In November 2004, Princeton University and Anthology Film Archives put together a week of activities focusing on the work of maverick filmmaker Hollis Frampton, an event meant to coincide with the (Summer 2004) publication of October #109, which contained several significant new readings into Frampton’s work. Not wanting to see those events go by without appropriate recognition here on the West Coast, we have organized this ad hoc screening.

Hollis Frampton was a conceptual holographer. His films build thought-sculptures in the attentive mind. He played with the mental language of film like no other (perhaps David Larcher does so with Video-Void). Frampton anticipated the computer-made film. His major project, Magellan, was intended to be viewed over the course of a year, a film a day, or in various configurations. Nothing less than a metahistorical inventory of the totality of films formal and material possibilities (and unfortunately left incomplete at the time of Frampton’s death in 1984), Magellan stand as perhaps the most ambitious and conceptually challenging projects in the history of cinema.

Our screening June 19 represents a subjective selection of films from the Magellan cycle, none of which have screened publicly in the Bay Area in over ten years, to include:

Drafts And Fragments: Straits Of Magellan (1974)
Mindfall, Part I & VII (1980)
More Than Meets The Eye (1979)
Otherwise Unexplained Fires (1976)
Palindrome* (1969)
Tiger Balm (1972)
Yellow Springs (1972)

*NOTE: Palindrome is not really part of Magellan.