Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema(Film and Culture Series)

Hollis Frampton was an American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist who bridged the experimental film and contemporary art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for avant-garde films including Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), Frampton spent his later years working on the unfinished epic Magellan, a monumental cycle that used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the world to rethink the natures and meanings of history, modernity, and cinema. Frampton's career was cut short by cancer at age 48, with his vast ambitions for the project left incomplete.

This book is a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of this remarkable figure's work in its totality, from Frampton's earliest films through Magellan. Michael Zryd explores the connections linking Frampton's art and thought to other media forms, histories, and cultural frameworks. He foregrounds Frampton's notion of the "infinite cinema," which redefined the parameters of the medium to encompass all forms of moving image and sound media across the past and future of cinematic possibility. Zryd analyzes Frampton's ambivalent relationship with modernism and the Enlightenment, showing how the artist navigated between attraction to radical artistic investigation and awareness of this tradition's implication in colonialism and other oppressive power structures. Shedding new light on Frampton's project of exploring and critiquing how cinema attempts to capture and understand the world, this book also considers his significance for contemporary art.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From the Chemistry of Cobalt to the Chemistry of Dirt
1. A Brief Introduction to Frampton’s Films before Magellan
2. An Introduction to Magellan
3. Metahistory and the Archive: “Historical Necessity” and Tradition
4. Encyclopedism, the Universe, and Everything
5. Archeology: Millennial Allegories of Art, Representation, and Politics in the Camera Arts
6. The Constellation
Conclusion: Virtual Future Metahistory
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Michael Zryd is associate professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. He is coauthor of Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (2021).

Review :
At long last, we have an authoritative guide to the work of one of experimental film’s most intriguing and polymathic figures. Through his meticulous study of Hollis Frampton’s unfinished Magellan project, Michael Zryd illuminates the filmmaker’s oeuvre as a whole, shedding light on the relationship among cinema, modernism, and epistemology. Hollis Frampton was a rigorous and complex individual, as well as a passionate and generous filmmaker/teacher. As a “Meta-Historian” of film, his radical work bridged the fields of cinema, poetry, mathematics, photography, xerography and early digital art. He made one of the defining films of the structural film canon, Zorns Lemma (1970), following it with the seminal, (anti-)autobiographical work nostalgia (1971). Magellan (1976-) was perhaps Frampton’s equivalent to Wagner’s Ring Cycle; an epic, wildly ambitious, calendrical film cycle lasting 36 hours that was only partially completed before his tragic premature death in 1984. Taking on the intimidating task of deciphering and decoding Frampton’s project from the fragments left behind, Zryd not only renders Magellan legible for film scholars but contextualizes and evaluates the entire project in hugely readable and nourishing prose. This book will surely become the authoritative text, not only on Magellan, but on Frampton’s oeuvre as a whole. Michael Zryd’s elegant treatise on Hollis Frampton’s late metafilms is the first to map the terrain of his accomplishment with commensurate intelligence and comprehensiveness. Zryd synoptically conjugates the master’s filmmaking, photography, and writing as an interlaced summa of the history of cinema and the most prescient bridge to its digital successors. Zryd brings unmatched expertise to the task of resurrecting Hollis Frampton’s last major work. The strength of this book resides in its ability to make the complexity of this massive cultural and artistic undertaking legible. Even for scholars of avant-garde cinema and veteran viewers of Frampton’s films, it offers revelatory readings. This groundbreaking book offers a richly layered map for navigating Frampton’s complex films and their intertexts. Devoting particular attention to the epic, encyclopedic, unfinished Magellan cycle, Zryd takes us on a deep dive into a speculative metahistory grounded in meticulous and expansive research. Frampton finds an articulate and generous interlocutor here: the energy of his last work endures through Zryd’s engagement with the idea of a cinema that moves past all limits, towards the infinite. This authoritative guide to the avant-garde filmmaker/photographer/theorist has been needed for years; finally, 40 years after Frampton’s death, comes this comprehensive look at his life and career. The author of this volume mirrors his subject's all-embracing approach to the art-making task in hand, rigorously tracking the twists and turns in this remarkable artist's creations and the reverberations he had on the discourses of the day. Examining not only the Magellan films but also Frampton’s writings and archival materials, Zryd provides a sort of Bloomsday Book for deciphering this vast project, marking an invaluable contribution to the study of this singular filmmaker. An incredibly useful and necessary resource for anyone interested in synthesising Frampton’s theories and reconstructing his cinematic goals, which remain pertinent in the digital age. Zryd’s writing ties together centuries of history to a single point of Frampton’s obsessions, weaving between a history of maritime navigational systems and the analogy of Magellan as constellation. One of the study’s strengths lies in Zryd’s presentation of complex modernist ideas that serve either as the bedrock of Frampton’s project, or as useful tools for its interpretation. A welcome addition to the scholarship on one of the most significant figures in American experimental cinema. Zryd is meticulous in his analysis of the work of the filmmaker without ever succumbing to the 'great man' approach to art history.