This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features the voice of artist Michael Snow. Frampton would place a tape deck at the front of a room, press play, and walk to the back to run a 16mm projector. Presented here is the audio portion of the piece,...
"...Frampton travels to the purported birthplace of the Eisensteinian model of cinema, the fairground, with its 'montage of attractions'...ambulating wide-angled portrait of the fair, its throng of participants, its array of attractions (Belgian Waffles, Walk Away Sundaes, Flying Bobs, the...
"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." - HF
By stripping the sound from a pre-existing instructional film, Frampton conjures, with an economy of means, the everyday movements then being explored by the Judson Dance Theater. "I bought this film in a Canal Street junk shop for $1.00 and found myself in complete agreement with it. The...
The understandable fascination with Frampton's intellect can blind one to the frequent down-home dimension of his imagery. Here, in a most rigorously formal, even mathematical procession, we see frame clusters of light blue sky, green grass, and red (filter red) leaves; then frame clusters of the...
The Red Gate: Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part I
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"In the final format for MAGELLAN, Frampton had planned to disassemble these two films into twenty-four 'encounters with death' that were to be shown in five-minute segments twice a month. In their present state, seen together and roughly the length of an average feature film, the two parts of...
Hollis Frampton alludes to origins and creation as he cuts between a garden featuring a bride and groom and an 1902 film entitled "A Little Piece of String."
"In PUBLIC DOMAIN...(Frampton) recapitulates cinema's infancy in a series of direct quotes from such notable primitive works as RECORD OF A SNEEZE (FRED OTT'S SNEEZE) and SANDOW FLEXING HIS MUSCLES, two 1894 Edison kinetoscopic shorts, as well as literal pieces of cinematic juvenilia (child wading...
While working at a photo lab, Frampton found that the waste at both ends of the rolls of processed film—where chemicals worked on the emulsion through clips used to attach the film to the machine—produced images far too interesting to be discarded. For Palindrome, Frampton selected images...
A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate...
"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...
