Hollis Frampton

A rhythmically edited alphabet composed of street and shop signs shot in New York City and other elements is gradually replaced by repeated seemingly abstract shots in this influential structuralist film.

An intimate, autobiographical, even humorous discourse about memories and their unrepresentative qualities (Mitternachtskino.de)

The themes of sexuality and infidelity are "projected" in narrative sequence as a script with the voice revealing the story (sfcinematheque.org)

An eight minute reflection on the use of light as an art, focusing entirely on a lemon.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. (KG)

A couple's argument reaches "critical mass", as Hollis Frampton's film plays with the audience's expectations of space, time, and synchronicity.

Homage to the physicist James Clerk-Maxwell, father of thermo-dynamics and analytic color theory. Contains sequences of a man exercising intercut with color images of the sea.

The film has three parts: a comic static shot emphasizing the passage of time; a fast motion tour through a city with fractured German commentary; and a slow seascape with fish floating midscreen. In this last section phrases translated from the German commentary are printed over the image. (http://hollisframpton.org.uk/bio.htm)

"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) and 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." (Hollis Frampton)

Filmed in a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, MN... Frampton utilizes a shooting strategy that flattens and pictorializes a palpable space of action that includes not only cattle (now seen hanging from huge meathooks), but even on occasion, figures. The abattoir is seen in the fleeting movements of Frampton's hand-held camera. The shots generally begin and end with swift panning movements which effectively flatten and abstract the objects of this work environment... (Bruce Jenkins)

"The menacing latin palindrome 'In Girvm Imvs Nocte Et Consvmimvr Igni' (By night we go (down) into a gyre/and we are consumed by fire) serves as epigraph to this animated film. Anima is imparted to 12 variations on each of 40 congruent phrases, metamorphosed from the chemically mutilated flesh of color film itself." (Hollis Frampton)

Courtly dances with friends and lovers, in the form of a 14 part drill for the camera, incorporating physiognomic & locomotor evidence related to the lens by 13 artists and an historian. (Hollis Frampton)

An experimental short film by Hollis Frampton

An experimental short film focusing on...carrots and peas.

In The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I, Frampton crosscuts against three radically different progressions of story and/or image (a bride, with or without the groom, on a park bridge, posing for the wedding photographer; a red dot exploding from a white background; a primitive silent comedy where a man surreptitiously removes a woman's skirt), less to tell a story than to build, in the Eisenstein manner, meaning through discordant juxtapositions. (slantmagazine.com)

Flashing alternating images of clouds, shown with a slow camera pan.

One minute of a threaded bead swinging back and forth, slowing down as the film progresses.

A naked lady performs various simple movements, while the film is played back in a slightly altered tempo.

Using contrasting red and green tints, the film examines death with a sequence of images of severed skulls and body parts in various states of decay.

Vertical streams of reflected light swaying across the screen, ocassionally merging and separating.

Sped up first person view of a quick jaunt through a corn field.

Slow motion fluttering images of 3 differently coloured sheets of paper tacked to a wall.

Man severs a cow head as a pool of blood forms beside it.

Camera pans back and forth rapidly on a flower garden at various angles.

Child dangling a frog from a fishing hook.

Phantom cars drive by on a busy street.

A series of statements, music, a green screen and old footage of people dancing, edited together with a unique sense of order.

After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard... and consecutive matters. -- Hollis Frampton

Geometric animation made entirely by sculptural methods: cutting, punching, welding colored leader. HETERODYNE is related to some of my other work as RNA to a protein or polypeptide. It was made in abject (if blissful) ignorance of Paul Sharits' early work. (Hollis Frampton)

Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of '67. We were staying at a friend's house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other - and we did. (Joyce Wieland)

Hollis Frampton's Snowblind is an homage to Michael Snow's environmental installation consisting of metal grated fences arranged in a gallery with a glaringly bright light situated in the center (viewers can walk in and around the fences). (smfafilm)

No, not the United etc. but the conditions, forms in which things exist. Somewhat abstracted, a solid, a liquid and a gas: salt, milk and smoke: falling, pouring and rising are the stars of this classical film. Sheets, streaks and wisps, the protagonists are all white (light). The background, zero place, is black (no light). (Karagarga)

Near the end of 1973, Frampton realized that he had not finished a single film over the course of a year. He promptly conceived and executed LESS, a doubly punning work in which a minimalist Frampton generates a twenty-four frame (one-second) loop of the incremental blacking out of a nude image by photographer Les Krims. (Bruce Jenkins)

A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a roomful of cadavers. (Karagarga)

Two repetitive, banal rhythmic acts - as it were from the observe and reverse of a phenakistiscope disk - factored and expanded into a cinema filmstrip. Note: Prince Ruperts Drops are not a confection or a nose candy, but a physical demonstration of extreme internal stresses in equilibrium. (Karagarga)

Shot at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works in Pittsburgh,...WINTER SOLSTICE is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal--all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. (Filmmaker's Cooperative)

A shot of trees reflected in the water in Kent, Ohio.

A shot of a lone tree in winter.

A shot looking up to the sky from the inside of a silo.

"This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death - the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker's hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future." (Stan Brakhage) (Harvard Film Archive)

"A 'baroque' summary of film's historic internal conflicts, chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space." - HF (Harvard Film Archive)

"The frame itself, which divides what is present to consciousness from what is absolutely elsewhere, is tempered here by the breath, tremor, heartbeat of the perceiver. People this given space, if you will, with images of your own devising." - HF (Harvard Film Archive)

This film is composed of different and relatively commonplace subjects, but each image is a super-imposition ('double exposure') of two similar shots of the same subject, almost in the same position. (MUBI)

An analysis of film's persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema's flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus. (MUBI)

"Hypothetical 'first film' for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonable principles, given: 1) camera; 2) rawstock; 3) a single bare lightbulb. I admit to having made a number of splices." (Hollis Frampton)

"CADENZA I offers up multi-layered references to the primordial, to birth, and to Creation. CADENZA XIV: the laugh track...variously suggests a partially displaced relation to the silent comedy in CADENZA I, a reaction to the blatancy of the sexual symbolism and perhaps even an irreverent reflection on the emotion-laden symbological practice of the poetic tradition of personal filmmaking." (Bruce Jenkins)

"Frampton was especially fascinated by Eisenstein's theory of 'vertical montage,' the notion that filmic structure could be built not only horizontally (sequentially), like a melody, but vertically, like a chord. In the MINDFALL sections of "Magellan" Frampton used desynchronized sound, along with super-imposition and a complex editing structure, to approach the possibility of vertical montage." (Harvey Nosowitz)

"Frampton was especially fascinated by Eisenstein's theory of 'vertical montage,' the notion that filmic structure could be built not only horizontally (sequentially), like a melody, but vertically, like a chord. In the MINDFALL sections of "Magellan" Frampton used desynchronized sound, along with super-imposition and a complex editing structure, to approach the possibility of vertical montage." (Harvey Nosowitz)

A herd of cows at a dairy farm are shown in closeup and long shot, between shots of grass. (imdb)

A series of ellipses out of focus and colored red, purple and orange, overlap each-other and are overshadowed by other objects whilst floating around in a black void.

A sampling of forty-nine fragments from Frampton's catalogue of 'actualities'. He makes reference to his own work and plays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that includes a series of appropriated 'lenses' ( a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of 'screens' a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window). (Letterboxd)

A mix of images from Frampton's "Solariumagelani" trilogy, color toned and superimposed over one another to create a psychedelic effect. (imdb)