"Hollis Frampton is known for the broad and restless intelligence he brought to the films he made, beginning in the early '60s, until his death in 1984. In addition to being an important experimental filmmaker, he was also an accomplished photographer and writer, and in the 1970s made significant contributions to the emerging field of computer science. He is considered one of the pioneers of what has come to be termed structuralism, an influential style of experimental filmmaking that uses the basic elements of cinematic language to create works that investigate film form at the expense of traditional narrative content. Along with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, he is one of the major figures to emerge from the New York avant-garde film community of the 1960s.
Frampton's legendary intellect and equally legendary stubbornness announced themselves early. At the age of 15, he applied on his own volition to the prestigious Phillips Academy and was accepted on a full scholarship. Toward the end of his studies there, he was offered a scholarship to Harvard, only to have it rescinded after he failed to graduate by purposefully failing a required American history class. He spent several years at Western Reserve University in his native Ohio, studying a wide range of subjects but never attaining a degree. In 1958, he moved to New York with the intention of becoming a poet, but he soon abandoned that idea in favor of photography. His move to film in the early '60s coincided with the rise of avant-garde filmmaking in New York, centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers Coop.
It was Frampton's philosophy that film, at its most fundamental, consists of a series of images that have to be arranged in some way. He saw this as a philosophical problem and believed that arranging images into a narrative was only one of many possible solutions. Instead, he often based the structures of his films on mathematical and scientific concepts. Prince Ruperts Drops takes its title from an object used in scientific instruction. The title and structure of Zorns Lemma come from "Zorn's lemma," a controversial mathematical concept. Frampton was astonishingly well-read, not only in mathematics and science, but in philosophy and literature as well. He was a great admirer of modernist writers Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and his films reflect a breaking down of film language similar to the revolutionary ways Stein and Joyce reconfigured fictional prose. Like Joyce, Frampton moved from shorter works to much longer ones. After making mostly short films in the '60s, he spent several years on the seven-part Hapax Legomena (which includes his most famous film (nostalgia)), then spent the last decade of his life working on Magellan, a 36-hour film meant to be seen at specific intervals over the course of 371 days, which was left unfinished at the time of his death."
- Tom Vick, All Movie Guide
"Hollis Frampton was a compelling raconteur: speech was another of his art forms. His insights and even his casual meanderings were immensely informative, as well as entertaining. Some of the tales (related repeatedly, as they were, from memory) perhaps lean toward the apocryphal; they are telling nonetheless."
"Hollis Frampton was a compelling raconteur: speech was another of his art forms. His insights and even his casual meanderings were immensely informative, as well as entertaining. Some of the tales (related repeatedly, as they were, from memory) perhaps lean toward the apocryphal; they are telling nonetheless."
- Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations
"Polymath of enormous cultural range and erudition, Hollis Frampton pursued both the analytic principles of modernist reflexivity and the synthesis from them of the encyclopedic meta-text of the kind that haunted his masters, Ezra Pound and Flaubert."
"Polymath of enormous cultural range and erudition, Hollis Frampton pursued both the analytic principles of modernist reflexivity and the synthesis from them of the encyclopedic meta-text of the kind that haunted his masters, Ezra Pound and Flaubert."
– David James, Allegories of Cinema
Hollis Frampton on Hollis Frampton:
"Hollis Frampton was born in Ohio, United States, on March 11, 1936, towards the end of the Machine Age. Educated (that is, programmed: taught table manners, the use of the semicolon, and so forth) in Ohio and Massachusetts. The process resulted in satisfaction for no one. Studied (sat around on the lawn at St. Elizabeths) with Ezra Pound, 1957-58. That study is far from concluded. Moved to New York in March, 1958, lived and worked there more than a decade. People I met there composed the faculty of a phantasmal 'graduate school'. Began to make still photographs at the end of 1958. Nothing much came of it. First fumblings with cinema began in the Fall of 1962; the first films I will publicly admit to making came in early 1966. Worked, for years, as a film laboratory technician. More recently, Hunter College and the Cooper Union have been hospitable. Moved to Eaton, New York in mid-1970, where I now live (a process enriched and presumably, prolonged, by the location) and work...
In the case of painting, I believe that one reason I stayed with still photography as long as I did was an attempt, fairly successful I think, to rid myself of the succubus of painting. Painting has for a long time been sitting on the back of everyone's neck like a crept into territories outside its own proper domain. I have seen, in the last year or so, films which I have come to realize are built largely around what I take to be painterly concerns and I feel that those films are very foreign to my feeling and my purpose. As for sculpture, I think a lot of my early convictions about sculpture, in a concrete sense, have affected my handling of film as a physical material. My experience of sculpture has had a lot to do with my relative willingness to take up film in hand as a physical material and work with it. Without it, I might have been tempted to more literary ways of using film, or more abstract ways of using film."
Stan Brakhage on Hollis Frampton & Photography:
"Hollis Frampton centers his consideration (always singularly) upon concept. It is a direction-of-endeavor that should have evolved supremely within the last hundred year's development of still photography. Something we might call snap cinch retarded this logical blessing -ie that photographic pictures have been taken (as an overwhelming assumption) for the purpose of prompting memory of fixing it rather than, even, as an emblematic representation of memory process. Still photography remains, as a field, crutch to thought-addendum. There are, of course, the exceptional stills we call Art; but these do almost certainly center their occasions upon a sensuosity which we might refer to as overtures to or overtones of concept. In short, the Art of still photography sits, for the most part, in a rather normal Romantic trap. The medium itself was almost perfectly designed to approximate the split-second instances of arrived at thought - Eureka! etc. etc.; but this designation in the hands of lazy humans was made way-station, an endless series of waiting-stations, along a line of wishful thinking. Perhaps it was the over-riding 19th century belief in Progress which did thus retard the assumptive values of the field of still photography. The artists did, as always, escape the medium and its box of limited expectations; but they did sacrifice some of snap's most immediate possibilities in their abounding tonal considerations and clims up gray scales, etc. Hollis Frampton was never inclined, in this fashion, to the open end of Romanticism. His temperament must always have demanded something more like a movable box. He was never surely temperamentally inclined to prop himself with pictures while waiting for a train-of-thought. Concept was certainly too huge a consideration for Hollis Frampton to think of it. Concept must always have been, for him, akin to instantaneous revelation of the conceivable, including the process of arriving at such an instant. Mathematics and poetry did surely fascinate him because the assumptive life of both these fields in the 20th century is that they be emblematic of concept (in the first place) and that at worst the be sign-posts directing one to the event of concept in both time and space. Action painting was a natural for his admiration because it primarily demonstrated frozen instants of momentum along a line of possibilities. The action painters did not often pretend to concept. Hollis had to exhaust the definite pretensions of still photography for himself."
Hollis Frampton on Hollis Frampton:
"Hollis Frampton was born in Ohio, United States, on March 11, 1936, towards the end of the Machine Age. Educated (that is, programmed: taught table manners, the use of the semicolon, and so forth) in Ohio and Massachusetts. The process resulted in satisfaction for no one. Studied (sat around on the lawn at St. Elizabeths) with Ezra Pound, 1957-58. That study is far from concluded. Moved to New York in March, 1958, lived and worked there more than a decade. People I met there composed the faculty of a phantasmal 'graduate school'. Began to make still photographs at the end of 1958. Nothing much came of it. First fumblings with cinema began in the Fall of 1962; the first films I will publicly admit to making came in early 1966. Worked, for years, as a film laboratory technician. More recently, Hunter College and the Cooper Union have been hospitable. Moved to Eaton, New York in mid-1970, where I now live (a process enriched and presumably, prolonged, by the location) and work...
In the case of painting, I believe that one reason I stayed with still photography as long as I did was an attempt, fairly successful I think, to rid myself of the succubus of painting. Painting has for a long time been sitting on the back of everyone's neck like a crept into territories outside its own proper domain. I have seen, in the last year or so, films which I have come to realize are built largely around what I take to be painterly concerns and I feel that those films are very foreign to my feeling and my purpose. As for sculpture, I think a lot of my early convictions about sculpture, in a concrete sense, have affected my handling of film as a physical material. My experience of sculpture has had a lot to do with my relative willingness to take up film in hand as a physical material and work with it. Without it, I might have been tempted to more literary ways of using film, or more abstract ways of using film."
Stan Brakhage on Hollis Frampton & Photography:
"Hollis Frampton centers his consideration (always singularly) upon concept. It is a direction-of-endeavor that should have evolved supremely within the last hundred year's development of still photography. Something we might call snap cinch retarded this logical blessing -ie that photographic pictures have been taken (as an overwhelming assumption) for the purpose of prompting memory of fixing it rather than, even, as an emblematic representation of memory process. Still photography remains, as a field, crutch to thought-addendum. There are, of course, the exceptional stills we call Art; but these do almost certainly center their occasions upon a sensuosity which we might refer to as overtures to or overtones of concept. In short, the Art of still photography sits, for the most part, in a rather normal Romantic trap. The medium itself was almost perfectly designed to approximate the split-second instances of arrived at thought - Eureka! etc. etc.; but this designation in the hands of lazy humans was made way-station, an endless series of waiting-stations, along a line of wishful thinking. Perhaps it was the over-riding 19th century belief in Progress which did thus retard the assumptive values of the field of still photography. The artists did, as always, escape the medium and its box of limited expectations; but they did sacrifice some of snap's most immediate possibilities in their abounding tonal considerations and clims up gray scales, etc. Hollis Frampton was never inclined, in this fashion, to the open end of Romanticism. His temperament must always have demanded something more like a movable box. He was never surely temperamentally inclined to prop himself with pictures while waiting for a train-of-thought. Concept was certainly too huge a consideration for Hollis Frampton to think of it. Concept must always have been, for him, akin to instantaneous revelation of the conceivable, including the process of arriving at such an instant. Mathematics and poetry did surely fascinate him because the assumptive life of both these fields in the 20th century is that they be emblematic of concept (in the first place) and that at worst the be sign-posts directing one to the event of concept in both time and space. Action painting was a natural for his admiration because it primarily demonstrated frozen instants of momentum along a line of possibilities. The action painters did not often pretend to concept. Hollis had to exhaust the definite pretensions of still photography for himself."
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