Bibliography:

Primary sources

Jenkins, Bruce. Frampton, Hollis. Krane, Susan. Faller, Marion. (1984) Hollis
Frampton: recollections/recreations Buffalo, N.Y.: MIT Press.

 Presentation of first hand material of Frampton’s photographic works.

Included are early explorations portraits of Carl Andre, Frank Stella and John
Chamberlain; works influenced by Edward Muybridge, E. J. Marey and
Edward Weston; and his late explorations into new technologies like
xerography and color photography. Contains annotations by the writer,
biographical information a catalogue of the artist exhibitions and career.

Frampton, Hollis. (Eds.) (2012) A Hollis Frampton Odyssey. Irvington, NY: The
Criterion Collection.

 The only DVD collection of Frampton’s films. It contains: Early films: Manual
of arms; Process red; Maxwell's; Surface tension; Carrots & peas; Lemon;
Zorns Lemma; Films from Hapax Legomena; and films from the series
Magellan.

Frampton, Hollis, Jenkins, Bruce. On the camera arts and consecutive matters: the
writings of Hollis Frampton. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, [2009]

Frampton, Hollis (1968). "Film in the House of the Word, "in Circles of Confusion:
Film/Photography/Video Texts

 Hollis Frampton, apart from a photographer and a filmmaker, was a prolific

writer. These are the two main collections of his text, rich in information
about the self-understanding of his practice, and aesthetics and history in
general. The most important essays of this collection are:

-------------- (1971) "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and

Hypotheses," Artforum (September), 1971, p. 32-35. Included in On the camera arts
and consecutive matters.

 Notes on a possible History of film, considering History not as histories, but

as an investigation in the possibility of becoming. The question is important
for Frampton, as he latter would characterize his practice as trying to make
film, as it should have been. To understand the meaning of history for
Frampton, thus, is to investigate the immanent possibilities for change in the
phenomena of film and this essay becomes essential in those terms.
-------------- (1972) "Digressions on the Photographic Agony," Artforum. November
1972. p. 43-51. Included in On the camera arts and consecutive matters.

--------------(1972). "Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract." in 'Circles of

Confusion', in Film. Photography. Video. Texts 1968-1980. Rochester: Visual Studies
Workshop Press. p. 69-80. Included in On the camera arts and consecutive matters.

-------------- (1972) "Meditations around Paul Strand," Artforum (February), p. 52-57.

Included in On the camera arts and consecutive matters.

 These three essays are key to understanding Frampton’s contributions to

photography and his understanding of its history. The first one more general
and discursive, the second and third more specific and analytic. Frampton
approaches the history of photography as a whole from the “unity of the
idea”, like in his film essay pointed above, to trace the practical possibility of
the new. On the second and third essays he reflects more particularly in the
works of Paul Strand and Eadweard Muybridge, developing notions of time,
language and space more in depth.

-------------- (1972) "Nostalgia: Voice-Over Narration for a Film of that Name," Film
Culture (Spring), p. 105-111.

-------------- (1972) "Notes on Nostalgia," Film Culture (Spring), p. 114.

 Notes on Frampton’s self-understanding of film at the moment of his

realization of Nostalgia, film belonging to the series Hapax Legomena.
Contains important insights on the nature of the film and the authors might
concern on the late part of his career. It also reflects upon the nature of
language and film.

-------------- (1972) "A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative," in Form and
Structure in Recent Film (Catalogue), Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC

-------------- (1974) "Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity," Art Forum

(October), p. 38-50.

 Frampton’s late investigations on the nature of film, photography, image and

history. Notes on the issue of time and technology, he considers language a
technology throughout, especially as reflecting upon the problem of
narrative, continuity and the formal spontaneity of art.

-------------- (1974). "The Withering away of the State of the Art", in The New
Television, p. 35. Also included in Circles of Confusion.
-------------- (1975) "Notes on Composing in Film." October 1, (Spring) p. 109.
Vasulka archive. Included in On the camera arts and consecutive matters.

--------------- (1978) "Mind Over Matter," October (Fall), p. 83-92. Included in On the
camera arts and consecutive matters.

--------------- (1981) "Film in the House of the Word," Vasulka archive. Included in On
the camera arts and consecutive matters.

-------------- (1985). "Erotic Predicaments for Camera," October, p. 32, 56-61.

Included in On the camera arts and consecutive matters.

--------------- (1986) "Mental Notes," CEPA Quarterly 1 (Summer), p. 7. Included in On

the camera arts and consecutive matters.

 Short series of theoretical essays on the idea of film, the state of art, reissuing
problems treated before about the relationship of language and images,
history, time, the relationship of Mind and Matter (or the Kantian idea of self-
understanding, Judgment as the mediator of Nature and Spirit, Pure Reason
and Reason). Some of the most important insights on Frampton practices to
be found.

Frampton, Hollis. Hollis Frampton - Pamphlet File: Print.

 Special Collection item, contains original letters, non-published writings and
exhibition catalogues.

Interviews

Frampton, Hollis. Gardner, Robert. (Eds.) (2005) Hollis Frampton. Cambridge, Mass.:
Studio 7 Arts.

Gidal, Peter (1985) "Interview with Hollis Frampton," October, XXXII (Spring), 93 -
118.

Henderson, Brian. (1986) "Hollis Frampton's For Georgia O'Keeffe," CEPA Quarterly
2 (Fall), 1-2.

Jones, Alan. (1989) "Letters From Frampton," Arts Magazine (Summer), 19-20.

Mekas, Jonas (1973) "Interview with Hollis Frampton," The Village Voice (January
11).

Snow, Michael (1970) "Hollis Frampton Interviewed by Michael Snow," Film Culture
(Spring), 6-12.
  Series of interviews which have the author discussion about issues
mentioned before: notions of the state of art, the self-understanding of
history, and notions of time and space; the idea of language and its
relationship with film and image; specific question about Frampton’s films
also emerge, which give further conception into author consciousness of his
own practice.

Secondary Sources:

Bershen, Wanda. “Zorns Lemma” Arforum (New York), vol.10, no. 1, Sep., pp. 41-45.
1972
 In-depth analyses of Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, a non-narrative film
structured around a 24-letter, and its arbitrary relationship to images. The
review is focused on the discourse of structural film and Frampton’s
participations in it.

Cornwell, Regina (1972). "Some Formalist Tendencies in the Current American

Avant-Garde Film,” Kansas Quarterly, 4 (#2, Spring), 60-70.

Field, Simon (1972) "Alphabet as Ideogram," Art and Artists (August), 22-26.

Fischer, Lucy (1979) "Frampton and the Magellan Metaphor," American Film, 4
(May), 58-63.

Simon, Bill (1972) "New Forms in FIlm," Artforum (October), 82.

 Understanding of Frampton’s films as a continuity of modernism, self-

reflecting medium specific notions. It treats the reified notion of formalism as
it seems to appear in a new form, manifest itself differently. Thus, it concerns
the continuity of Frampton’s film with the larger discourse of modernism.

Michelson, Annette (1985) "Frampton's Sieve," October , XXXII (Spring), 151 - 166.

Michelson, Annette (1983) ”TIME OUT OF MIND: a foreword.” Also included in

Circles of Confusion

 Annette Michelson controversial evaluations about Frampton’s films,

including her understanding of Frampton’s reconfiguration of time and
space. She also deals with notions of memory and its useful with respect to
her ideas of film language and language, which are problematized in
Frampton’s films.
Segal, Mark (1971) "Hollis Frampton/Zorn's Lemma," Film Culture, 52 (Spring), p.
85-95.

Simon, Bill (1978), "'Reading' Zorns Lemma," Millennium Film Journal.

(Spring/Summer) p. 38-49. Sitney, P. Adams (1970) "Structural Film" in Film
Culture Reader. New York:

 Review of Frampton’s film Zorns Lemma, which specifically deals with the
relationship between language and film image as pointed before. The
discourse is situated around structuralist notions of film.

Sitney, P. Adams, ed. The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New
York: New York University Press, xxxi-xliv, 228-232, and passim.

Sitney, P. Adams (1972) The Films of Hollis Frampton. (Catalogue) Walker Arts
Center, Minneapolis.

 P. Adams Sitney’s ideas on Hollis Frampton’s films as they related to the issue
of structuralism, i.e. the structured of a film image around medium specific
forms. In Frampton, he specially focuses on the language of film and how it
organizes itself around other forms of material, such as language itself.

Jenkins, Bruce. (1983) The films of Hollis Frampton: a critical study Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University.

 Thesis aspiring to indicated a different reading to Hollis Frampton’s films, i.e.

a reading opposed to structuralist tendencies and based on authorial
understanding and biographical information. It points to the possible faults
of the reading proposed by the texts emphasized above.

The general picture of Frampton’s text is controversial. On the one hand we have the
authors self-understanding of his practice, it presents us with a desired of continuity
of a modernist enterprise, albeit this is understood differently. Frampton’s
modernism is not medium specific; he redefines modernism as a matter of History
understood as a category of Freedom. He bases his enterprise in the Idea, presented
before by philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, that there are two different kinds of
concepts: concepts of Nature and concepts of Freedom. Frampton’s self-
consciousness of History, as different from merely “what happened” or “the past”,
crystalizes on his project to create “film as it should have been”; namely as it “ought”
and “should” be, rather than as it is. This subjective transformation of the object of
History related him also in different level to language, as another category that can
be merely discourse (or “what is”) or can dialectically related to its own Nature and
search for the conditions for the possibility of becoming, the creation of the new and
the different from the given and the same.
On the other hand, the critics, based on structural methods taken from post-
modernism and phenomenology, emphasize a different approach to the same
material. The issue of transformation is replaced for that of representation, as if they
antinomies rather than dialectical propositions. The necessary forms of appearances
that interest the critics can be summarized on an interest on puns, double meanings,
ambiguities, i.e. a semiotic understanding of signifier and signified, which in their
apparent play present, a different discourse. Thus, there are notions of the use of
sound and image, image and words, sound and words, time and space, etc. The
breakthrough of these dialectical antinomies bathes the critiques.

This self-consciousness of art proposes a dialectically opposite moment in critique

(or Hegel notion of Science or philosophy). This can be seen in Frampton’s own
criticism, specially as it points to its practical necessity, like in the essays on
Muybridge and Strand. The critics, however, cataloged above, seem to overlook the
more general implications of Frampton’s films, not as they affect perception, but as
they change the possibility of representation, i.e. Imagination. Frampton’s
enterprise is then Naturalized, as what is looked on is merely how does relate to
“what is”. There are exceptional cases, which I would like to point out throughout
the paper. In short, Frampton’s critics might fall below the level of theory by
disregarding the contradictions presented by the work itself and overlooking
theories possibility of judgment.

Being the notion of language’s, seeing and reading as praxis, one of the most
interesting contradictions in Frampton’s work, I pretended to demonstrated
Frampton’s self-understanding, shown through his writings and his works, as
pointing beyond the apparent antinomies presented by his critics. Frampton’s
understanding of language form example, as relating to his investigations on Ezra
Pound, on his films Nostalgia and Zorns Lemma, and his self-consciousness
modernist approach points to the rather continuity rather than a separation on
what has been cataloged as two kinds of modernism. Additionally, Frampton’s
wholes enterprise reassesses the vulgar understanding of modernism as medium
specific, to a broader concern with History. The redefinition of modernism, the
salvage of the category of history, show the realistic concerns of the critics as one
sided, unconcerned with the work as a whole. For this to be true, I will prove that
Frampton’s self-criticism approaches to a rather more accurate model of what critic
must do, in trying to understand the historical position of works of the past and his
own, pointing out to the possibility of what lies beyond and promoting thus a
different notions of what it means. I reflect on this latter point with respect to the
now antique notions of aesthetical education, as proposed by philosophers such as
Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Nietzsche, Lukács, Adorno, and its connection with politics.