage in 1976, all but ruining their budding camaraderie, Frampton makes the case for his “prose” work as his film style, and opposes it to Brakhage’s “poetic” cinema.
Here is Frampton:
“that you very noticeably tack towards lyric poetry, for instance, and return to it for nourishment,. . . whereas… leaving aside Pound, who can scarcely be said to be a lyrist…I have for many years now veered more and more steadily towards consideration of some kinds of prose…
You so often cite Ohlson [sic], with his “keep moving, citizen”, and close as I have felt to Pound, I suppose I am most nearly with Joyce as he finds a leviathanic encyclopedia in a dull June day. Within which, or within which notion of format least, there is for me the most limitless hope of bringing to perfect equilibrium the most disparate things…”[29]
Again, it is the formal concerns that predominate here. Might Frampton also be thinking of Soviet theorist, Viktor Shklovsky’s “formalist” argument for “estrangement” in Theory of Prose (1925)? It is art that saves us from automatization, and which rescues life from oblivion. For Frampton art meant filmmaking, not writing.
Perhaps the conversation that Michelson recalls in 1985—in which Brakhage proposes that Frampton strains cinema through language—is the very same argument Frampton felt he was put upon by Brakhage—unfairly, publicly, in early 1976. In his correspondence with Brakhage, we can see just how close to correct was Sitney (or Michelson—he gives the same story twice, with different protagonists) predicting that an in-person meeting between Frampton and Brakhage might precipitate some kind of annihilation. If it was, it was in fact a concussion that can now be measured precisely in the size and weight of an apostrophe. “The fundamental operation of filmmaking is called cutting,” Frampton asserted in his earliest text on the matter, in 1965, and perhaps that is the point of the difference: “to put composition on a cutting rather than a modelling basis” was his commencement with the art of photography: both the paragon and fundamentally unrelated to the plastic and graphic arts, he proposes.[30] Prose as cutting, poetry as modeling.
Giles Fielke
Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth, cover of the screenplay for Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1965.
Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970, colour, sound and silent, 16mm, 60mins.
[1] Hollis Frampton letter to Reno Odlin, dated 11 March 1964. The letters were republished in expanded form as “A Young Man’s Book”: Letters From Framp 1958-1968, 8 vols., ed. Reno Odlin (Samizdat, 1996), the letter cited here appears on page eight of that edition. The letters were later republished as Hollis Frampton: Letters, ed. Reno Odlin (Paris: Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, 2002); “Letters from Framp 1958-1968,” edited by Reno Odlin, October 32 (Spring 1985): 25-55.
[2] See Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. and with an introduction by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture, no. 30 (Autumn 1963). Metaphors on Vision was republished in 2017 in an expanded and annotated version by Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry in New York. In his “Introduction to the French Edition,” Sitney notes that ‘in the very last week of 1963, the first copies came from the Film Culture press just in time for the Third International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium.’ Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (New York: Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, 2017), 179.
[3] That is, “a living word in a universal language.” Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, translated by George Kubler, originally published in Paris in 1934 (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 63.
[4] Stan Brakhage collection, COU:228, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, Rare, and Distinctive Collections.
[5] Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 15.
[6] James Joyce Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce.html.
[7] “Obituaries: Gerald “Gerry” O’Grady,” UBNow, 5 June 2019. https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/working/obituaries.host.html/content/shared/university/news/ub-reporter-articles/briefs/2019/06/obit-gerry-ogrady.detail.html.
[8] Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton, Film Conference, 5-6 November 2004. https://www.princeton.edu/~visarts/Conferencemainpage.htm
[9] Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues 1962–1963, photographs by Hollis Frampton, edited and annotated by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Halifax, Nova Scotia: NSCAD, 1980). Today the definitive collection of Frampton’s writing is On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, edited by Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
[10] The venture was short-lived. See the collection of essays first presented at the Volta Cinematograph Centenary Celebration Conference in January 2009 as a part of the Trieste Film Festival: Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema, edited by John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010).
[11] The title of this work lacks a possessive apostrophe and therefore seems to have influenced Frampton’s naming of Zorns Lemma. One extrapolation from this would allow the sense that Zorn is neither an individual nor a lemma understood as a theorem, but rather as a “word or phrase defined in a dictionary or entered in a word list.” That is, Zorns, the term in German means “anger,” pluralised, as in a list.
[12] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) with an introduction Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), 20. Brian Henderson, “Propositions for the exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” October, 32 (Spring 1985): 135.
[13] Scott MacDonald cited in a fragment from an essay, now de-published on Zorns Lemma at HollisFrampton.org.uk, see Colin Gardner, “Ecosophical Chaoids: Towards an ‘Infinite Cinema’ with Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970) and Gloria! (1979),” in Chaoid Cinema: Deleuze and Guattari and the Topological Vector of Silence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 54-66.
[14] MacDonald cited in Gardner, 2021.
[15] Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film,” text delivered at the “Conference on Research and Composition,” State University of New York at Buffalo, October 1975. Published in October 1 (Spring 1976): 104-110. See Frampton, On the Camera Arts, 2009, 154. See Giles Fielke, Rational Fictions: Hollis Frampton’s Magellan and the Atlas of Film, PhD Thesis, The University of Melbourne, 2019, http://hdl.handle.net/11343/227678.
[16] Federico Windhausen, “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 76-95.
[17] Zryd, Navigating the Infinite Cinema, 2023, 16.
[18] Alain Badiou, The Century, translated with a commentary and notes by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 3.
[19] Alberto Toscano, “Translating the century,” in Alain Badiou, The Century, 2007, ix-x. Beckett’s essay, “Dante… Bruno… Vico…Joyce,” was originally published in the transition 16/17 (June 1929).
[20] Badiou, The Century, 2007, 160.
[21] “We may assume of ourselves that we are already images and artistic projections for [the world’s] true creator and have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872, §5.
[22] See Hollis Frampton, “Incisions in History / Segments of Eternity,” in On the Camera Arts, 2009, 43.
[23] “After the technical instrument has been invented, it must be taken up by an artistic will and, as it were, re-invented before one can succeed in making real films.” Maurice Merlou-Ponty, “Film and the New Psychology” (1945), reprinted in Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou: A Critical Reader, ed. Christopher Kul-Want (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 146.
[24] Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” On the Camera Arts, 2007, 143. The essay was originally published in Form and Structure in Recent Film, ed. Dennis Wheeler (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972).
[25] As well as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hapax Legomena is in seven parts, however. That is, a heptagram. See P. Adams Sitney, “Hollis Frampton and the Specter of Narrative,” in Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 98-122.
[26] Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative” (1972), in On the Camera Arts, 2009, 147.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Annette Michelson, “Frampton’s Sieve,” October 32 (Spring 1985): 160.
[29] Hollis Frampton to Stan Brakhage, 22 July 1973. Box 15-16. Norlin Library M350B. Stan Brakhage collection, COU:228, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, Rare, and Distinctive Collections.
[30] Hollis Frampton, “Some Propositions on Photography” (1965), published in On the Camera Arts, 2009, 8.