On March 8, 2012, Hollis Frampton went viral. The Criterion Collection, in preparation for the release of a long-anticipated Frampton box set, posted a fragment from his 1968 film Surface Tension on Facebook; the clip was picked up by the New York Times blog ‘City Room,’ and from there it spread. For a second, Frampton was everywhere. The Times began their post: “Hollis Frampton would find this an unforgivably crass thing to say, but the video above provides an amazing snapshot of New York City in 1968.” Experiencing the film historically was apparently not Frampton’s intention. Cybernauts agreed the film was fascinating, but for reasons almost certainly unrelated to the filmmaker’s goals. This was a case of the reception of avant-garde and experimental film reinforcing the notion that no one, let alone commoners without formal training, can understand these works.

Frampton, though, was not only concerned with the materiality of film with regards to shape and texture, but also with materiality in terms of film being an historical artifact. To watch Surface Tension is to be fascinated by the images of New York, and illegitimizing that point of entry means that a facetious art-for-art’s-sake conception of Frampton’s work has foreclosed a more complete experience and understanding of the film. The implication is that no work of art this advanced would dare concede to content. This sanitation of art makes it safe, clean, and formal. For those pieces that tread into the politics of form, nothing can be more dangerous than rewiring form as a concern exclusive to the work’s internal space. Surface Tensionn scrutinizes the formal, material, and ontological differences between still photographs and photographs that approximate motion; the result is an atlas of photography that takes the representation of history as its starting point. For the film to appear to an online audience as a record of its own time is very much the point.

The Criterion set — which is being released today — serves well as an introduction to Frampton for a wider audience and a greatest hits for those familiar with his films. Seven early films, including the behemoth Zorns Lemma, are present, along with 3 out of the 7 films in Frampton’s Hapax Legomena series, and a little less than 2 hours of what exists from his Magellan film cycle. As a whole, the discs provide a useful overview of Frampton’s trajectory as a filmmaker. The early films serve as a prelude to the rigor of Zorns Lemma and the later Hapax and Magellan projects.

The earliest film in the collection, Manual of Arms, from 1966, introduces some essential elements of Frampton’s filmmaking, most notably the idea that film itself can function as a paradigm for a variety of histories. The film is silent and shows a group of Frampton associates, including painter and filmmaker Joyce Weiland and sculptor Carl Andre, interacting with the camera in dramatic black and white. The concept of the manual, inscribed in the film’s title, illuminates the cataloguing function of a film Frampton described as a “drill for the camera.” In 1969’s Lemon, a piece of the eponymous fruit becomes the surface of distilled cinematic form while also taking on playful astronomical associations. Another film from 1969, Carrots & Peas, serves as a primer for Frampton’s later encyclopedic aesthetic. In it, a dish of carrots and peas journeys through a variety of art-historical styles, at once elevating it into artistic context while cataloging the varieties of stylistic representation.

With Zorns Lemma (1970) Frampton dove completely into the long-form works that would preoccupy the rest of his career. The hour-long epic is divided into three segments. The first section is set to a reading from an early American child’s grammar book called the Bay State Primer and is followed by a middle section composed of still-shots of signs forming a modified 24-letter alphabet. As the cycle continues, the signs are replaced by non-linguistic moving-images until the alphabet is totally reimagined. Finally, a long shot of a man, woman, and dog walking through the show with a narration from an 11th century tract by the philosopher and bishop Robert Grosseteste. The film uses logical structures and mathematical precision to wrest language from its verbal or written state and reinscribe it as a filmic functor. Zorns Lemma is an epic that helped define the critical concept of “structural film.” According to P. Adams Sitney, who coined the term in an influential 1969 essay, structural filmmakers were more interested in the shape and form of their films than content, emerging in the late 60s and early 70s after and partly in reaction to the poetic subjectivity that dominated experimental film in the preceding decades. Partly due to the fame and success of Zorns Lemma, Frampton is considered an archetypal structural filmmaker within the codified history of American experimental film. But today the term seems diminishing for the filmmakers — like Frampton — that it has come to define.

From the seven-part Hapax Legomena, only the most famous entries — (nostalgia), Critical Mass, and Poetic Justice — are present here, fragmenting Frampton’s only completed film series. Travelling Matte, which Frampton called “the pivot point” of Hapax Legomenaa, is noticeably absent. This incompleteness only adds to the symmetry of the collection. Frampton’s enormous, unfinished Magellan project is present here in its spectral form. Magellan can never be seen: not enough of the film exists to reconstruct the viewing experience Frampton intended. As he continued working on the films that make up Magellan, they were further fragmented and dispersed. Winter Solstice, viewable as a complete 33-minute film, would have been chopped up and distributed throughout the 371-day calendar. The Magellan we see today can only be viewed as an assemblage of films, plans, and notes. Magellan requires the assistance of Frampton’s writings to attempt a mental reconstruction of what the work might have been.

The incomplete overview offered by Criterion may be more fitting for Frampton than a totally historicizing retrospective. Magellan was a phenomenological investigation of human consciousness, dually inspired by Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation and the elaborate structure of Stonehenge. Frampton began a poet then moved to photography. From there, he finally settled on film — its mechanical apparatus, historical archive, and social construction — as his favored tool to probe the variances of the mind. The Magellan films have double lives: they serve as both a history of human consciousness historiography of film. Frampton termed this project metahistory: it gave the film artist agency to recast the development of film “as it should have been,” using anything from found-footage fragments to colorful animated transitions. Of the filmic metahistories that comprise Magellan, the most famous and affecting is Gloria!, which Frampton made in 1979 as a tribute to his grandmother. What makes the film so fascinating is that Gloria! places the personal in direct relation to the archival and historical filmic project Frampton envisioned. A mixture of found-footage, text inspired by early computing technology, green leader, and an overwhelming dose of synthesized bagpipes, Gloria! personalizes Frampton’s investigation of the history of cinema’s formal devices.

Frampton would likely have been excited to use the Internet to continue the work of Magellan, just as Surface Tension’s going viral would have probably delighted him. The film’s brief foothold online relates to Frampton’s reimagining of the platform of the distribution of film. In a 1980 interview with Bill Simon that appeared in Millennium Film Journal, he discussed the difficulty of his plans for Magellan within then-current modes of film distribution. Says Frampton: “The scheme of film distribution as we have it — its packaging strategies, its being set apart for a special occasion — cannot in any way be separated from film as we have it. So it is difficult to imagine, first of all, a film which is distributed through a very long period of time and has other stuff, mainly the spectator’s life, embedded in it.” At one point, Frampton envisioned personal media for his personal films. He thought about making limited-edition laserdiscs of certain Magellan films, to be sold at a gallery. The entire 36-hour film cycle, which was never completed, would have required quite the set of laserdiscs. The Internet, and the consumer devices through which it’s accessed, allows for the flexible distribution of a film that can be revisited.

Today, the ability to create metahistories histories out of archival material is accomplished by hitting reblog. In this context, Frampton’s thinking is more valuable than ever. Despite predating the Internet’s current form, Frampton’s work seems made for it. In this light, the current Criterion DVD of Frampton’s films could be seen as an intermediary step in a longer process of somehow continuing Frampton’s project, which has not lessened in relevance since he first imagined it 40 years ago.

Better Than a Poke in the Eye With a Sharp Stick

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