Hollis Frampton’s “Magellan”

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S “MAGELLAN”
11—18 November 2007
London National Maritime Museum

A screening, over two consecutive Sundays, of Hollis Frampton’s monumental film sequence Magellan, which uses Fernand Magellan’s circumnavigatory voyage as a metaphor for a meditation on the history and language of cinema, and the phenomena of perception.

“A series of shaped observations that include portraits, cadaver footage, re-stagings of Lumière films, visits to slaughterhouses, double exposures, a field of peaceful dairy cattle, allusions to Muybridge, electronic imagery, industrial pictures, a state fair – a kind of capsule version of the twentieth century that might have been placed on the Voyager spacecraft as it soared out of the solar system to worlds unknown.” —Robert Haller, Anthology Film Archives

In composing his metahistory of cinema, Frampton often refers to other films and filmic modes, quotes liberally from early cinema (specifically the paper print collection of the Library of Congress) and explores countless possibilities for montage and the relationship between sound and image.

Originally intended as a 36-hour sequence in which individual titles would be shown on specific days in a calendar of one year and four days, it was left unfinished when Frampton died in 1984. The surviving 8 hours of material, comprising of almost 30 individual films, will be screened together for the first time in the UK.

The schedule of four two-hour programmes, as structured by Michael Zryd and comprising of almost 30 individual films, is based on the artist’s 1978 “Magellan Calendar” and his last work-in-progress screenings at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) in January 1980. It was first shown in this form at Anthology Film Archives (New York) in September 2003.

Sunday 11 November 2007
12pm – 2pm     The Birth of Magellan (introduced by Michael Zryd)
3pm – 5pm       The Straits of Magellan I

Sunday 18 November 2007
12pm – 2pm     The Straits of Magellan II
3pm – 5pm       The Death of Magellan

Hollis Frampton, one of the key filmmakers of his generation, was also a noted photographer and theorist, whose remarkable writing was published frequently in Artforum and October.

“Frampton is generally understood, in his words, as an artist ‘of the modernist persuasion,’ not only for his aesthetics, but for his close personal association with such figures as Ezra Pound, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, and Stan Brakhage. Certainly, Frampton conceived of Magellan as a utopian artwork in the monumental tradition of James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. In a grant application, he hoped to realize the project as ‘the notion of an hypothetically totally inclusive work of film art as epistemological model for the conscious human universe’.”
(Michael Zryd, York University, Toronto)

The event at the National Maritime Museum is curated by Mark Webber. With thanks to Michael Zryd, Marion Faller, Wendy Dorsett, Lisa Le Feuvre, Helen Whiteoak, Benjamin Cook, M.M. Serra, Anthology Film Archives and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Presented in association with LUX.

Hollis Frampton’s book “Circles of Confusion”, which has been out-of-print for many years, has been published in an expanded edition by MIT Press.

Portrait of Hollis Frampton (directed by H.F.) by Marion Faller. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives. © 1975 Estate of Hollis Frampton.

The Birth of Magellan

THE BIRTH OF MAGELLAN
Sunday 11 November 2007, at 12pm
London National Maritime Museum

CADENZA I AND XIV
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
A prelude to Magellan’s universe, rife with allusions to Creation and Duchampian sexual puns: “The film about the bride in which two gentlemen, who we may presume to be bachelors, strip more or less bare a putative bride of some sort.” (HF)

MINDFALL I
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Emerges out of HF’s experiments with sound and Eisenstein’s ‘vertical montage’: “If you start responding to every stimulus, then you end up as a nerve gas case, quite literally. All the neurons fire at once.” (HF)

MATRIX [FIRST DREAM]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1977-79, 16mm, colour, silent, 28 min
A film of multiple superimpositions, utilizing the images of SOLARIUMAGELANI (a film shown later in the cycle) and the hexagonal images that recur throughout Magellan.

PALINDROME [SECOND DREAM]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, silent, 22 min
An early film of HF’s which was later incorporated into Magellan: “The menacing Latin palindrome IN GIRVM IMVS NOCTE ET CONSVMIMVR IGNI (By night we go (down) into a gyre / and we are burned in fire) serves as an epigraph to this animated film.” (HF)

MINDFALL VII
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
See above

NOCTILUCA [MAGELLAN’S TOYS #1]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
“Designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle. The title (nox / luceo) means something that shines at night, i.e. the moon […] The second day of the cycle seems to be an inventory of the knowledge, machines, and arms that Magellan – and latter-day voyagers like HF – had at the outset of his journey.” (Brian Henderson)

The Straits of Magellan I

THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN I
Sunday 11 November 2007, at 3pm
London National Maritime Museum

PUBLIC DOMAIN
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w, silent, 14 min
A found-film composed of early films, arranged alphabetically according to copyright title, all readily retrievable / quotable fragments from our finite federal version of the “infinite film / the paper print collection at the Library of Congress.” (Bruce Jenkins)

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min (20 min excerpt)
Directly inspired by the Lumière brother’s actualities, these one-minute films (49 of which are collected in Drafts and Fragments), are arranged around the circumference of the Magellan Calendar. Named Panopticons, they allude to Jeremy Bentham’s famous plan for a prison, and point to the dark ironies of Magellan’s Enlightenment project.

INGEIMM VIBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT [VERNAL EQUINOX]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 62 min (5 min excerpt)
Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s nude motion studies, this film was intended to be shown in 13 parts distributed equally through the calendar year.

SUMMER SOLSTICE [SOLARIUMAGELANI 2]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 32 min
“The operations that dislocate a film like Summer Solstice – I hope irreparably – from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy film document or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure – the intrigue possibly – of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching.” (HF)

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min (20 min excerpt)
See above

PAS DE TROIS
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
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.

INGEIMM VIBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT [VERNAL EQUINOX]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 62 min (5 min excerpt)
See above

The Straits of Magellan II

THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN II
Sunday 18 November 2007, at 12pm
London National Maritime Museum

AUTUMNAL EQUINOX [SOLARIUMAGELANI 3]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 27 min
The cows of Summer Solstice reappear, here filmed in a slaughterhouse, animated by HF’s revelation that animals are as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside.

WINTER SOLSTICE [SOLARIUMAGELANI 4]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 33 min
Shot in a steel mill, “a pre-textual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors” (HF), this film’s rhythmic and compositional textures pay tribute not only to Eisenstein and Vertov, but also to Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, silent, 51 min (4 min excerpt)
“A sampling of 49 fragments from Frampton’s catalogue of ‘actualities,’ the films from Straits Of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments are all silent and unedited. Several invoke directly the work of the Lumières, as in Frampton’s reworking of Démolition d’un mur (1895), in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumières’ wall. He makes reference to his own work … and pays 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 include a series of appropriated ‘lenses’ (a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of ‘screens’ (a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).” (Bruce Jenkins)

THE RED GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART I]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 52 min (9 min excerpt)
In The Red Gate and The Green Gate the primary imagery comes from a human anatomy laboratory in tribute to and (in contestation with, Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971). The films were to be divided into 24 sections, each section to be projected, right side up and forwards, and upside down and backwards according to the Magellan Calendar.

THE GREEN GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART II]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 53 min (9 min excerpt)
See above

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS 1 [PANOPTICONS]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min (1 min excerpt)
See above

THE RED GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART I]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 52 min (9 min excerpt)
See above

THE GREEN GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART II]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 53 min (9 min excerpt)
See above

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS 1 [PANOPTICONS]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min (4 min excerpt)
See above

The Death of Magellan

THE DEATH OF MAGELLAN
Sunday 18 November 2007, at 3pm
London National Maritime Museum

APPARATUS SUM [STUDIES FOR MAGELLAN: #1]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
“A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a room of cadavers.” (HF)

OTHERWISE UNEXPLAINED FIRES [MEMORANDA MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 14 min
“Filmed in large part during HF’s lecture-screening tour of the [San Francisco] Bay area: Visits to the Musée Méchanique, Land’s End, the Cliff House […] A visit to the Brakhage Colorado residence provided images of chickens / roosters.” (Gail Camhi)

QUATERNION [PARES MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
A visual dialogue with the artist James Rosenquist: “A safari by Hollis into the categorical domains of artifactual debris.” (Patrick Clancy)

YELLOW SPRINGS [MAGELLAN: VANISHING POINT #1, PARES MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
“A portrait of the filmmaker Paul Sharits, in particular response to energies he generated one May afternoon in 1971.” (HF)

FOR GEORGIA O’KEEFE [PARES MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
An exquisite homage to O’Keefe’s “Radiator Building, Night.”

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE [TEMPORA MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
HF’s affinity with Duchamp informs this film: If Eisenstein remade Anemic Cinema (1926), this film might have been the result.

NOT THE FIRST TIME [TEMPERA MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
“The viewer is engaged in a process of double vision that returns him to the image and subject in a manner more complex, more self-aware, and more temporal than the way most of us view photographs.” (Fred Camper)

TIGER BALM [MEMORANDA MAGELANI #1, MENS MAGELANI]
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena, 1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in colour, a celebration of generative humours and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard … and consecutive matters.” (HF)

PROCESSION
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
inc. BANNER, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 40 sec / DRUM, USA, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 20 sec / TUBA, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
A collection of three short films: “A trip to the New York State Fair filtered through a most rarefied formal film.” (Scott MacDonald)

GLORIA!
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1979, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
The last film of HF’s oeuvre and the last completed for Magellan, this film encapsulates the meta-history of cinema, bridging early cinema and video, and distils Magellan’s themes: the tension between image and language, Frampton’s ‘sentimental science’, tradition and memory, and the persistence of death.