Hollis Frampton

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As its name suggests, Nostalgia is autobiographical. Its maker, HOLLIS FRAMPTON, is recognised as one of the leading figures of the New American Cinema, a contemporary of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits and George Landow. This film, made in 1971 and itself part of a larger work called Hapax Legomena relates to a period between 1958 and 1966- before Frampton was known as a film-maker and was working mainly in still photography. Twelve photographs are presented as ‘documents’ of that period. A number are of friends in the New York art world, others are images that were of aesthetic interest. The tone throughout is dry and ironic.Read More »

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“Wavelength” was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May, 1967. (The Film-Makers’ Cooperative)

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I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing.Read More »

Experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton shoots a series of portrait shots of each of his fourteen friends, each with half of their face in shadow and each with a different expression. After all fourteen introductions have been made, Frampton then presents a series of brief shots in which each friend shown previously performs an everyday activity for the camera, from smoking to drinking to sitting. The different angles and the varied lighting in each of these lightning-quick shots are used to create a mysterious and sinister atmosphere.Read More »

An abstract short consisting of a series of quick shots, in which hands are shown doing a variety of things: peeling an egg, holding a cup, etc. Tinted pink, these shots are consistently interrupted by other black and white shots of other images.Read More »

“Zorn’s Lemma stands for – Every non-empty partially ordered set in which every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound contains at least one maximal element.

It is named after the mathematician Max Zorn.

The terms are defined as follows. Suppose (P,≤) is the partially ordered set. A subset T is totally ordered if for any s, t ∈ T we have either s ≤ t or t ≤ s. Such a set T has an upper bound u ∈ P if t ≤ u for all t ∈ T. Note that u is an element of P but need not be an element of T. A maximal element of P is an element m ∈ P such that the only element x ∈ P with m ≥ x is x = m itself.Read More »

A naked woman.Read More »

Frampton on Ordinary Matter wrote:
A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)…visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood. The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language.Read More »

“Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard’s Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).

A major figure in the American experimental film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and a widely published theorist, Hollis Frampton made such acclaimed and influential films as Zorns Lemma, the Hapax Legomena series, and the unfinished Magellan. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.The journal October twice devoted whole issues to Frampton, and the entire body of his work is preserved in the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Frampton taught at Cooper Union, Hunter College, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In January 1977, Hollis Frampton appeared on Screening Room to discuss his work and screen Lemon, Pas De Trois, excerpts from Maxwell’s Demon, Surface Tension and Critical Mass, and footage from what ultimately became Magellan.” – DER websiteRead More »