Hollis Frampton | |
|---|---|
| Born | Hollis William Frampton Jr. (1936-03-11)March 11, 1936 Wooster, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | March 30, 1984(1984-03-30) (aged 48) Buffalo, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer. |
| Notable work | |
| Spouse(s) | Marion Faller (before 1984) |
Hollis William Frampton Jr. (March 11, 1936 – March 30, 1984) was an Americanavant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer,theoretician, and pioneer ofdigital art.[1] He was best known for his innovative and non-linearstructural films that defined the movement, includingLemon (1969),Zorns Lemma (1970), andHapax Legomena (1971–1972), as well as his anthology book,Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980 (1983).[2]
Hollis William Frampton Jr. was born on March 11, 1936, inWooster, Ohio to Nellie Cross Frampton and Hollis William Frampton.[3] An only child, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandparents John and Fanny Cross. Fanny Cross is the subject of Frampton's 1979 filmGloria!.[4] He grew up inCleveland from the age of ten, and five years later, he enteredPhillips Academy inAndover, Massachusetts, where he was accepted on full scholarship.[3] His classmates and friends included the painterFrank Stella and sculptorCarl Andre.[5] Well read as a youth, he had a reputation at Andover as a "young genius".[6][7] He failed to graduate from Andover, and thus forfeited a National Scholarship toHarvard University. He failed his final History exam on a bet that he could pass without ever reading the textbook.[8] EnteringWestern Reserve University in 1954, Frampton took a variety of classes (Latin, Greek,German,French,Russian,Sanskrit,Chinese, mathematics) but had not declared a major. He recounted that when he was called in front of the dean after three and a half years of study and 135 hours of credits and asked, once again, if he intended to take a degree, he was told that if so, he needed to take speech, western civilization, and music appreciation. He replied that "I already know how to talk, I already know who Napoleon was and I already like music" and noted that "For that reason I hold no bachelor's degree. I was very sick of school."[9] During this time he had a short-lived radio show onWOBC atOberlin College.
In 1956, Frampton began correspondence withEzra Pound after becoming interested in the literary generation of the 1880s. In the fall of 1957, he moved to Washington D.C. where he visited Ezra Pound almost daily at St. Elizabeth's hospital where Pound was finishing part of hisCantos. There, Frampton writes that he was "privy to a most meaningful exposition of the poetic process by an authentic member of the 'generation of the '80's.'At the same time, I came to understand that I was not a poet."[10] Early the next year, Frampton moved to New York.[3] He renewed his friendships with Andre and Stella, sharing an apartment first with the two of them and then with Andre only. He began photographing artist friends; early projects included documentation of Andre's work,The Secret World of Frank Stella 1958–1962, and portraits of artists such asLarry Poons andJames Rosenquist.
In 1973, Frampton joined the faculty of theUniversity of Buffalo.[11]
Hollis Frampton married Marcia Steinbrecher in September 1966. The couple separated in 1971 and divorced in 1974. He later marriedMarion Faller, a photographer whom he had met and began living with in early 1971.[12] They lived inBuffalo andEaton, New York.[11] Together, Frampton and Faller collaborated on several series including "Vegetable Locomotion"[13] and "False Impressions". Frampton had a stepson by Faller named Will.
Frampton died from lung cancer at his Buffalo residence on March 30, 1984, at the age of 48.[3][11] His 1971 film(nostalgia), was inducted into theNational Film Registry in 2003.[14]
As Frampton's photography moved toward exploring ideas of series and sets, he began to make films. He based a lot of his early films on concepts. All of his very early works were either discarded or lost.[15] His earliest surviving work isInformation (1966). His early works were reasonably simple in construction. A few of them includingMaxwell's Demon,Surface Tension, andPrince Rupert's Drops were based on concepts from science. His films gradually increased in scope and ambition. He was seen as astructural filmmaker, working in a style that focused on the nature of film itself. In an interview with Robert Gardner he stated a discomfort with that term because it was too broad and didn't accurately reflect the nature of his work.Autumnal Equinox (1974) was shot inside a meat-packing plant, and shot using 30 mm film that containedbovine jelly.
His most significant work is arguablyZorns Lemma (1970), a film which drastically altered perceptions towards experimental film at the time. It is formed in three different sections. The first is a reading (byJoyce Wieland) ofthe Bay State Primer, a puritan work for children to learn the alphabet. The sentences used had foreboding themes such as "In Adam's fall, we sinned all." The second section is based on a text based work by Carl Andre, which started out with an alphabetical list of words for each letter in the alphabet. Each subsequent list is replaced with a letter until it is just letters. In Zorns Lemma, the concept is reversed. It starts off with a twenty four letter alphabet (I/J and U/V are considered one letter), each letter shown for one second of screentime and then looping. The second cycle replaces each letter with a word that starts with each letter. Gradually the word stills are replaced by an active film shot, such as washing hands or peeling a tangerine until there are only moving images. The third section contains a seemingly single shot of a couple walking across a snowy meadow. The sound is of six women reading one word at a time from Theory of Light. One interpretation ofZorns Lemma was that it was a comment on life's stages, the morality of the Bay State Primer being childhood, the sets of numbers representing maturing and interaction with the world, and the third part representing old age and death.
AfterZorns Lemma, he made theHapax Legomena films, a series of seven films of which(nostalgia) is the most well known. Several of these films explored the relation between sound and cinema, an area often disregarded in American avant-garde film, by demonstrating a disjointed relationship between the two.Poetic Justice explores a "cinema of the mind", wherein the film takes place in the viewers' imagination(s) as they read title cards. An extremely rare artist book edition ofPoetic Justice was printed by theVisual Studies Workshop. His final major film project was a monumental project calledMagellan, named after the explorer who first circumnavigated the world.Magellan was intended to be shown as a calendrical cycle, one film for each day of the year. One film from the cycle,Magellan: Drafts and Fragments, is exemplary of Frampton's ambition to create a personal "meta-history" of film; inDrafts and fragments, he remade the cinema of the Lumieres in 51 1-minute films.
The last few years of his life, Frampton taught at SUNY Buffalo, writing, working onMagellan and ongoing photographic projects with fellow artist and wifeMarion Faller, and investigating the relationship between computers and art. He did some initial work with video and sound reproducing with anIMSAI 8080 computer.[16]
Film study, restoration and print availability through Filmmakers Co-op NY, Anthology Film Archives and NY MoMA. Much of Frampton's work was released by theCriterion Collection on April 26, 2012, as special edition Blu-ray Disc and DVD.[17] His archive is maintained byAnthology Film Archives and theHarvard Film Archive.
