Hollis Frampton: Incidental Holographer

Although I never met Hollis Frampton, the American film maverick who died of cancer at the age of 48 but left a legacy most 100-year-olds would be proud of, I studied at his feet. And later at his footage. But at the start it was mostly footnotes. While the early-1980's did provide some wonderful growth in the arts: artists' book publishing, performance spaces opening, multi-media forms emerging, the art of film was showing its first stages of decline, largely due to increasing costs, but also with the new interest in portable video, among other causes. So a lot of the great experimental film of earlier decades was not being actively screened. I'm talking Boston. There was Saul Levine at Mass Art showing his personal favorites. There was New York, where almost anything could be seen in the course of a year, but I couldn't live in New York, my birth city. The only way I found to internalize the great works of avant-garde cinema was reading about the films in books by P. Adams Sitney (Film Culture Reader) and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art), among others.

The two filmmakers whose ideas jumped off the pages of those books and bit me the most were Stan Vanderbeek and Hollis Frampton, both visionaries and meta-film activists. Vanderbeek, after a period of playful animation and collage films, turned to ideas for presentation including his Cinedome, which envisioned a geodesic sphere intended for projections; the interior was an ocular theater. Vanderbeek went so far as to imagine the cyber-future where films could be beamed in from elsewhere on the globe, collaged or mixed with any manner of other projected film on the spot. It was a beautiful vision, one which inspired a number of my own attempts at multi-projector harmony.

Frampton was a more traditional maker, cutting his films to A and B roll perfection and trying to wrestle every bit of mind muscle he could from one standard 16mm projector, just as he had gathered the images while gripping the camera. Singlehandedly. Frampton's major opus, Magellan, has every bit the same spherical intelligence as Vanderbeek's Cinedome. Magellan imagined a unique film to be projected for each day of the calendar year, effectively encircling the viewer in a humongous film loop and rendering a 3-dimensional clarity of vision. Frampton called it "circumambulating the hemispheres", and my own early film practice was largely inspired by the idea of capturing a place by walking a circle through it with the camera ON. While Frampton may not have described his work as seeking 3-dimensionality, I have been struck for the 28 years since his death at the proximity with which his ideas rub up against theories of poly-dimensionality. While the film image may not pop off the screen in a Frampton film, the thought-activity in response to his films must be considered something akin to mental holography. The work is just that active.

Frampton was a poet, linguist, photographer and dabbler in several arts--painting was what he seemed to admire most--and it was quite a natural move for him to abandon much of the rest once the film bug had bit him. We know that Frampton's earliest staging of Magellan was an art piece where he hung some pieces of plaster (?) in the studio and made a kind of walk-through sculpture. There are also the word-picture series he worked through in photographs and film: Ways to Purity, which collected odd signage fragments from lower Manhattan and, of course, Zorn's Lemma, the 1970 film which clearly established Frampton's genius. Not only does Zorn collect a movie version of the catalog of word signs seen in Purity, but his radical re-imagining of the alphabet begins with each letter hammered out of aluminum foil on a typewriter. The graphic impact of this alphabet, projected with a nice 250 watt bulb, cannot be overstated. The letters are downright cubic. I don't know if he was an admirer of Kubrick, but perhaps vice versa. The two filmmakers form a very small subset of intelligencia. The unrolling of Frampton's New Alphabet across the middle half of Zorn's Lemma is one of the great passages of film time. As each aluminum foil letter is replaced by a moving film image, the sensation becomes akin to the opening of windows. And it's not a house of windows, but the viewer's head and mind, the language centers, which are opening, and each letter becomes a flowing form much as ideas take form and move in the mind. If this isn't something close to holography then I'm hallucinating. It may be faux holography or something akin to anaglyphs, the red and green windows of early 3D movie glasses. Frampton turned to the motif of Red and Green himself; it is a major motif in Magellan.

Another early film worth mentioning here, which sometimes defies comment by its brilliance, is Palindrome, from 1969. The film presents a short strip of abstract shapes and forms repeated in a series of variations, positive, negative and other effects, regularly broken up by an equal length (24 frames?) of black or silence. (It is a "silent" film.) However, the great gift of palindrome is the music that this silent "image track" plays in your head. Frampton sets up a regular rhythm with the image turning on and off as it runs through, and then the subset of tinier variations happening within the image set plays another rhythmic dance which becomes music in the head. I would again argue in favor of considering this film an example of extramural holography. Frampton pushes the silent medium into the realm of sound as it is imagined in the mind by vision. The film explores a part of the brain that is usually dormant, a kind of inter-ear-eye canal.

And then there's Magellan. Frampton's final film project contains too many parts and pieces to fully evaluate here, but several of the films clearly suggest and create 3-dimensional states of mind, an effect Stan Brakhage might have called hypnagogic.

Mindfall is a film shot in Puerto Rico and contains beautiful and lush tropical footage, although Frampton subverts the elegance of his host island with disconcerting sound effects and he super-imposes two images throughout its entire half-hour length. Using A and B roll as a clever way to double-expose, Frampton provides the materials of stereo-vision without resorting to a 2-camera-2-projector system. He proposes that there is a cinema multi-tasking mind, which should be able to view and decipher more than one image stream at once. So, if two separate strands of thought or action coincide, maybe like a talented drummer playing one rhythm with his right hand and another with his left (and another with his feet!?), is that something one could tag as approaching holographic? (Stereo vision being a multi-task of parallel eyes.)

Winter Solstice is in some ways the crowning achievement of Frampton and Magellan. Shot in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh, the camera captures metals in various states of vulcanic transformation: liquid, solid, and most remarkably as flying patterns of showering sparks. This is magma. Usually a 30 minute experimental film on one subject is a tedious affair, but here is an example of time melting under the heat of such spectacular capture. Dali is jealous of this film. The cascades of burning ore fragments create patterns similar to some created by Bill Brand in the optical printer using rows of repeating and tumbling images. There is a constantly new feeling to the framed image. The camera shutter works in time with the shower of metal flowers to unbelievable effect. It seems re-animated. Vulcan lives. A Frankenstein effect of the material coming alive again under each projection. Again, an argument for holography.

Frampton pursued a goal of meta-film creation and, along the way, happened upon some radical techniques which elevated his bibliotic project to the level of euphoric discourse. He wanted to catalog a series of films, and shots within the films, that represented the entirety of human education and experience. Frampton and Magellan, by following the arc of the calendar, by walking a set path of stones through time, erected a World's Fair Globe to film consciousness, a bubble which collapses when it's not perceived through the right lenses. Circles of confusion abound.

Criterion published a dvd collection of Frampton films in 2012.