Make It Old: Hollis Frampton - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Make It Old: Hollis Frampton
contra Ezra Pound

GEORGE DERK

I visited Pound nearly every day during this time,
while he was finishing the part of his Cantos called
Section: Rock-Drill, commencing work on
Thrones—and had undertaken, for the benefit of
his visitors, to read aloud . . . and to annotate, oral-
ly, the entirety of the epic poem. Thus I became privy
to a most meaningful exposition of “the generation
of the ’80s.” At the same time, I came to understand
that I was not a poet.

—Hollis Frampton1

Hollis Frampton’s account of his time spent with Ezra Pound has come to
stand as an origin story of his artistic formation. Two special issues of this journal
(1985; 2004) were dedicated to examining Frampton’s filmography, with most of
the articles placing him squarely in the lineage of modernism’s originators.2
Even more than critics of his work, though, Frampton himself often appears
invested in solidifying his self-image as one of the modernist heirs apparent.
Throughout his life, he would consistently gesture at his place in this genealogy,
and in his final years, Frampton penned a brief bio for himself in a book of dia-
logues with sculptor Carl Andre that included the following line: “Studied (sat
around the lawn at St. Elizabeth’s) with Ezra Pound, 1957–58—that study is far
from concluded.”3

There is no denying that Frampton’s theoretical writings and artistic practice
owe much to the legacy of modernism and that his direct connection to one of its

1.
(Cambridge, MA: AVEC Presse, 1984), p. 109.

Quoted in Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations

2.
Annette Michelson introduces the first of the special issues by stating that its purpose is to
examine “that large project which identifies Frampton as claimant in the lineage of both Pound and
Joyce.” Annette Michelson, “Poesis/Mathesis,” October 32 (Spring 1985), p. 6. The second special issue
devoted to Frampton was October 109 (Été 2004).

3.
(Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981), p. 127.

Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963, éd. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

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OCTOBER

foremost practitioners supplied him with firsthand experience of its technical
opérations. But the degree to which Frampton endorsed the most central of mod-
ernist precepts and redeployed them in his own work has been overstated. Même
the above epigraph, for all its admiration for Pound, ends in a renunciation. While
Frampton’s early films, with their attention to the material properties of their
moyen, fully adhere to the modernist program, his unearthing of history in his
Magellan cycle (1972–1980) functions in opposition to the excesses of modernism
as well as to the troubling political manifestations that arose in conjunction with it.
Reconceptualizing Frampton’s career in relation to his artistic forebears as one of
revision, rather than emulation, opens a space for a more nuanced understanding
of the relationship between modernist poetics and postwar American avant-garde
cinema.4 Frampton, in particular, shows that these filmmakers developed a mod-
ernism for an inherently vernacular medium by turning not outward to the literary
arts but inward to film’s historical origin.

The Cantos and the Subject of History

Before delving into Frampton’s Magellan, it is necessary to understand what
Pound’s Cantos meant to Frampton, even if it ultimately supplied him with a nega-
tive example against which to base his own epic. Michael Bernstein’s The Tale of the
Tribe (1980) remains one of the most helpful accounts in grasping the larger aims
and the basic premises of this modern epic in verse. “One of the dominant goals
of The Cantos,” writes Bernstein, “a concern governing the work’s internal order
and historical stance, is just such a quest for the necessary structure of a new epic,
a structure that would emerge in the literary articulation of the poem itself and
not in its adherence to external criteria.”5 Unlike the methodical schemas that
other modernist writers would give their works, a sturdy foundational structure is
not a foregone conclusion for Pound; en effet, structure seems to be a sort of grail
that would organically reveal itself upon completion. In seeking such a form,
Pound utilizes four compositional strategies, according to Bernstein: the presenta-
tion of a mythic heritage; the use of a communal and not a singular voice; le
interpellation of the reader as a member of a tribe; and the bestowal of lessons
necessary for this group’s survival.6 The driving force is thus centripetal in all
aspects: to assemble a common history for and by a collective, so that it may fortify
itself as a whole to ensure its continued existence.

4.
For examples that read modernist poetry and avant-garde film as a continuum, see the fol-
lowing: P.. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Scott
MacDonald, “Poetry and the Avant-Garde Film: Three Recent Contributions,” Poetics Today 28, Non. 1
(Spring 2007), pp. 1–41; R.. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra
Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).

5.
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 11.

Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic

Ibid., p. 14.

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Frampton contra Pound

Bien sûr, the extent to which The Cantos achieves such a unity has long been
cast into doubt, and the authoritarian bent that pervades the poem, most pro-
nounced in its middle sections, calls into question what such a unity would look
like. The sense of alienation that inevitably overtakes even the most steadfast of
readers underscores the issue of exactly who belongs in this tribe; at times it
appears to consist only of Pound himself. The fact that some of the most famous
lines in the poem, specifically the apologia near the end, concede its failure to
cohere goes a long way in undermining any supposed achievement of order. À
the same time, the failure of The Cantos to cohere, its collapse of unity, may also be
what gives it value; as Bernstein contends, the “liberating fragmentation … in
effect transforms The Cantos from a totalitarian ideogram into an open-ended
grand collage. And it is exactly in this incomplete form that The Cantos has proved so
fruitful a model for subsequent writers.”7 More than most other literary works, Le
Cantos has come to stand more for what it does not do than for what it does, its
story more the one surrounding it than the one contained within it. Even for
Frampton, who witnessed an annotated reading by its author, the poem is beyond
redemption: “In its failure—and I believe that as a poem, as a whole work of art, it
is a failure, as Pound believed—it represents an incredible catastrophe within
modernist poetics. It is one of the supreme attempts, and it is one of the supreme
failures. It is an immense catastrophe.”8 Thus Frampton, aussi, identifies the dis-
tance between the intention and the result as the primary legacy of the poem.

For Frampton, the reason for the failure rests in Pound’s definition of the
genre to which the poem belongs. Pound succinctly summarized the epic, que
most expansive of literary forms, as “a poem including history.”9 But this funda-
mental component is precisely what Frampton sees as lacking in The Cantos:

I don’t think that it’s possible—and I suppose here my theoretical
Marxist leanings begin to emerge, at least—possible or feasible to bring
off a project of those dimensions without a theory of history, in a word.
And I don’t think Pound had one. Thereby unfortunately depends the
anti-Semitism. Pound didn’t have a theory of history; he had a child’s
view of history—namely, that it was quite clear that everything was
going downhill. (Californie, 183)

The simultaneous timelines that Pound weaves in and out of his epic—the
Renaissance, the Confucian era, early American history, the age of the trouba-
dours, the contemporaneous moment—can only really map onto each other if

7.
(Fall/Winter1985), p. 189.

Michael André Bernstein, “Robert Duncan and the Individual Tradition,” Sagetrieb 4, Non. 2/3

8.
Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: AVEC Presse, 2009), p. 183. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CA.

Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, éd.

9.
Directions, 1968), p. 86.

Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, éd. T. S. Eliot (New York: Nouveau

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OCTOBER

one disregards specific historical circumstances. Frampton elsewhere speaks of
Pound’s approach as constituting “the continuous copresence of everything,»
which necessarily depends on viewing the effects of time and geographical loca-
tion as negligible.10 If the past epochs that Pound includes in his all-encompassing
present are not really past, then they belong just as much to the contemporary
scene as any current event. Pound’s view of literary criticism further emphasizes
his belief that the past only matters in terms of the present: The work of the critic,
he maintains, is “analogous to that which a good hanging committee or curator
would perform in a National Gallery or in a biological museum. The ordering of
knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part
of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues.”11 This pragmatic
belief in criticism’s raison d’être hints at self-effacement: To practice criticism is to
lay the groundwork for future critics. En même temps, the remark exhibits a deep
skepticism as to history’s capacity to do anything but reflect present concerns: Le
past is inaccessible, the present inescapable. The statement is innocuous enough,
but if it is taken to the extreme—as arguably Pound does in his epic—a congru-
ence begins to emerge between this sort of anti-theory of history and fascism’s
simultaneous nostalgia for a mythic origin to support its radical overhaul of pre-
sent conditions.12

Frampton never directly links his own unique conception of history to his
belief that Pound’s inability to conceive of a viable theory of one resulted in the
faulty underpinnings of The Cantos. Yet Frampton’s numerous essays that take up
the subject convey his desire not to err as his predecessor had, and instead to crys-
tallize history as a dynamic, complex process, one that does not necessarily lend
itself to the imperatives of the present. Frampton sets himself the task of theoriz-
ing history in this manner when discussing Lumière’s puzzling claim that “the cin-
ematograph has no future.”13 What could be taken as an ironic lack of foresight
from one of cinema’s inventors Frampton instead interprets as a call to historicize:
“Until such a time as there is a past of some sort—a history furthermore, of some
sort—a past which has been examined, has been subjected to a critical, a theoreti-
cal analysis, there can be no future, because there is no apparatus for prediction
and extrapolation” (Californie, 180). Frampton’s entreaty for a rigorous historicism, un
based in both critical and theoretical traditions, presents itself as a possible reme-
dy to Pound’s ramshackle approach.

10.
p. 100.

Hollis Frampton and Peter Gidal, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” October 32 (Spring 1985),

11.

Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” p. 75.

12.
1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature 34, Non. 1 (Fall 2010), pp. 19–35.

David Barnes makes this point in “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in

13.
Camera Arts, p. 131.

Quoted in Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,»

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Frampton contra Pound

Film History as Metahistory

To call Frampton a rigorous historicist does not mean that he practices histo-
ry in any conventional way. Idiosyncrasy, a defining trait of all his essays, lequel
often include the adoption of personae like Robert Browning or Jorge Luis
Borges, is at the core of his historical project. Son 1971 essay “For a Metahistory of
Film” contains his most sustained and irregular consideration of the topic. He dis-
tinguishes between, on the one hand, the historian of cinema, who “faces the
appalling problem,” the impossible task, of accounting for every frame of all
extant feature films; et, on the other, the metahistorian, who invents a tradition,
who brings into focus “a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to
inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art” (Californie, 136). Le
historian searches for order; the metahistorian forges it. Whereas Pound’s solution
to the problem of abundance depended on a palimpsestic meshing of separate
eras into one, Frampton seems to take a cue from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” wherein the present enters into a matrix of relations with the
past to create an altogether new network of arrangements. The metahistorian,
moreover, does not privilege feature films above other forms, as does the histori-
un, but considers “instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography,
and much, much more” (Californie, 136). Anything recorded onto celluloid is fair game
for the metahistorian, who navigates such excess in order to put together patterns
of meaning.

In what resembles a filmic equivalent of the Borgesian infinite library,
Frampton posits an infinite cinema that will occupy the attention of the meta –
historian:

A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its
lens focused upon all appearances of the world. Before the invention of
still photography, the frames of the infinite cinema were blank, black
leaders; then a few images began to appear upon the endless ribbon of
film. Since the birth of the photographic cinema, all the frames are
filled with images. (Californie, 134)

And yet, in the same essay, having conceived of this never-ending filmstrip, he also
proclaims the death of cinema. According to Frampton, the cinema belongs to the
“Age of Machines,” which has now ended, rendering the cinema obsolete (Californie,
136). Paradoxically, it is only by turning the cinema into a relic of a bygone era
that the metahistorical goal of fathoming the sum total of all recorded images can
be achieved. Frampton concludes the essay by saying he “glimpse[s] the possibility
of constructing a film that will be a kind of synoptic conjugation of such a tour—a
Tour of Tours, so to speak, of the infinite film, or of all knowledge, which amounts
to the same thing” (Californie, 138). This glimpse is the germ of Magellan, Frampton’s
attempt not to produce the infinite cinema but to conduct a voyage by way of it
et, in doing so, compose a metahistory for film.

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OCTOBER

A Film Outside of Film

Magellan is metahistory in action. Brian Henderson describes this massive
work as “at once a cycle of films and one large cyclic film.”14 These cycles within a
larger cycle suggest a calendrical form, which Frampton planned to reinforce by
showing a segment or two each day of the year. The section entitled Birth of
Magellan covers the last two days of the annual cycle; Straits of Magellan, 720 un-
minute films (with two projected per day), spans the majority of the twelve
mois; Death of Magellan screens at the start of the New Year; finally, a series of
Frampton’s old films shows on the equinoxes and solstices as well as the filmmak-
er’s birthday. He completed only eight hours of the planned thirty-six before his
early death. Despite being only one-quarter complete, Magellan has been subject
to a number of critical accounts. En fait, its very incompleteness—the sheer
implausibility of ever finishing such an ambitious undertaking—seemed to be part
of the work itself. Frampton would express both the impossibility and the necessity
of reaching the end of it, sometimes in a single utterance: “This is something that
will never transpire. Although, bien sûr, I will do it eventually.”15 These paradoxi-
cal qualities—the improbable and the inexorable aspects of its realization—reflect
the same contradiction inherent in its source: the unfathomability of circumnavi-
gation prior to Magellan and the inevitability of its happening in due course.

Yet Frampton stressed that, compared to the precedent set by unfinished lit-

erary epics, film lacks any such model of incompleteness:

I cannot in the same sense assume the existence of film . . . film has not
thus far achieved levels of organization that are in any means compara-
ble with literature, and especially, I think it has not constituted itself as
a mode of production on the one hand or a field of cultural potentiali-
ties on the other such that it can contain the large work. This is film
outside of film, for the most part. So that I’m not interested nearly so
much in performing a special task within film as I am of, not seeking,
but redefining the boundaries of filmic discourse. So that my worries
aren’t the same as they would be if I were, par exemple, writing a 1,000-
page novel. I worry about other things, like, for instance, am I totally
haywire? Seriously. Am I going to finish this goddam thing? You see,
this is a serious problem. If you don’t finish an epic poem it is a more
or less magnificent ruin. The Canterbury Tales … The Cantos … This I
probably have got to finish or have blown the whole thing, in my own
esprit, since it has the problem of establishing its own context.16

14.
(Spring 1985), p. 135.

Brian Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan,” October 32

15.
https://www.kanopystreaming.com/product/screening-room-hollis-frampton.

Hollis Frampton, interview with Robert Gardner, Screening Room, Janvier 1977,

16.
Cinemanews 3/4 (Septembre 1978), p. 15.

Hollis Frampton, “St. Hollis (Part 2),” interview with Henry Hills and David Gerstein,

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Frampton contra Pound

Such a claim would appear to consign Magellan to oblivion. The instances of
metahistory that the fragments of Magellen do contain, cependant, constitute enough
of a foundation to justify the work of analysis. And if we are to take Frampton at
his word, that Magellan is a film outside of film, then the question arises: What is it
inside of, where does it belong? An example towards the beginning of Magellan
will demonstrate how Frampton enacts metahistory in three contexts—Odyssean,
sculptural, and archival—that stand in contradistinction to Pound’s own use of
them in The Cantos.

A Cinematic Circumnavigation

Magellan opens with the sounds of an orchestra tuning up and images of a
lightning storm, insinuating itself into an incipient, primeval setting. After this
prelude, it cuts between a scene from a contemporary wedding and a piece of
film’s early history, A Little Piece of String (1901). In the wedding video, the spatial
arrangement of those in the frame resembles that of String. The groom stands to
the left of the bride as another woman holds the fabric of the dress’s train. The lat-
ter clip presents a visual gag on politeness. A young man and young woman con-
verse while a second man notices a string dangling from the woman’s clothing. Il
pulls it until eventually, to his embarrassment, the woman’s dress falls apart. Le
juxtaposition of these clips in Birth of Magellan suggests not only that the display of
sexuality has been integral to the medium since film’s conception but also that the
medium itself is a form of striptease in its promise to reveal what it cannot actually
deliver. It is thus a proper initiation for a film based on a voyage around the world
that contains zero images of such.

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Hollis Frampton. Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I. 1977–80.
© Estate of Hollis Frampton.

OCTOBER

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Frampton. Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I. 1977–1980.
© Estate of Hollis Frampton.

A beginning that enacts a return to origins can also be found in The Cantos,
but the discrepancy between these returns intimates that Frampton and Pound
are conducting two different types of voyages. While Pound stated that “all poet-
ic language is the language of exploration,” beginning The Cantos with a transla-
tion of Homer imbues the epic with the feeling that everything has been preor-
dained and has, in a sense, already transpired: “The ocean flowing backward,
came we then to the place / Aforesaid by Circe.”17 The caesura gives the line an
antiquated meter, reinforcing its rearward motion by melding echoes of old
English verse with the content of Greek epic. The metrical inversions swim
against the flow of the line so that the meter inhibits the verse’s progression just
as much as it propels it forward. When Odysseus then encounters the shades of
his former crew members, this brief surfacing of the underworld makes plain
that Pound’s odyssey embarks with multiple acts of excavation.

In contrast to The Cantos beginning in retrograde, Frampton establishes an
orientation of immediacy to his source material. The most important primary
document on Magellan’s voyage is the journal kept by the passenger Antonio
Pigafetta, who “was a close observer and a scrupulous recorder, often writing in
his ever-present notebook during the actual occurrence of events.”18 Frampton

17.
Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 3.

Pound, “Vorticism,” Early Writings, p. 285. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Londres:

18.
Herman W. Liebert, « Avant-propos,” in Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account
of the First Circumnavigation, trans. and ed. R.. UN. Skelton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xi.

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Frampton contra Pound

reconceptualizes the activity of viewing in light of Pigafetta’s style of transcrip-
tion, an essential fact of which is its indiscrimination of subject matter written in
the moment in which the experience transpires. He wrote down anything and
everything—from observations on the climate and geography of where they
made landfall to records of the ship’s navigational coordinates, from descrip-
tions of the customs and dress of the peoples they encountered to the attempted
mutiny of his shipmates and the death of Magellan in battle. Frampton draws an
underlying connection between this scrupulous record-keeping and the manner
in which the earliest films were made; namely, a camera operator would load a
reel of film and start recording until the reel ran out. The defining feature of
this early technology is that too much would be recorded: Whatever happened
to pass in front of the lens, however extraneous or insignificant, would go into
the film. Like Pigafetta’s all-inclusive note-taking, the incidental details are just
as relevant as anything else.

This model of spectatorship based on a record of seafaring exploration
establishes a new set of relations to film. As Frampton explains it, the experience
of the film viewer blends with that of the filmmaker.19 The calendrical form of
Magellan turns watching into a daily, ordinary task like any other part of one’s
routine. En effet, Pigafetta’s journal makes it clear that exploration has its own
routinized operations. At every port, Pigafetta follows a checklist of details to
give an account of the location and its inhabitants, making the unfamiliar famil-
iar by compiling standardized information. For Frampton’s spectator, the images
stand in for the uncharted waters that the film attempts to navigate. Le
metaphor of circumnavigation contextualizes each scene, inviting the spectator
to look at the opening clip of the wedding, Par exemple, as though seeing a cere-
mony such as this for the first time. Frampton correlates a spectator’s disposition
toward the image to an explorer’s inclination for the unknown. And because
Magellan’s voyage ultimately circles back on itself, returning to its original point
of departure and encompassing the entire Earth, the ever-present implicit ques-
tion throughout Magellan is, How does each of its constituent parts fit into all of
film, into the infinite film that it approaches? Crosscutting between A Little Piece
of String and footage from a wedding implies a genealogy from the medium’s
beginning until the contemporary era, a study in contrasts not only of film at dif-
ferent moments in history but also of courtship, attitudes toward sexuality, gen-
der roles, dress, entertainment, and so on—numerous cultural customs and
norms that reincarnate the spectator as traveling diarist.

19.

Frampton, Screening Room.

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The second context to which the opening of Magellan belongs is sculptural.

In discussing the initial juxtaposition of clips, Michael Zryd contends:

Scalar Incongruities

Material from the point of origin of cinema is not valued for its own
sake (Frampton does not share certain archivists’ fetishization of early
film). En fait, in itself, A Little Piece of String is “idiotic.” The metahistori-
an searching for the quintessence of early film is faced with its “infan-
tile” rawness. Cependant, by appropriating A Little Piece of String, segment-
ing and intercutting it, and placing it within the larger conceptual
framework of Magellan, Frampton transforms its slim narrative into a
grand metaphor. This metaphor doubles back to ironize the grandeur
of its correlative, the already self-ironic Duchampian modernist master-
travail [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Même] it echoes.20

Frampton, who once quipped, “If Ezra is my father, then Rrose [Duchamp] is my
mother,” positions Magellan outside of film and inside sculpture by means of mon-
tage.21 Duchamp’s sculpture also appears to enact a fusion of frames. The struc-
ture stands nearly nine feet tall with its two large glass panes. The top “frame” con-
tains the mechanical bride with a cloud-like shape trailing behind her, lequel
Duchamp described as a “cinematic blossoming” of a halo or the Milky Way.22
Below, nine suitors and their chariot make up the bachelor machine, along with
nearby farming equipment including a mill and grinder. This montage of glass
panes separates “the mass-produced readymade from the readyfound.”23 The
inclusion of objects such as a comb, wheel, and shovel (the readymade) et le
amalgamation of assorted materials (the readyfound) resemble Frampton’s inte-
gration of stock wedding footage with the found film from the turn of the century.
In addition to the overlap of procedural method, Frampton and Duchamp see eye
to eye in how they want the spectator to engage with their work. Duchamp’s gen-
dering of the mechanical gears and levers of this primal agricultural apparatus
gives some indication of how it would operate, but in its unanimated and, like
Magellan, unfinished state, the spectator is left to imagine “the throbbing energy of
this robotic world.”24 Frampton follows Duchamp’s claim that he “attaches even
more importance to the spectator than to the artist” and takes it even further by
offering “the spectator the possibility of a posture that’s so active in relation to the

20.
(Été 2004), p. 141.

Michael Zryd, “History and Ambivalence in Hollis Frampton’s Magellan,” October 109

21.
Hollis Frampton,” October 109 (Été 2004), p. 116.

Quoted in Ragona Melissa, “Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of

22.
(New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co., 1960), n.p.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Même, trans. George Heard Hamilton

23.

24.

Ibid..

Richard Hamilton, “The Green Book,” in Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare, n.p.

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Frampton contra Pound

work that it borders on the utopian or is utopian” (Californie, 235). In regard to either
the Bride or Magellan, the spectator must consult each’s corresponding documents,
be they the clutter of notes in Duchamp’s The Green Box or Pigafetta’s journal and
Frampton’s essays. Both works use textual forms to supplement their visual ones,
entrusting the spectator to envision an ensemble.

Encore, even with the substantial scale of Duchamp’s sculpture, an incongruity
remains between its size and the forty-foot screen that Frampton intended to pro-
ject his film onto. Frampton’s outsized proportions hint at a tension in Magellan
between the notions of grandeur that exploration elicits and the imperialistic con-
sequences of such an odyssey. Mark McGurl has recently argued that problems of
scale can give rise to the colonial drive to assert mastery by reining in dispropor-
tion. McGurl’s most prominent example is Robinson Crusoe’s reaction to finding
a footprint larger than his own on the island. The inner turmoil caused by such a
contrast in scale “won’t be fully quieted until Robinson takes virtual colonial pos-
session of the racial other who is Friday and everything is adequately, realistically
explained to his satisfaction, the small triumphing over the large.”25 The same
could apply to the events that transpired on the southernmost tip of the Americas
during Magellan’s voyage. Pigafetta relates how they encountered people whom
he describes as “Patagonian giants” and how Magellan tricked two of them, chain-
ing them and taking them captive on one of the ships. They were to be presented
to the Spanish royalty upon their return, but they died in transit. This abduction
exemplifies the symbolic import of the first circumnavigation as a proclamation of
supremacy over the Earth’s boundary, a claim to dominion over the horizon itself
and a foundation for European colonial rule.

That Magellan’s voyage was not without a sordid underbelly was not lost on
Frampton. If the disparity between screen and sculpture evokes colonial conflict
through its scalar incongruity, the middle portion of the film, Straits of Magellan,
confronts it head-on. This section’s title locates it in the site of the kidnapping of
the “Patagonian giants” by Magellan. Frampton shot a number of sections from
Straits in a steel mill, capturing sprays of sparks and glowing embers, thereby locat-
ing this section in an inferno-like underworld. One clip jumps aboveground and
shows a boy holding a frog caught on a fishing line immediately in front of the
lens. The proximity of the boy to the camera magnifies his stature; he dwarfs even
the house in the background. In speaking about this clip, Frampton said, “The
frog looks so much like a little man that then the scale of the little child is magical-
ly changed.”26 The scene undoubtedly has a playfulness to it in how it upends spa-
tial perception, and perhaps exemplifies what McGurl identifies as the role of
giants in literature, which is to teach children how to understand themselves in
relation to larger objects, including giant-sized adults, by converting “a primary
human cognitive developmental necessity into an aesthetic structure of mobility

25.
Inquiry 43, Non. 2 (Hiver 2017), p. 411.

Mark McGurl, “Gigantic Realism: The Rise of the Novel and the Comedy of Scale,” Critical

26.

Frampton, Screening Room.

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OCTOBER

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© Estate of Hollis Frampton.

and mastery, the pleasure of measure.”27 When confronting larger-than-life figures—
this child who morphs into “a mighty hunter,” for example—the audience must
adjust, expending cognitive effort on what, before becoming automatic, had to be
learned in infancy. This temporary regression to the state of childhood inevitabili-
ty carries with it some delight. Yet the role reversal doubles as a reenactment of
Magellan’s seizure of the indigenous couple, the colonial other represented here
as subhuman from the perspective of Magellan and his crew. Frampton also spoke
of this scene as his “one-minute horror movie,” and however glib he might have
been, the implication is nevertheless present that it critiques the colonial project
as the manifestation of infantile urges, as signaling a sort of arrested development
that insists on the diminishment of the physiques of others as compared to the col-
onizers.

Pound, aussi, evokes the dynamics of sculptural dimensions by pitting mis-
matches of scale against each other, most memorably in the much-analyzed “magic
moment” of Canto 81 in The Pisan Cantos. George Kearns encapsulates the arc of
this canto as a movement “from egotism (me, my life), through participation in
traditions of craft and song, to humility and a sense of the prisoner’s true scale
within nature.”28 It is in the third division of the canto that the poet-prisoner
speaks the line “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.”29 The amplification of

27.

McGurl, “Gigantic Realism,” p. 414.

28.
Presse, 1980), p. 159.

George Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick: Rutgers University

29.

Pound, The Cantos, p. 521.

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Frampton contra Pound

the micro-creature is startling in itself, but the unspoken other side of the equa-
tion forms a picture of an utterly humiliated poet, lying on the ground and look-
ing up in awe at an insect. This line of pentameter, mostly iambic, goes against the
poet’s earlier declaration that he would break lines such as these. Despite speaking
of disproportionality, this orderly line defies the poet’s riotous intentions toward
the traditional lyric and humbles him in the process. A few lines down, the poet
reflects on his insight into the inversion of sizes: “Learn of the green world what
can be thy place / In scaled invention or true artistry.”30 Compared to the mono-
syllabic words in the first half of the sentence, the two trisyllabic words contract the
length of the second line, enacting the scalar diminution that the poet himself
undergoes. Although these lines have also been read as an entrenchment of
Pound’s aggressive defiance—thy could address the Allied nations just as easily as
Pound himself—they nevertheless convey that he at least contemplated the impli-
cations of proportionality via poetics.31 The famous refrain that follows, “Pull
down thy vanity / I say pull down,” continues to deflate the ambiguous addressee.
While Pound’s repentance or defiance is uncertain, the stylistic virtuosity of the
canto suggests that Pound also takes some pleasure in measure. Where Frampton
and Pound depart from each other in their respective use of scalar incongruity is
thus less in the possible critiques that they both levy but in how they locate the
pleasure of their craft. For Frampton, it’s a medium-intrinsic property—the screen
enlarges bodies that in turn make the spectator feel small—while Pound simulta-
neously presents a lowly self-image while elevating the register to its highest lyrical
potential, effecting an aestheticized grandeur in its virtuosic display.

Out of the Archive

Michael Zryd’s view that the metahistorian aims not to fetishize but to recon-
textualize early cinema captures an essential characteristic of Frampton’s attitude
toward archival material. Frampton made this point more or less when he said
there is nothing within “the structural logic of the filmstrip that distinguishes
‘footage’ from a ‘finished’ work,” and, par conséquent, “it may be possible for a
metahistorian to take old work as ‘footage,’ and construct from it identical new
work necessary to a tradition” (Californie, 136). This recourse to the already made owes a
debt to the verbatim rewriting of Don Quixote by Pierre Menard as imagined by
Borges: The context in which Menard composes the facsimile results in an original
work despite the fact than an identical work already exists. In this vein, Bruce
Jenkins considers the instances in Magellan when Frampton reaches into the
archive as establishing a “postauthorial understanding of cinema” that derives
from the original role of the filmmaker “as recorder and presenter inherent in the
conceptual and mechanical basis of cinema’s own first device, the cinematograph,

30.

Ibid..

31.
(Fall 1984), pp. 247–52.

On this issue, see Peter D’Epiro, “Whose Vanity Must Be Pulled Down?,” Paideuma 13, Non. 2

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OCTOBER

which functioned both as camera and projector.”32 Jenkins extends Zryd’s observa-
tion to suggest not only that Frampton treats the cinema as an archive but also
that he treats the antiquated technology as an archive in its own right. Plus loin, it is
possible to add another type of archive that Frampton sifts through: his own fil-
mography. The most illustrative example of this case spans Frampton’s entire artis-
tic career: He originally intended to use the title Hapax Legomena for a volume of
poetry but eventually applied it to a series of films that then became part of
Magellan.33 Frampton’s meshing of personal and historical archives ensures that
metahistory does not exile biography from its purview.

This propensity to recover an alternative tradition finds one final outlet in
film criticism. Frampton pinpointed what, to his mind, was the most underutilized
and least understood of all concepts of film theory. Surprisingly, it comes from
one of the most canonical of theorists on the subject for which he is most well
known: Sergei Eisenstein on cinematic montage. Frampton unearths a forgotten
component of Eisenstein’s writings, namely, vertical montage. If the influential
theory of montage focuses only on images, positing a dialectical relation between
sequential frames separated by a cut, vertical montage introduces the element of
sound into the equation. It is a concept that Frampton was still experimenting
with at the time of his death, but in his writings he stresses the possibilities he envi-
sioned in such a practice: “Vertical montage at least permits—I would suggest,
almost enforces—the simultaneous availability of essentially covalent chains of
causal linkage of one kind or another” (Californie, 242). He goes on to give an example
in which he introduces the noise of a jackhammer first to the image of a cactus
and then to the image of a river. He gives a rundown of the revolving set of associ-
ations between image and sound that this produces:

We have, d'un côté, a cactus, which is prickly, irritating, an abra-
sive thing, set against the pneumatic hammer, which is generally, même
in the abrasive sonic environment of the city, a particularly noticeable,
inescapable annoyance and interruption, likewise abrasive. On the
other, it is also true that the cactus is phallic in form and thereby,
because it is spiny, at least moderately sadistic in its implications. Et
the pneumatic hammer, of course, is a penetrating agency, which dis-
rupts what it penetrates and functions phallically in a painful and
destructive way. But then, of course, the image cut crosses the sound
cut and one does have something like the gentle image of flowing
eau. The valence of sound immediately changes entirely. (Californie, 242)

The vertical montage disrupts the initial sonic-visual equivalence between jack-
hammer and cactus, switching to a discordant relation between its two modalities.

32.

Bruce Jenkins, “The Red and the Green,” October 32 (Spring 1985), p. 91.

33.
Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 2008), p. 107.

P.. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford:

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Frampton contra Pound

In this instance, the inflated masculinity that the first combination presents is
exposed as an artifice, representative of what Frampton called “the supreme fic-
tion of film: that we’re hearing what we’re seeing.”34 In moving toward the de-syn-
chronization of sound and image, Frampton seems most interested in undoing
unnecessary constraints imposed by the expectations of realism and verisimilitude
in commercial film. Resurrecting the overlooked technique of vertical montage
demonstrates the task of metahistory: to lay the foundation for a more artistically
aware and a more self-conscious tradition of film history.

Critics of Frampton’s work have often lamented that he did not have the
chance to explore the possibilities of Eisenstein’s lesser-known theory further in
Magellan. Yet the beginning of the film gestures at more potential applications of
this added dimension to montage. Whenever Frampton cuts from A Little Piece of
String to the clips of the wedding, he overlays the sound of applause from an audi-
ence. When the bride and groom appear onscreen, sound and image are unwed-
ded from each other. The clapping echoes the atmospheric sounds of rain and
thunder in the overture and also anticipates the film’s end not only by signaling
the cessation of a performance but also by suggesting the thunderclap at the
beginning of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to which the finale of Magellan pays homage.
Thus the soundtrack of Magellan, like its calendrical structure, circles back on
lui-même. The recorded applause also subtly brings the two simultaneous perfor-
mances into relation with each other: the wedding and the cinematic projection.
By doing so, Frampton invites the spectator to consider how different types of
spectacles determine the expectations of audience behavior, especially the pecu-
liar phenomenon of applauding after a film. The repetition of the applause track
poses the question, When applause occurs in a movie theater, whom is it for?
Neither the director nor the actors are present to hear it, though it could be
understood as approbation sent from afar. Encore, like applause at a wedding that
both praises the newly married couple and gives an auditory confirmation that the
ceremony was indeed witnessed, this vertical montage hints that in those occasions
when the audience members clap for a film, they clap, in part, for themselves as a
collective, affirming the communal experience they just shared with one another.
This is the sort of action that Frampton wants Magellan to inspire in those who
view it: to claim a stake in the film and to realize that their role is just as essential
to it as his.

Frampton uses the archive to encourage a collaborative effort between the
spectator and himself; Pound, by contrast, resorts to it mostly in order to barricade
himself within, especially when facing the precarious situation of being impris-
oned in an outdoor cage at a U.S. military detention center during the composi-
tion of The Pisan Cantos. De plus, Frampton encourages spectatorial participa-
tion by breaking the unity of image and sound; Pound, by contrast, in his
moments of greatest distress strives against the overwhelming discord to find a

34.

Frampton, Screening Room.

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OCTOBER

resemblance between the visual signifiers and the verbal cadence of his verse. Un
possible example of this strategy is Pound’s use of the ideogram, which to him, dans
almost every case, stands for order and coherence. The ideogram’s appeal to
Pound, though, resides predominantly in its visual immediacy, in how its signifier
approaches transparency, lequel, as many critics have pointed out, is a result of
Pound’s superficial understanding of Chinese written characters.35 Sound does
not play a significant factor in Pound’s incorporation of the ideograms, et
indeed they seem to embody a peaceful silence when they appear in The Cantos,
like the paradisal quiescence that one of the final cantos venerates. A more apt
example of how Pound attunes image and sound is the motif of “Le Chant des
Oiseaux” that runs throughout The Pisan Cantos. This musical composition that
imitates birdcalls dates back to the sixteenth century, and Canto 75 consists almost
entirely of its score. The score is a rare insertion of an archival document in The
Cantos, one written not in Pound’s hand.36 The line that precedes the pages of
musique, “not of one bird but of many,” will be echoed by the self-referential ones in
Canto 94 (“This is not a work of fiction / nor yet of one man”), thereby giving this
chant of the birds a significance that bears on the entire symbolic structure of The
Cantos.37 Pound would, in fact, often resort to musical notation when asked to
explain his epic: In a letter to a friend he drew the notes of an F major chord on a
staff to explain the work’s organizing principle.38

References to birdcalls permeate the remainder of The Pisan Cantos. Le
poet, exposed to the elements while imprisoned in his open-air cell, spots a group
of birds on a wire fence that call to mind the piece of music not only because
singing birds evoke the composition’s title but also because the scene resembles an
image of notes on a scale. As the birds move around (“with 8 birds on a wire / ou
rather on 3 wires”) et autour (“4 birds on 3 wires, one bird on one”), their posi-
tions create an evolving score that the poet eventually transcribes:

f f

g
write the birds in their treble scale39

Pound fashions a hybrid form of writing music, part treble scale and part tabla-
ture, that reflects the combined image of birds and musical notes superimposed
over each other. Birds become letters become music, in other words. The canto
closes on a moment of crisis—“the loneliness of death came upon me / (à 3 P.M.,
for an instant)”—that then immediately transforms into one last birdsong: “three

35.
As Jessica Pressman puts it, “It is precisely because he did not read Chinese that Pound could
claim, as he did, that the Chinese ideogram is a universal medium for poetry.” Jessica Pressman, Digital
Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 2014), p. 140.

36.

37.

38.

39.

The score is written in the hand of Olga Rudge, a violinist and a mistress of Pound’s.

Pound, The Cantos, p. 450.

William Cookson, A Guide to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Londres: Croom Helm, 1985), p. xx.

Pound, The Cantos, p. 525.

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Frampton contra Pound

final half notes / their white downy chests black-rimmed / on the middle wire.”40
The distance between the notes disappears, resolving the avian counterpoint into
the tolling of a bell marking the moment when Pound expected to face execution
for treason. But the threat that this ringing would resound as his own death knell
subsides, and the final word of the canto, periplum, situated alone in the center of
the line, signals the voyage of the sun across the sky, the passage of a day and the
prolongation of the poet’s life. These birds provide comfort, respite, and brief har-
monious interludes for the prisoner from the impending dangers, both physical
and psychological. The image of the birds insulates the poet from the chaos with-
out by protecting the music within. This withdrawing from the world into an inner
realm thus contrasts with the opposing movement of Frampton, who dismantles
barriers, unsettling his film through discord between image and sound and expos-
ing it to extrinsic involvement.

A Vaudeville of Light

As much as the primary strategies of Frampton and Pound are antagonistic
to each other, it must be admitted that at least one significant overlap exists
between The Cantos and Magellan. Canto 47 identifies one of Pound’s central
odysseys with the directive “must thou sail after knowledge.”41 Following suit,
Magellan quests after the creation of a sort of epistemological logbook, ou, comme
Frampton puts it, “the largest possible inventory of modes of classifying and per-
ceiving experience.”42 And just as Pound presents The Cantos as “the tale of the
tribe” that imparts lessons necessary for the survival of the tribe, Frampton writes
in the essay in which he outlines Magellan, “Survival of our species depends upon
our having correct information at the right time” (Californie, 135). This survival instinct,
moreover, inheres within Frampton’s source material: Pigafetta, the voyage’s
diarist, beyond the wide scope of information he documented, “displayed another
quality important in a recorder, namely a remarkable faculty for survival.”43 Out of
the nearly 240 sailors who began the expedition, Pigafetta was one of only eigh-
teen to still be alive three years later when the voyagers returned to their point of
origin, and consequently his journal reads in part as a survival guide. If Frampton
and Pound share this same purpose—an epistemological end point that gives
them a direction to set their compasses to—it would seem to overshadow the dis-
crepancies between their diverging routes to arrive there and cast into doubt
whether Frampton actually seeks to separate his brand of modernism from the lit-
erary tradition established a generation earlier. Especially when one considers the
final completed portion of the film, Gloria!, one of the concluding segments of
Death of Magellan, the conspicuous allusions to the modernists, Joyce in particular,

40.

41.

42.

43.

Ibid., p. 527.

Ibid., p. 236.

Quoted in Henderson, “Propositions for the Exploration,” p. 144.

R.. UN. Skelton, “Introduction,” in Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, p. 7.

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OCTOBER

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further suggest that Frampton resolves to forsake a cinematic inheritance for a
literary one.

On the whole, cependant, Gloria! does not celebrate modernism’s legacy so
much as present it as one mode of classifying experience among many. It chal-
lenges modernism’s supremacy by interpolating into the metahistorical unveiling
of film’s forgotten origin. Gloria! is made up of two parts: The first displays digital
text over a green screen that involves Frampton’s reminiscences of his Irish grand-
mother, and the second consists of an early film version of the ballad of Tim
Finnegan. Frampton presents the reminiscences as propositions doubly ordered,
alphabetically and numerically, which flattens expressive language into digital
code. The tone owes something to the catechismal question-and-answer form of
the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses.44 The first proposition states: “1. That we belonged
to the same kinship group, sharing a tie of blood [UN]» (Californie, 253). Just as Joyce
engineers a disconnect between the discourse of Catholic instruction and the nar-
rative content, Frampton employs the discourse of programming to compose an
elegy for his grandmother. This digital art, the only instance of it in Magellan, com-
pletes the metaphor of circumnavigation by signaling the global connectivity made
possible by computer technology. The navigational circuit that Magellan’s ships
perform prefigure the fiber-optic internet cables strewn across the ocean floor.
This episode of homecoming also involves Finnegan’s resurrection, a conspicuous
nod to Joyce but, even more significantly, the capstone of Frampton’s metahistory,
the recovery of an alternative tradition for film. For Frampton, the origin of this

44.
Digital Modernism. See page 144.

Jessica Pressman draws the parallel between digital code and the style of “Ithaca” in Ulysses in

Frampton contra Pound

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tradition lies not in the movie theater but in the variety performances and magic
shows that interspersed film clips throughout miscellaneous other acts: “When
film was very new and was a real novelty you really would find films, little films,
shown in the middle of a kind of vaudeville of light.”45 This vaudeville of light—
comprising not only short films but everything from demonstrations of X-rays to
see inside the performer to phantasmagoria performances to terrify the audience
with spectral images projected onto clouds of smoke—would eventually be articu-
lated within film criticism as the cinema of attractions, giving a belated vindica-
tion to the realization of metahistory in Magellan.46

As much as high modernism permeates the films of Hollis Frampton, his own
epic reverses Pound’s dictum to “Make it new.” His voyage after knowledge ulti-
mately strives to make a new medium old, to return to its starting point and dwell
within it, to recuperate the burlesque beginnings that it sloughed off when the
industry of commercial filmmaking took over. Frampton’s ludic modernism, dans
turn, foregrounds the playfulness of the authors who—at least in his time—were
often mischaracterized as capable only of high-toned solemnity. Frampton often
cited an interview that Joyce gave in the ’30s in which he complained that no one
had yet observed the humor in Ulysses.47 But even with Frampton’s proclivity for
irreverence, the serious side of Magellan should not be entirely overlooked.

45.

Frampton, Screening Room.

46.
Garde,” Wide Angle 8, Non. 3/4 (Fall 1986), pp. 63–70.

See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-

47.

Frampton references this interview with Joyce in Recollections, p. 118.

OCTOBER

Metahistory is, après tout, a sincere search for a silly source. And while Frampton’s
epic-in-film bears the likeness of Pound’s epic-in-verse with regard to its global and
encyclopedic ambition, if one considers Frampton’s entire artistic output,
Magellan functions as his most significant point of divergence from Pound.
Reading The Cantos and Magellan contrapuntally leads to a new angle on
Frampton, complicating the notion that his modernism is a transposition or an
extension of the literary one he so admired. The contingent of postwar structural
filmmakers to which Frampton belonged produced much more than a sort of
delayed death rattle of the literary experimentalism that they were weaned on.
Frampton, who of all those filmmakers owed one of the greatest debts to the mod-
ernists, found a way through—one that did not leave behind formalist concerns
altogether but placed them alongside the trivial, the senseless, and the diverting
qualities inborn in the cradle of cinema.