Frampton

104 • Film Studies • Issue 4 • Summer 2004

Interview with Hollis Frampton

• Deke Dusinberre and Ian Christie

This interview took place on 8 September, 1976,at the London Filmmakers’ Coop, Fitzroy Road,London, and was intended for a future issue ofAfterimage. It followed Frampton’s participationin the Edinburgh Film Festival’s InternationalForum on Avant-Garde Film, where he took partin panel discussions with fellow-NorthAmericans Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, YvonneRainer, Joyce Wieland and Annette Michelson;and with European filmmakers including ChantalAkerman, Willem and Birgit Hein, Malcolm LeGrice and Willian Raban. Behind the Forum laythe influential re-mapping of avant-gardetradition proposed by Peter Wollen’s ‘TwoAvant-Gardes’ essay, first published in StudioInternational in November 1975, and reprintedin the Festival’s 1976 magazine. There was alsomuch talk of a new narrative tendency in avant-garde film, signalled at the festival by Le Grice’sAfter Manet and After Lumière, Raban’s AfterEight, Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures andWieland’s The Far Shore. Frampton already hada reputation as one of the major theorist-filmmakers of the contemporary avant-garde,although his work was comparatively littleknown in Britain at this time. An interview bySimon Field and Peter Sainsbury had appeared inAfterimage 4 (1972) and Zorns Lemma wasavailable for hire from the London Filmmakers’Cooperative, while some of his essays appearedin Artforum during the early 1970s. The films byFrampton shown at Edinburgh were from theon-going Magellan cycle: At the Gates of Death,consisting of The Red Gate and The Green Gate,each 52 minutes long.

Deke Dusinberre: I’m particularly interested inlearning what you’ve been up to over the lastfour years – particularly since the Afterimageinterview of 1972 was so lucid and suggesteda number of possible directions – but perhapsit might be better to start by simply askingwhat you’re doing now.

Holl is Frampton: I’m probably becoming lesslucid than I was four years ago. At that time,as I recall, I was finishing one thing andstarting another. I was finishing HapaxLegomena (five parts of which I had with mein London); in the midst of that visit toEngland I went to the west and filmedStonehenge, which was incorporated intoanother part of Hapax. The last of it wasfinished in the fall, I guess. At the same time, Ihad begun what I hoped would be a simpleproject, as outlined in that interview: acatalogue or compilation of films which werelimited to exactly one minute – 1,440 frames.They were to be an homage not so much tothe early cinema of the Lumières as to anaspect of film that I feel has been lost, to acertain degree, in the period in which we nowfind ourselves, and which began with theSoviet cinema of the period – roughly speaking– of montage culture (or of the edited orspliced film). What is so difficult to explainabout the Lumières’ films and other single-shot films made at that time – I’m thinking forinstance of the very earliest things done in theU.S., starting with Fred Ott’s Sneeze:1 45-frame cinema that at 40 frames-per-secondlasted a little over one second – is theirluminosity, by which I mean that they seemimpervious to analysis. Films made withinmontage culture, on the other hand, inviteand even command a type of analysis thatproceeds during the extended moment ofwatching the films.

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DD: What’s the status of that project now?

HF: At a certain point, what has tended tohappen previously happened again: I set outto make a simple inventory or catalogue of theappearances of the world, which I imaginedmight run to a few hundred short films, but asI actually began to gather these film segmentsthey began to organise themselves – to mydiscomfiture – in a manner that I suppose isdetermined by my own immersion inmontage: one thing suggests another, and ifyou have five things there seems to be somebest order in which they should be seen. Thebits of film, which were as opaque as anisolated word, seemed somehow to bedemanding a more intricate organisation thanI had originally planned. At first I thought thatsimply meant sorting them into more intricatecategories; I had originally imagined that therewould be four categories – ‘ordinary,extraordinary, exotic, and erotic views’ – whichwere the categories used by the Lumières. So Iattempted a more complex sorting, which ledto the question of an equilibrium among thecategories. I suppose I could give a verydetailed history of a series of insights anddecisions (though I can’t necessarily rememberthe dates), but what basically evolved fromthat proposed inventory – or catalogue, orstorehouse – is a work whose working title iscurrently Magellan. This is composed of parts,not all of which consist of one-minutesegments, not by any means. It’s not a workthat can be diagrammed in linear fashion,since it uses the grid – among many others –of the cycle of the solar year. In other words,it’s a calendar. That is to say, it rotates like awheel, or rather like a series of wheels thatrotate within one another. I now expect, whenand if the whole thing is completed, that it willbe, very roughly, thirty-six hours long. Withinthose thirty-six hours there are a series ofrough categories – well, the categories areactually quite exact, but they name parts thatoverlap each other on a kind of two-dimensional map of the work. Thosecategories are ‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’ [of

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Film Studies • Issue 4 • Summer 2004 • 105

• Hollis Frampton, Stopping Down (1973)

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Magellan], and there’s a section whichcorresponds to a ‘Birth of Magellan’ (itselfcomprised of subsections), and there’s anotherwhich relates to adolescence. Then there’s a‘Death’ and even, heaven help us, a‘Resurrection’.

DD: How much of Magellan do you have underyour belt now?

HF: Well, that’s also hard to say. I’ve nowfinished and released the two parts of the‘Gates of Death’, which together come to 110minutes and represent, within the completework, a kind of dispersed zone between‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’. There’s also a cycle offour films for the solstices and equinoxes thatcould be collectively seen as an epicycle I call‘Solaria Magellani’. (A solarium, by the way, isnot only a sunroom – as in a tuberculosissanitorium – it’s also a sundial.) Those fourparts together amount to two hours thirty-seven minutes.

DD: Are they exterior to the ‘Straits’ and to‘Clouds’?

HF: No, they’re inside the ‘Straits’. Embedded.

DD: But there’s more to be done on the‘Straits’?

HF: There is very much more to be done. More,indeed, has been done but hasn’t beenreleased: of the one-minute pieces – theunmodified one-minute pieces – I have nowshot about 700. I don’t think I will ever use allof them. There are now also one-minutepieces which are edited – indeed some arehighly edited. There are even some thatinvolve performance and directed acting. Thatis to say, the one-minute pieces alone arestratified or separated out into clusters whichare distributed throughout the whole time ofthe work, which are involved in a longertemporal spectrum within the history of filmthan simply the primitive cinema of the1890s.

DD: Will those one-minute pieces form adiscrete part of Magellan, or will they bedistributed throughout the work? Will peoplebe expected to view all the parts in the samerelationship, or will they be allowed to pull outany number of those parts in any of an infiniteseries of permutations?

HF: Well, we come now to another aspect of theproblem – the problem of describing this thingin linear speech. I will propose, then describe, Ithink, a set of ways for deriving a canonic orderfor seeing the whole thing. This is somethingthat on certain days of the year, let’s say, wouldbe pinned to this imaginary year, to specificsegments, while certain other days of the yearwould be completely indeterminate (or at leastpartly indeterminate). In particular, as I now seeit, there will be not one but two cycles of one-minute pieces, which constitute the panopticonof the ‘Straits of Magellan’. One of thosewheels – or series – is, as it were, a gear withone more tooth, 366 teeth against 365, so thatif they were seen in a real, determined canonicorder – in fact, seen along a strictly calendricalmodel in which there would be something tosee for every day of the calendar year – then itwould take 366 years to see all thecombinations.

In addition to which, there will be a piece ofsound – I use that phrase very deliberately: apiece of sound – because I’m envisioning akind of inventory not only of kinds of soundbut of ways in which sound may be usedalongside the image attached to each piece.But at any given screening, whether or not thesound will actually be played or the track runsilent will be determined by other, local,factors. So a great deal of it is very rigidlystructured in one sense, but very rigidlystructured in a direction which will tend toplace the principles upon which it is structuredon a kind of horizon, as it were, in theperceiving of the work, rather than at thecentre of one’s attention in perceiving it.

DD: Although I expected the implications of thequestion to be important, I was really asking a

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simpler question. Which is: how do you expectthe 36-hour film Magellan to be experienced?

HF: In as many ways as possible, save one: Iwould be horrified if anyone ever proposed toshow the whole thing in thirty-six consecutivehours. It’s not at all my goal to subject anyone– not even myself – to the kind of exhaustion,the kind of phasing in and out of attention(and the ordeal of wakefulness) that wouldentail. I just don’t think it could be done.

I can imagine a situation in which it couldbe seen in the course of a week. That’s still anawful lot of film. Or, under absolutely idealcircumstances – though I don’t care too muchif they’re ever achieved – over the actualcalendar year which the work imitates (but towhich it is not absolutely tied down: I mean,one writes a diary, for instance, with dailyentries over the period of a year, but that doesnot necessarily imply that the reader must readthe entries at the rate of one a day). It’s like alibrary, let’s say, or a compendium, and alsolike a mechanical analogue computer ordifferential analyser, something in which theparts can be taken out, put elsewhere, and soforth. Film, after all, does come on reels in tincans, and these can be lined up on shelves likebooks, so that one has random access to the‘books’ on the shelf (if not instantaneously tothe pages within the books). Most of thebooks on this shelf – or most of the cans, theparts – would in fact be very small; they wouldbe little reels of film with 2 x 36 or 72 feet offilm. That would be the case on about 360days of the year. Some of the reels would belarger, and of course there are some days inwhich there would be very much to watch.Again with the proviso – or at least thesuggestion – that the very large segmentsintended to be seen on one day are open atcertain points – open out, so that smallerepicyclic digressions are inserted into them orballoon out of them.

DD: I’d like to clarify precisely what that [library]will catalogue, what that analytic machine willanalyse, to what particular cycle the calendar

refers. Two things that spring immediately tomy mind, knowing a bit about your work, are:that Magellan will in the first instance be arecapitulation of the history of cinematicrepresentation, and that secondly it will have astrong autobiographical element, situatingyourself as protagonist within thatrecapitulation.

HF: This is where I have to condition the likeningto a diary or to a journal. In a certain sense –indeed, in many senses – my work has tendedto be autobiographical. That was certainly trueof Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena. In anycase, with any material filmed by a particularperson there’s a kind of kinesicautobiographical inscription, is there not? Justone’s physiological or motor state on a givenday will mark a shot with a gesture that onanother day it might not have. The hand-heldcamera, at least, inscribes the presence of thecameraperson on the invisible side of thecamera, and so forth. But to pursue methrough these mazes and corridors I think isnot what I would recommend to anyone.

DD: Would you recommend pursuing Magellanhimself? Have you in fact adopted him as apersona? I know little about Magellan’s lifeother than that he was the first to attempt tocircumnavigate the earth, but didn’t succeed.Yet his conception – that is to say, the way heconceived the expedition – was sufficient toallow it to carry on beyond his own death.

HF: Well, at least some of his mortal part made it all the way around the world. He wasdismembered, hacked to pieces in a local war in the Philippines, where he had previously been on an earlier voyage that took the Vascoda Gama route around Africa, though of courseon this occasion he was coming back the otherway. So the few of his crew – plus his friendAntonio Pigafetta who went along as apassenger and kept a diary of the entire voyage– gathered up what they could find and packedhim in a barrel of cloves. And so, aromaticallypreserved, Magellan returned to Genoa.



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Certainly there are specific things in thevoyage – the actual historic voyage – whichinterest me and which I incorporate more orless obliquely. One of the most interesting findsits way into the work as a behaviouralparameter, a generated parameter rather thanan allusion: this of course concerns the datingparadox, the time paradox that fell upon themwhen they did get back. They had kept anexact day-to-day log of the journey, as an aid tonavigation and so forth, and Pigafetta had kepta day-to-day journal or diary, so they knew – orthey believed that they knew – the date uponwhich they arrived home, and even the day ofthe week. They were incorrect by one day. Wenow know, of course, that they had crossedwhat we would call the international date line.Except that there was no international date lineat the time. They had simply preset – within thecycle of the rotation of the earth – onerotation, so that they had gained twenty-fourhours. It was extremely puzzling to them. Itwas some years before all that got straightenedout. Although the Arabs had done a certainamount of theoretical work on it in the highMiddle Ages, and understood what shouldhappen assuming that the world was round,this knowledge was not available to thePortuguese at the time.

Well, that paradox concerning the misfit ofactual experience – even enumerated,modulated, kept careful account of – with one

aspect of the real astronomical calendar of theworld, is massively referred to in the phasingmisfit of cycles of material in the film. But as faras specific episodes having the same kind ofrelationship to my film as the specific episodesin the Odyssey have to the episodes of Joyce’sUlysses, no, the relation is not the same.

DD: Why, then, Magellan?

HF: Why Magellan? OK, it’s a voyage, that is tosay it’s a vast picaresque which, like allsuccessful picaresques, takes the form of acomedy. That means there’s a full resolution infavour of the protagonist (which is gettingcomedy melted down about as far as you cango, making it about as abstract as you can). Ina manner of speaking, in the original voyagethere’s a resolution in favour of theprotagonist: he did establish the‘spheroidalness’ (or what have you) of theearth. He even, in a manner of speaking, gotback; because such a voyage is vastly inclusivewithout there necessarily being a moment-to-moment causal chain or transfer of energyfrom one moment to the next. In the Odyssey,for instance, there’s no particular reason why,having escaped the enchantments of Circe,Odysseus should then next come driftingashore and become Nausicaa’s lover. There’sno direct causal link between that; it’s a modelof history which at least questions the notion



• Hollis Frampton, The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall: VII (1977–80)

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of causality. There may or may not be causallinks. What those links are – the nature of why,say, one shot follows another, or one segmentfollows another – is at all times underconstruction, as is the nature of the passage ofthe energy of attention from one segment,one shot – one frame, even – to another.

DD: And you’re contrasting that with theOdyssey?

HF : Well, the Odyssey is a vastly sophisticatedwork, of course. No, I wasn’t so muchcontrasting it, I was likening it: except for thevery beginning and the very end, which firstenunciate and then resolve a specific set ofproblems, whether or not what happens inepisode ‘a’ is causing what happens inepisode ‘b’ remains problematical. In otherwords, that relationship is at all times to beconstructed in the imagination of thespectator. At the level of a kind ofmetalanguage, if we can imagine Ulysses as acritical essay about the Odyssey, and aboutprior comic literature, there is a doublerelationship that is at all times underconstruction: the first is that from episode toepisode, the second is that between theepisodes which we are now reading and thepalimpsestic corresponding Homeric episodethat underlies it and the nature of the distancebetween them, which at all times is extremelyfluid. It’s fluid in relation to one’s attention;sometimes one feels oneself reading theOdyssey through Joyce at the moment ofdetecting a strong correspondence, at othertimes the distance becomes very large so thatthe Odyssey, as it were, disappears.

DD: So can we assume that’s the way youenvisage the relationship between your filmand the exploits of Magellan?

HF: For starters. Save, of course, that it’s a lotlooser. And I wonder if I haven’t started toregret, first of all, referring to this filmic objectI’m working on by a name of any kind; and Iwonder, furthermore, if I don’t regret a little

bit referring to the subsections by names.Because of course what this does – and, in away, it does it in advance of the very fact ofthe thing – is to polarise examination of thefilm around a kind of clue-hunting. It’spossible, mind you, for me to take a certainkind of pleasure in presenting that kind ofextremely intricate but conceivably open andschematised form – I’m not immune to thepleasures of pedantry. But at the same time,the activity of detective work – in which thework presents itself under the guise ofscholarship about itself – constitutes, I think, akind of fool’s gold. As time has passed (andnow six and a half years have elapsed since Icompleted Zorns Lemma), I have beenincreasingly disappointed at a kind of insistentfailure of examination of that work to get pastits participatory and mechanical self-generating quality, self-exhausting quality.2

(Which are of course attractive: there has beensome expansion of the list of goodies that canbe mined out of Zorns Lemma and so forth.)

DD: What direction would you like to seeanalysis of Zorns Lemma take?

HF: Shall I say ‘deeper’? I’m not sure –

DD: Analysis has tended to dwell on the images –

HF: Well, the images contain so many to the n-th power bits of information per frame andso forth. And the fact that there are wordswithin them that can be read, let’s say, is anaspect of those images.3 At a certain point,your question engages with all kinds ofproblems of artists explaining their own work– and whether they should or not.

DD: I didn’t say I was going to believe you, I wasjust asking for your version.

HF: Good. You leave me free to spin all sorts offiction.

DD: Do you want to pursue that question aboutZorns Lemma?



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HF: No, not too much. I just feel that there areother dialogues which are being rehearsed inthat film that are not much touched upon bythe kind of empirical retrieval of its scheme,about which, needless to say, I know a verygreat deal. Mercifully, I’m starting to forgetsome of it.

DD: But you raised that in the context of beingafraid that Magellan would just amplify,because of the conceit . . .

HF: I just utter it as a kind of caution. I certainlyknow that all these Ptolomaic and post-Ptolomaic wheels with wheels are there [inMagellan]; indeed, I talk about them all thetime, and exhibit them at considerable lengthin the work. At the same time, I would offersimply that they do also constitute a highlyornate façade – or smokescreen – behindwhich the meaning of the work is contained, asit were, in camera. But, for me, the meaning ofthe work is in the process of making it,precisely what is under construction, and notthe scaffold. And the meaning of the work iswhat it has always been. To put it as generallyas possible, it is an essay – in this case, aparticularly massive and inclusive one – aboutwhat meaning is or may be, or various things itis or may be in film (that is to say, in themechanical joining of images together in spaceand time). An essay, if you like, on how thenotion of meaning itself is constituted. Which,if the work is eventually clear to anyone, shouldbuild the substance of that essay from within –from an experience of the work – rather thandiagramming it from without.

Ian Christ ie: I recently read your ‘Notes onComposing in Film’ in October, which is theone piece of yours that seems to engage withsome of the current modes of descriptive andanalytic terminology, but actually doesn’t.4 Yousay that denotation is one of the privilegedareas of connotation, which seems like asideswipe at various forms of semiotic analysis,and I realise that you’ve tended to avoidspeaking about filmic signification.

HF : That’s true – I try not to. That particulartext was written for a conference aboutresearching composition and it turned outthat those who organised it understood theword composition to be, of all things,writing. There were no musicians there. I was,of course, the only filmmaker. I don’t knowwhether painters would take very happily tothe word composition anymore, because ithas come to mean things like triangles andreceding diangles and so forth – fixed stencilsto be applied to the picture plane. So it’s adead word for painting. I felt I was undersome constraint to be a little more specific, alittle less belle-lettristic, than I usually tend tobe. Which led to two results. One was thatthings became rather severely schematised;the other was that, having gone throughexamples of four kinds of axiomatic changederived from reading and one from mis-reading, they were all drawn from literatureand music. To produce the scientific postscript to that text with respect to film is,of course, exactly what we are about – butwe are not, I think, very close. No, that’s nottrue: we may be a little closer than we were awhile ago, to the point of being able to giveexamples from film of any given category orany operative principle that we can discern asapplying to the making of other works of art.If we are at the incipience of a period ofprecision, then we are at its very firstmoments. So it would have taken me, let’ssay, ten years to write the other part of thatessay. No one knows enough to write a bookin three parts, the name of that book beingPrincipia Cinematica. Part One is called‘Definitions’, Part Two is called ‘Principles ofSequence’, Part Three is called ‘Principles ofSimultaneity’ –

IC : A rationalist approach, which identifies youroperation as an attempt at a modern mathesisuniversalis – the kind of enterprise that wouldhave been entirely comprehensible toDescartes, or to any of the philosophers of theEncyclopédie period.5 That would seem to beyour working model?



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HF: Right on the button. At the same time, ofcourse, I know very much more than they did,because they are precisely what I know. Whatinterests me among all those interactive, closedrational systems is the particular manner – theparticular point in their operation – where theymost begin to resemble the universe. And thatis the point where, after they have been inoperation for some time, they begin togenerate discrepancies, irrational values,accumulations of error. Where the operationsbegin to interfere with themselves or with eachother to such an extent that what is generatedappears not to permute but to be absolutelysmooth and continuous, becoming – if webelieve in causality – causally seamless, but atsuch a level that it seems incessantly to just failto dis-intricate the lines of self-interferencefrom the system –

IC : That recalls a point you made about buildingerrors into Zorns Lemma; and it leads on to apossibly irrelevant speculation about how onebuilds free will into a rationalist system . . .

HF: The last person to deal with that problemwas God, by the way.

IC : There’s a point you make in the Octoberessay about Pound’s notion of reading andwriting being intimately connected. Doesn’tthis also connect with the current idea ofreading film as a text?

HF: It comes not only from Pound but also fromEisenstein, who likens a film to a text, andshots to words. He speaks of reading the shotsas though they were words, hence ZornsLemma’s very obvious debt to Eisenstein,which somebody did finally remark. The filmtends, at that very frontal level, to takeEisenstein at his word. Literally. And to act outhis suggestion, his insight, even while turningit about, re-directing that energy back into theenterprise of filmmaking – into practice. Poundsimply was handy at that point ofintroduction, because he came right out andsaid it. There are other, notable praxes thatintimately connect reading to writing, orconnect an understanding of the detailedtextural and textual history of the enterprise offilm, painting, or what have you on the onehand, to practice on the other.

I think as we look at modernism it tends toseem, to a great extent, as though on one



• Hollis Frampton, Poetic Justice (1972)

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level or another most artists have done that.The action painters, after all, were incorrigiblemuseum hounds; they were, in fact, ageneration of art historians. I think theirrhetoric of silence tended to camouflage – as itwas intended to – that historicisation, todeliberately sink it to a deep layer. It’s clear,again and again, that – how to put it – theywere not making those paintings becausethose were the kinds of paintings theypersonally found pleasant or interesting orwanted to see, they were making thosepaintings out of some version of what theyperceived to be historical necessity. For acertain amount of time, that current inpainting persisted. Now, it’s not always asimple path – this notion of perceivednecessity – but it’s one that does look into thetradition of the art (or that part of it which isavailable and known), re-evaluating it,discerning within it what seem to be operativeprinciples that can be of use (or, on the otherhand, should be argued with, engaged with).

IC : One implication of Pound’s idea is that we’renot so much reading the mind of a text’sproducer as tracing the history of theproduction of that text, and what its agent, asit were, encapsulates because of his historicallocation. But the reading of Magellan that thespectator is capable of seems to be history subspecie aeternitatis. Not history viewed criticallyor dialectically, but as if from God’s point ofview, if you follow me?

HF: I follow you, but I wonder if you’re right – Idon’t know.

DD: That’s an interesting contradiction, becauseclearly the adventurousness of the Magellanproject re-foregrounds that act of making orreading. I don’t know what sort of time-scaleyou envisage devoting to the project; but can Iinfer that it follows in a line from Pound’sCantos through Zukovsky’s A and Brakhage’sSongs, in terms of being a work that isconceived over such a long period of time thatit inscribes into its own making a history of its

permutation and change? Which wouldundermine the idea of a perfect holistic work,challenging its own hermeticism.

HF: Absolutely. I suppose I would like for themboth to be there, for them both to be present:at once the hermeticism that you detect –which is widely detectable, too – and thesimple fact that in undertaking something verylarge one does not know how to do it. Whatmarks all projects of a certain size is the‘learning how’ to do the thing as you goalong. Now, characteristically there are seriousproblems with this. I suppose the Cantos aresomething of a case in point, though there areother cases. On the side of both the signifierand the signified, the Cantos are heavilydependent on what Pound happens to findout, or run across, or get interested in at anygiven time. The circumstances of his own lifeconstitute a kind of aleatory control voltage orsomething.

IC : I suppose it’s the scale and also thecomplexity of the framework, or thereassurance of the massiveness of the work,that enables a structure such as the Cantos totake on so much empirical material?

HF: Yes, Pound said that an epic was a poemincluding history. He tended, rather selectively,to shove history in wholesale. He isfurthermore supremely open to the criticismthat he merely included history withouthaving, as it were, a theory of history.Finnegans Wake, after all, is also an extendedwork of art in a language that includes history,though Joyce appears not to have a theory ofhistory but to maintain every theory of historythat he knows equidistant from the fusionpoint at which the prose is being generated.

IC : Vico stands to Finnegans Wake likeCopernicus to Magellan?

HF: Yes. There’s also obviously a psychological,or psychoanalytic, theory of history whichstands ready at all times to inflect or deflect



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not only the shape of an episode but the verychoice of words in that case. The Cantos have,of course – well, I shouldn’t say ‘of course’ –but they have always been a particular kind ofthorn in my side because there is, it seems tome, a real disparity – well, the work is notrigorous. It has a certain kind of architecture;it’s possible, let us say, to separate it out intomassive blocks. In due course, one way oranother, Pound even manages to inform usthat there is a kind of subtext to the Cantos, asthere is to Ulysses, and that subtext is theDivine Comedy in a general sort of way. But itdoesn’t wash too well to have spent twoCantos on the Inferno, separated by a veryshort distance in the poem from the firstincursion of Pound’s orientalism (at that pointin an almost pre-Raphaelite or Swinburnianform); it is, without being very detailed aboutit, a hell of a long way from the use Ulyssesmade of the sub-text of the Odyssey, to keepreturning to those examples. The Cantos, ofcourse, stands in ruins, repudiated by itsauthor for reasons that one can only guess.6 Isuspect, in fact, that one of the reasons it wasrepudiated was that Pound perceived in oneway or another that the very thing the poemneeded, since it was and is an essay abouthistory, was some controlling view of whathistory is. Pound seems, literally, to subscribeto the view that history is just one goddamthing after another; that there is not, say, avector within it (or that the vector is relativelysimple, not multiple, and has a downwarddirection), but that there is a bugbear – so tospeak – in the works, and the identity of thebugbear changes from time to time. And at acertain point the poem, for all its extraordinarylocal inventiveness, begins to teeter.

Okay, I’d like to make something that issimply not in pieces, one after another, in theorder that I happen to be able to make them.Which, again, is Pound’s problem. Joyce, as heworked on the text of Finnegans Wake, ofcourse, did not write it from beginning to end.He wrote at the whole book, as it were, untilthe whole book was written. That seems to bea more useful model. On the other hand, we

seem to be spending an awfully long time onthe literary.

IC : We’re guilty of encouraging that. Wherewould you like to go next?

HF: Maybe a swoop back to music, or moreparticularly the theory and practice of serialmusic in this century, in which stereoscopicenterprise has developed in an exemplarymanner.

DD: I’m not sure what you mean by‘stereoscopic’.

HF: I was simply trying to develop a littlemetaphor in passing, in which theory andpractice converged upon one another, eachinextricably informing the other. At the sametime, this is a music that has produced objectswhich command a serious examination but donot require any critical salivation in order tosustain themselves. One can listen to and bemoved by Wozzeck long before one has thebenefit even of the score – in which, as I pointout with some relish, the various sections ofthe work are developed musically with extremerigour.7 I have a predeliction for that work ofSchönberg, Berg and Webern, and that whichtheir successors have continued. Weunderstand a non-serial composer differentlythan we would have before. I like things thatare as tense as a soap bubble, that account forthemselves completely. At the same time, Idon’t like things that give out their favours toofreely, that can be had, as it were, for a nodand a knowing wink.

IC : Am I right in thinking that there is noobjective summary of Magellan laid out inwriting anywhere?8

HF : There are various pieces on various tapes – Idon’t really know what to do about it. I’mbeginning to suspect something that I mightdo about it. I have tried on various occasions –I may or may not try this evening – to situate asegment shown on a given occasion within



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• Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma (1970)

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larger and larger sets of schemes and so forth.I don’t know why I should want to do thatbeyond the fact that I’m excited about it, likesomeone bound to a Catherine Wheel that islikely to turn for some years. On one occasion,I spent two and a half hours spinning thisgossamer out into space, in order to situateabout two and a half hours of real filmsomewhere within it. And everybody seemedto find it just a puzzling as if I had saidnothing – which suited me fine. On the otherhand, on that occasion I felt as though I hadshot my wad. Now, what to do?

IC : It’s a matter of ‘local interest’, as you havesaid a propos the Cantos. An expectation iscreated as the scale of the whole workbecomes known. So the problem ofmaintaining interest in its parts becomescrucial; there is a real pull in an intellectual aswell as a perceptual sense, for a viewer who isscurrying around trying to see parts within adeveloping sense of the whole.

HF: At the possible cost of having totheatricalise the production of the work, it isexactly the pleasures and terrors of thatexperience . . .

IC : . . . which you have knowingly evoked for us all?

HF: One thing that Joyce did that has caused mesecond thoughts was that he never did revealthe name of the thing, but would draw peopleout by the hour, like Molly Bloom talkingabout heavy petting, as to what they thoughtthe title might be. If anyone got too close to it,he would blanche and withdraw. Pound, ofcourse, pulled somewhat the same thing anddied, presumably with the name of his poemin pectora, as John XXIII did.9 There are threecardinals in the world who don’t know whothey are.

IC : Given that we are in that situation, can welook at the local and structural aspects within asection that is now available?

DD: For instance, by comparing Gates of Deathwith Solarium Magelani?

HF: If we’re going to compare Solarium and theGates of Death, then I think the first thing wenotice is that they seem to behave pretty muchin the same way, except that Gates of Deathseems to be even more complicated. I think it’svirtually impossible to retrieve or determinewhat shot goes where in any of the five or sixfilms – or film segments – under discussion. Atthe same time, it becomes clearer all the timethat there is some set of rules, some set ofoperating principles, at work ever more clearlyand powerfully, hovering just beyond the pointwhere they can be retrieved.

DD: I was hoping to address that. After oneviewing, I was struck by the fact that thestructure of Gates of Death seems so eminentlygraspable – even though I never managed tograsp it – whereas Solarium gives me a muchgreater feeling of an organicism that is harderto assimilate, which I think pertains to all theparts. Is there, in fact, a significant differencein terms of the conception of the way thosefilms are ordered?

HF: As it happens, the rules become somewhatmore complex. That is to say, if we use serialmusic as an analogy, the ways in which therow can be modified or inflected increase innumber. What seems to change the issue isthat one of the rules in Gates of Death allowsthe material to be redoubled; that is to say,each image is seen twice. Another concerns itsmore overt dispersion into strophes (or stanzasor what have you), each of which carries arefrain. So there’s a kind of lap dissolve in theprogress of this double group of films in whichthey are at once more complexly rigorous andrule-bound, and at the same time the quotientof shape-markers on the surface increases,which tends to make the formal structure ofGates of Death look clearer than it is.

IC : The shape-marker frequently takes the formof repetition. This is the problem of seeing the



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nature of the structure, but not being able tograsp it at the time, since a lot depends onrepetition which can only be appreciatedretrospectively. Towards the end, you see theshape, how it’s working, by which time youhave, of course, lost –

HF: – what is shaped.

IC : It does create a curious interplay betweenthe realisation that comes at the end and therecollection. Can we assume for the momentthat this is a form of filmic serialism, like serialprocedures in music after Schönberg?

HF: Let’s say it bears analogies. All the charts andgraphs that precede the editing of a film likethis are a kind of ‘lost wax’, if you understandme.10 Actually they hang around, but I havenever exhibited them, as Sharits does.11 Let’sjust go back to a slightly different aspect ofthis double group of films, one that becomesmore vehement as you pass through them, notin the order of their making, but, let’s say,from ‘Autumnal Equinox’ to ‘Winter Solstice’.Or we could start with ‘Summer Solstice’ andgo to ‘Autumn’, to ‘Winter’, to ‘Spring’, and tothe ‘Red Gate’ and ‘Green Gate’. In all ofthem, there is a punctuation betweenindividual shots; that punctuation tends, firstof all, to force the shots apart. It certainlyforces them out of immediate juxtapositionwith each other. In the case of the first three, itis a brief flash of a colour field in one of theMaxwellian primaries;12 in the case of the filmthat I’m still calling ‘Vernal Equinox’ – althoughI may have to contribute a massive footnote onthat – it’s a dotted line, the trembling dottedline that outlines the frame.

In the Gates of Death, the punctuation –the diaeresis, if you like – is even longer andeven more vehement: a superimposed patternof moving hexagons. The moment betweenthe ending of one film strip of photographic orillusionist material and the beginning of thenext one is marked by a very abrupt return ofthe pictorial space to frontality. It’s a flat fieldof red or blue or green, or an interference of

two patterns of geometric figures, the flatnessof which tends to make even more pointed –even more disjunctive – at the moment whenone shot encounters another shot. In fact, theydon’t encounter each other; that is to say,there’s no direct collisional montage anywherein any of these films. This, it seems to me,begins to place them in dialogue with the verynotion of collisional montage itself, which at acertain point, as we know, degenerated – orwas degraded – into a set of rules aboutsomething called ‘continuity’.

IC : One way leads to the disguised montage ofcontinuity, the other way to the theory ofenhanced emphasis, dramatic intensification.

HF: Very well. What I’m doing, in a way, is justdescribing these.

IC : But are you not also implying a move – achange of compositional principle – from theneo-Eisensteinianism of Zorns Lemma, tosomething which actually abandons theprinciple of montage?

DD: Not so much abandoning it as opening up aspace between it and . . .

IC : What’s montage if you open up the spaces?

HF: You see, one of the pleasures of the pursuitof the design is to find out whether all of thelarge design is going to behave like this. Quitesimply, the answer is: no, it is not. What isalways at issue in this particular group of films– or this particular bunch of pieces – to whichI have now put an end, is what I take to be anopening up of the pathway to meaning fromone shot to the next shot. If you can imagineall the shots – all the film pieces – that makeup a film as a grid or chess board, then onthat chess board there is for the knight, let ussay, a particular tour: there is a way to see allof the shots in that as at least united by a rule;there is a way to visit all the squares that isunited by the manner in which a knight canmove. In fact, there are a very large number of



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knight’s tours; so there are presumably a verylarge number of pathways through a body ofillusionist material. We have tended towardthe view that there is some one pathwaythrough that material, understood to be themost meaningful, the one that the artistchooses. First, I’d like to call into question theconcept that seems to lie behind the phrase‘most meaningful’; and second, of course, I’dlike to call into question the notion of choice –the artist’s choice – in that situation. I thinkthese films do so by holding open, at all times,the pathway through the set of all shots thatcompose the film. That is to say, the nature ofthe tour itself – or the manner in which oneconstructs meaning (inventing it as thespectator in the midst of witnessing the work)– is under construction again.

IC : The spectator is certainly under construction,or his perceptual processes are. The producerof the text, or of the set, is presumably alsounder construction by the text?

HF: That’s right. But I think, at least for thetime being, that in these parts of the overallwork, Solarium and the Gates of Death, I’vecarried this way of expanding the field ofchoices for a pathway about as far as I can.Now, to get back to your ‘eye of God’ trope.If there is announced or believed to be agrand design, which seems to be the case forthis film, this is in anticipation of a kind ofhindsight, you understand. That eye issomething that changes its colours and itsconfiguration. I winced internally when yousaid that, because there is a two dimensionalmap or diagram of the whole thing which,when seen from a distance with all itsconstruction on a hexagonal lattice and withvarious kinds of coding marks (colours,numbers and so forth), when seen from thatdistance reduces it to a kind of pantheistmush. That notation, or map, is a very largerendering of the human eye. But at the locallevel – and of course one sees the film locallyin time, and then invents the real, fictivestructure of the film with whatever

equipment and tools one has – one invents,as it were, the actual concrete intellectualspace within which the film transpires. Thatprocess is one of continuous dialogue, aconstant re-opening of as many questions as Ican cram into it, so to speak. And it isprecisely at the level of the self-interference ofoperations, at the level of disjunctionbetween the signifying apparatus and what itis perforce linked to, that that dialogue takesplace. I wonder if that was a completesentence? It may have been.

Notes

1 What Frampton knew as Fred Ott’s Sneeze is nowmore formally catalogued as Edison KinetoscopeRecord of a Sneeze, and appears to hve been madeas a series of stills primarily intended for publicationin Harper’s Weekly in January 1894, to illustrateEdison’s moving-picture achievements, and onlylater printed as a ‘film’. See Charles Musser, EdisonMotion Pictures, 1890–1900, SmithsonianInstitution Press/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto,1997: 87–88.

2 Zorns Lemma was first shown in 1970, and at 60mins. was Frampton’s longest film to date. Almostimmediately, it attracted wide attention, mostlyinfluenced by P. Adams Sitney’s presentation of it astypifying the ‘structural’ turn in avant-garde film(Sitney, ‘Structural Film’, Film Culture: AnAnthology, ed. P. A. Sitney, Secker and Warburg,1970). Much subsequent criticism took this as itsstarting point, to Frampton’s despair. For adiscussion of the critical legacy, see VirginieGuichard, An ABC of Film: Hollis Frampton and theCultural Tradition of Film, Unpublished Ph.Ddissertation, University of London, 2003.

3 All the initial images of Zorns Lemma’s centralsection are of words or letters in alphabetical order,many appearing as public signs, which are thensubstituted with word-free images to form analternative alphabet.

4 ‘Notes on Composing in Film’ appeared in the firstissue of October, Spring 1976; and had originallybeen given at a Conference on Research andComposition at SUNY Buffalo in October 1975.

5 In his early Rules for the Direction of the Mind(1628), Descartes spoke of a ‘universalmathematics’ [mathesis universalis] to deal with allmatters causing ‘problems about order andmeasurement’ (Philosophical Works of Descartes,trans. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, Cambridge,1970: 13). The Encyclopédie (1751–78), edited byDiderot and D’Alembert, aimed to provide a



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comprehensive, materialist account of the worldand human knowledge.

6 From 1961 until his death in 1972, Pound madevarious despairing or dismissive remarks about theCantos – ‘I have lots of fragments. I can’t makemuch sense of them’ (to Michael Alexander). ‘It’s abotch. I knew too little about so many things . . . Ipicked out this and that thing that interested meand jumbled them into a bag’ (to Daniel Crory).

7 Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck was completed in1922, following the serial method of Berg’s teacherArnold Schönberg, in which permutations of a basic‘tone row’ determine all aspects of the work’smusical structure.

8 From 1978 onwards, Frampton outlined and spokeabout the structure envisaged for Magellan withincreasing frequency. For a discussion of theseaccounts, see Brian Henderson, ‘Propositions for theExploration of Frampton’s Magellan’, October 32,

Spring 1985: 129–50.9 Pope John XXIII died in 1963 during the Second

Vatican Council which he had summoned, withmany of his reforms of the Catholic Churchunfinished – and later to be reversed by hissuccessor.

10 The ‘lost wax’ or cire perdue technique is used forcasting bronze sculpture. A model in wax is placedwithin a clay and plaster casing, then heated untilthe wax runs out, and is replaced by molten bronzepoured into the resultant mould.

11 Paul Sharits, another participant in the EdinburghAvant-Garde Forum of 1976, had been exhibitingportions of film strip from some of his of his solid-frame ‘flicker’ films, such as Ray Gun Virus.

12 The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell(1831–79) laid the foundations of electrical andoptical theory, identifying the primary colours, red,green and blue.



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Frampton