On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (review)

Reportedly, avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton was a childhood genius. At age nine, a test revealed that he had the intelligence of an eighteen-year-old. As a teenager, he earned a full scholarship to Phillips Academy Andover, where his classmates included sculptor Carl Andre, painter Frank Stella, filmmaker Les Blank, and composers David Behrman and Frederic Rzewski. He went on to study Latin, Greek, and mathematics in college and considered himself a poet—leading him to Washington, D.C., where he spent several months visiting poet and critic Ezra Pound every day at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York and began his art career as a photographer. In 1966, at age thirty, he largely abandoned photography for filmmaking, and within six years, he made three of his most notable films—Zorns Lemma, Critical Mass, and (nostalgia)—and had a retrospective at MoMA. He remained a prolific filmmaker throughout the 1970s and early 1980s—all while actively teaching, lecturing, and writing for such journals as Artforum and October. In 1983, about a year before his untimely death, Visual Studies Workshop published twelve of these writings in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video Texts 1968-1980. Unfortunately, the book quickly went out of print, and his contributions as a theoretician, critic, and historian remained largely overlooked.

On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton finally puts these texts back in print, along with a slew of other unpublished letters, notes, interviews, proposals, book introductions, artist statements, and photographs. Frampton's writings uniquely combine his diffuse interests in literature, language, mathematics, and science while rigorously exploring the nature of photography, film, and video. Editor Bruce Jenkins clarifies in the introduction that Frampton's writings continue to resonate among a dedicated group of artists and academics. By extending this expanded volume to a new audience, Jenkins aims to broaden and continue the legacy of Frampton's distinctive discourse. This deliberate republication of Frampton's writings comes at a crucial time, just as major institutions, including Anthology Film Archives, New York University, and MoMA, begin efforts to preserve his films.

Jenkins, professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is long familiar with the work of Hollis Frampton. He wrote The Films of Hollis Frampton: A Critical Study, and he cowrote the Frampton artist catalog, Recollections/Recreations. ¹ For this three-hundred-page volume, Jenkins divided Frampton's writings into five broad sections: "Photography," "Film," "Video and the Digital Arts," "The Other Arts," and "Texts." Jenkins orders the essays within each section loosely by subject, rather than chronologically, with Frampton's own photography and xerography separating each of the five sections. This organization proves useful for referencing back to specific subjects or works, while complicating Frampton's own intellectual trajectory when reading the book beginning to end. Ultimately, this layout mirrors Frampton's own multidisciplinary approach.

Not surprisingly, the equally long "Photography" and "Film" sections account for approximately 80 percent of the book. The "Photography" section relies heavily on previously published historical analyses, exhibition reviews, and introductions of other photographers: Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Les Krims, and Marion Faller. Of particular note in this section is Frampton's earliest piece in the book, "Some Propositions on Photography," an unpublished manuscript from 1965. In this relatively straightforward manifesto, Frampton struggles to balance the many aspects of photography as an industry, a technology, and an art before concluding that the "artist in photography is responsible for the whole field of photographic activity, its merits and defects" (6).

Three of Frampton's most celebrated and cited compositions begin the "Film" section. In one of these essays, "For a Metahistory of Film," Frampton anticipates the orphan film movement as we know it today. He recognizes that of all the films ever made, "the likes of Potemkin make up a numbingly small fraction. The...