For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses (1971)
Wiedergabe in Auszügen aus: Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters. The Writings of Hollis Frampton, hg. v. Bruce Jenkins, Cambridge, MA 2009, S. 131–139. Zuerst in: Artforum 10, Nr. 1, 1971, S. 32–35.
„Considered one of the most brilliant artist-thinkers of the modern American avant-garde, Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) is best known as a structuralist filmmaker, though he was also at various times a poet, photographer, essayist and film theorist, later working in video and „computer-generated, -controlled & -processed image, sound & text“ which included designing programs at the dawn of the computer age. […] In 1958, Frampton relocated to New York and began a career as a freelance art photographer while working as a photo lab technician. […] By the late 60s, he was making and exhibiting films on a regular basis – including the formalist classics Surface Tension (1968), Lemon (1969), Zorns Lemma (1970), Critical Mass (1971) and (nostalgia) (1971). […] In 1973, he joined the faculty at SUNY Buffalo, where he helped develop the illustrious Center for Media Study—shortly joined by fellow pioneers in the arts Tony Conrad, Woody and Steina Vasulka, James Blue, Paul Sharits and Peter Weibel. […] Cinematically, Frampton spent most of the decade and thereafter concentrated on his calendrical film cycle, Magellan, intended to be over thirty-six hours long, yet remained incomplete at the time of his death. In his later years, Frampton also created xerographic and photographic works and pursued his interest in computer science, founding with Woody Vasulka a Digital Arts Lab at the university, the first of its kind in the country.“ (Harvard Film Archive, [→Link])
“The cinematograph is an invention without a future.”
Louis Lumière
Kommentar: Abweichend zu der Angabe Framptons wird das Zitat gelegentlich auch Antoine Lumière, dem Vater der berühmten Kinopioniere, zugeordnet. (Elsaesser/Hagener 2007, S. 9, vgl. auch Elsaesser 2002)
Once upon a time, according to reliable sources, history had its own Muse, and her name was Clio. She presided over the making of a class of verbal artifacts that extends from a halflight of written legend through, possibly, Gibbon.
A Metahistory of Film
The relationship between cinema and still photography is supposed to present a vexed question. Received wisdom on the subject is of the chicken/egg variety: cinema somehow ‚accelerates‘ still photographs into motion.
Implicit is the assumption that cinema is a special case of the catholic still photograph. Since there is no discoverable necessity within the visual logic of still photographs that demands such ‚acceleration,‘ it is hard to see how it must ever happen at all.
lt is an historic commonplace that the discovery of special cases precedes in time the extrapolation of general laws. (For instance, the right triangle with rational sides measuring 3, 4, and 5 units is older than Pythagoras.) Photography predates the photographic cinema.
So I propose to extricate cinema from this circular maze by superimposing on it a second labyrinth (containing an exit) – by positing something that has by now begun to come to concrete actuality: we might agree to call it an infinite cinema.
A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focussed upon all the appearances of the world. Before the invention of still photography, the frames of the infinite cinema were blank, black leader; 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.
There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema film strip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.
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History views the marriage of cinema and the photograph as one of convenience; metahistory must look upon it as one of necessity.
Kommentar: #Vertov/Benjamin
Frampton schlägt die Idee des „infinite cinema“ vor, indem er konstatiert, dass es immer eine Kamera gebe, die auf alle Erscheinungen der Welt gerichtet ist.
2013/14 realisierte das Museum of Modern Art die Ausstellung ‚Images of an Infinite Film‘, die um den Begriff Framptons eine Reihe künstlerischer Arbeiten (Kerry Tribe, Paul Sharits, David Lamelas, Nan Hoover) gruppierte. [→Link]
The Age of Machines
I was born during the Age of Machines.
A machine was a thing made up of distinguishable ‚parts,‘ organized in imitation of some function of the human body. Machines were said to ‚work.’ How a machine ‚worked‘ was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shape of its ‚parts.‘ The physical principles by which machines ‚worked‘ were intuitively verifiable.
The cinema was the typical survival-form of the Age of Machines. Together with its subset of still photographs, it performed prizeworthy functions: it taught and reminded us (after what then seemed a bearable delay) how things looked, how things worked, how to do things … and, of course (by example), how to feel and think.
We believed it would go on forever, but when I was a little boy, the Age of Machines ended. We should not be misled by the electric can opener: small machines proliferate now as though they were going out of style because they are doing precisely that.
Cinema is the Last Machine. lt is probably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses.
lt is customary to mark the end of the Age of Machines at the advent of video. The point in time is imprecise: I prefer radar, which replaced the mechanical reconnaissance aircraft with a static anonymous black box. Its introduction coincides quite closely with the making of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Willard Maas‘ Geography of the Body.
Kommentar: #Werke
The notion that there was some exact instant at which the tables turned, and cinema passed into obsolescence and thereby into art, is an appealing fiction that implies a special task for the metahistorian of cinema.
The Metahistorian of Cinema
The historian of cinema faces an appalling problem. Seeking in his subject some principle of intelligibility, he is obliged to make himself responsible for every frame of film in existence. For the history of cinema consists precisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatever.
[…]
The metahistorian of cinema, on the other hand, is occupied with inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art.
Such works may not exist, and then it is his duty to make them. Or they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And then he must remake them.
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There is no evidence in the structural logic of the filmstrip that distinguishes ‚footage‘ from a ‘finished’ work. Thus, any piece of film may be regarded as ‚footage,‘ for use in any imaginable way to construct or reconstruct a new work.
Therefore, it may be possible for the metahistorian to take old work as ‚footage,‘ and construct from it identical new work necessary to a tradition.
Wherever this is impossible, through loss or damage, new footage must be made. The result will be perfectly similar to the earlier work, but „almost infinitely richer.“
What Cinema is
Cinema is a Greek word that means ‚movie.‘ The illusion of movement is certainly an accustomed adjunct of the film image, but that illusion rests upon the assumption that the rate of change between successive frames may vary only within rather narrow limits. There is nothing in the structural logic of the filmstrip that can justify such an assumption. Therefore we reject it. From now on we will call our art simply: film.The infinite film contains an infinity of endless passages wherein no frame resembles any other in the slightest degree, and a further infinity of passages wherein successive frames are as nearly identical as intelligence can make them.
Kommentar: Ausgehend von der Herkunft des Wortes ‘Kino’ (griech: kinēma= ‚Bewegung’) unterscheidet Frampton zwischen den Begriffen ‘movie’ und ‘film’. Da Frampton das Bewegungsphänomen nur als einen ‘Zusatz’ des Films betrachtet und den fotografischen Filmstreifen als dessen eigentliche Basis ausmacht, bevorzugt er den Begriff ‘Film’.
The Last Machine
I have called film the Last Machine.
From what we can recall of them, mechanics agreed roughly with mammals in range of size. The machine called film is an exception. We are used to thinking of camera and projector as mechanics, but they are not. They are ‚parts.‘ The flexible film strip is as much a ‚part‘ of the film machine as the projectile is part of a firearm. The extant rolls of film out-bulk the other parts of the machine by many orders of magnitude.
Since all the ‚parts‘ fit together, the sum of all film, all projectors and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine, which is by far the largest and most ambitious single artifact yet conceived and made by man (with the exception of the human species itself). The machine grows by many millions of feet of raw stock every day.
lt is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.
If we are indeed doomed ro the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe, and fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe, it is reasonable to suppose that such an artifact will resemble the vaults of an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film.
If film strip and projector are parts of the same machine, then ‚a film‘ may be defined operationally as ‚whatever will pass through a projector.‘ The least thing that will do that is nothing at all. Such a film has been made. lt is the only unique film in existence.
Kommentar: Frampton konzeptualisiert den Film als eine Maschine. Alle Filme, Projektoren und Kameras sind Teil dieser gigantischen Maschine, die mit jedem Film, der gemacht wird, weiter anwächst. Das Kino sei darüber hinaus auch die letzte Maschine, d.h. die letzte Kunst, die unseren Geist über die Sinne (Wahrnehmung) erreicht.
[…]
The act of making a film, of physically assembling the film strip, feels somewhat like making an object: that film artists have seized the materiality of film is of inestimable importance, and film certainly invites examination at this level. But at the instant the film is completed, the ‚object‘ vanishes. The film Strip is an elegant device for modulating standardized beams of energy. The phantom work itself transpires upon the screen as its notation is expended by a mechanical virtuoso performer, the projector.
Kommentar: Frampton bemerkt, dass der Film (wie die Musik) keine Objekte hervorbringe. Die Herstellung eines Films, wie z.B. die eines Filmstreifens (heute DVDs, Blurays usw.), produziere zwar Objekte, doch diese sind, sobald der Film fertiggestellt ist, lediglich Mittel zur ‘Modulation standardisierter Energiestrahlen’. Das auf der Leinwand erscheinende ‘Phantom’ ist das Werk eines ‘mechanischen Virtuosen’, dem Projektor, der den Notationen eines Filmstreifens folgt.
[…]
Film has finally attracted its own Muse. Her name is Insomnia.
Eaton, New York
June, 1971
Literatur:
Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt/M. 2007
Thomas Elsaesser, Eine Erfindung ohne Zukunft. Thomas A. Edison und die Gebrüder Lumière. in: ders., Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels, München 2002, S. 47–68
Thomas Elsaesser und Malte Hagener, Filmtheorie zur Einführung, Frankfurt/M. 2007
Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters. The Writings of Hollis Frampton, hg. v. Bruce Jenkins, Cambridge, MA 2009
Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video. Texts 1968–1980, Rochester 1983
Mark B.N. Hansen, Digital Technics Beyond the “Last Machine”, Thinking Digital Media with Hollis Frampton, in: Eivind Røssaak (Hg.), Between Stillness and Motion. Film, Photography, Algorithms, Amsterdam 2011, S. 45–73
Ressourcen:
The Hollis Frampton Collection, Harvard Film Archive, [→Link]