The sequence of films (London screening, 2007) of the MAGELLAN series...
https://markwebber.org.uk/archive/categ ... -magellan/
http://hollisframpton.org.uk/frampton23.pdf
https://records.cmoa.org/things/dafba4b ... 661d1cc3b/
Originally intended as a 36-hour sequence in which individual titles would be shown on specific days in a calendar of one year and four days, it was left unfinished when Frampton died in 1984.
“A series of shaped observations that include portraits, cadaver footage, re-stagings of Lumière films, visits to slaughterhouses, double exposures, a field of peaceful dairy cattle, allusions to Muybridge, electronic imagery, industrial pictures, a state fair – a kind of capsule version of the twentieth century that might have been placed on the Voyager spacecraft as it soared out of the solar system to worlds unknown.”
—Robert Haller, Anthology Film Archives
I. The Birth of Magellan
CADENZA I AND XIV
1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
A prelude to Magellan’s universe, rife with allusions to Creation and Duchampian sexual puns: “The film about the bride in which two gentlemen, who we may presume to be bachelors, strip more or less bare a putative bride of some sort.” (HF)
MINDFALL I
1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Emerges out of HF’s experiments with sound and Eisenstein’s ‘vertical montage’: “If you start responding to every stimulus, then you end up as a nerve gas case, quite literally. All the neurons fire at once.” (HF)
MATRIX [FIRST DREAM]
1977-79, 16mm, colour, silent, 28 min
A film of multiple superimpositions, utilizing the images of SOLARIUMAGELANI (a film shown later in the cycle) and the hexagonal images that recur throughout Magellan.
PALINDROME [SECOND DREAM]
1969, 16mm, colour, silent, 22 min
An early film of HF’s which was later incorporated into Magellan: “The menacing Latin palindrome IN GIRVM IMVS NOCTE ET CONSVMIMVR IGNI (By night we go (down) into a gyre / and we are burned in fire) serves as an epigraph to this animated film.” (HF)
MINDFALL VII
1977-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
NOCTILUCA [MAGELLAN’S TOYS #1]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
“Designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle. The title (nox / luceo) means something that shines at night, i.e. the moon […] The second day of the cycle seems to be an inventory of the knowledge, machines, and arms that Magellan – and latter-day voyagers like HF – had at the outset of his journey.” (Brian Henderson)
II. The Straits of Magellan
PUBLIC DOMAIN
1972, 16mm, b/w, silent, 14 min
A found-film composed of early films, arranged alphabetically according to copyright title, all readily retrievable / quotable fragments from our finite federal version of the “infinite film / the paper print collection at the Library of Congress.” (Bruce Jenkins)
STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min
Directly inspired by the Lumière brother’s actualities, these one-minute films (49 of which are collected in Drafts and Fragments), are arranged around the circumference of the Magellan Calendar. Named Panopticons, they allude to Jeremy Bentham’s famous plan for a prison, and point to the dark ironies of Magellan’s Enlightenment project.
INGEIMM VIBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT [VERNAL EQUINOX]
1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 62 min
Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s nude motion studies, this film was intended to be shown in 13 parts distributed equally through the calendar year.
SUMMER SOLSTICE [SOLARIUMAGELANI 2]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 32 min
“The operations that dislocate a film like Summer Solstice – I hope irreparably – from being a movie about the locomotion and eating habits of cows, a dairy film document or what have you, are finally of a whole lot less concern to me than the following things: how it looks, the sense that probably it was done deliberately, the pleasure or displeasure – the intrigue possibly – of attempting to retrieve the manner in which it was done while one is watching.” (HF)
STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min
PAS DE TROIS
1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
An analysis of film’s persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema’s flicker and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus.
INGEIMM VIBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT [VERNAL EQUINOX]
1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 62 min
AUTUMNAL EQUINOX [SOLARIUMAGELANI 3]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 27 min
The cows of Summer Solstice reappear, here filmed in a slaughterhouse, animated by HF’s revelation that animals are as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside.
WINTER SOLSTICE [SOLARIUMAGELANI 4]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 33 min
Shot in a steel mill, “a pre-textual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors” (HF), this film’s rhythmic and compositional textures pay tribute not only to Eisenstein and Vertov, but also to Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.
STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS [PANOPTICONS]
1974, 16mm, silent, 51 min
“A sampling of 49 fragments from Frampton’s catalogue of ‘actualities,’ the films from Straits Of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments are all silent and unedited. Several invoke directly the work of the Lumières, as in Frampton’s reworking of Démolition d’un mur (1895), in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumières’ wall. He makes reference to his own work … and pays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that include a series of appropriated ‘lenses’ (a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of ‘screens’ (a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).” (Bruce Jenkins)
THE RED GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART I]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 52 min
In The Red Gate and The Green Gate the primary imagery comes from a human anatomy laboratory in tribute to and (in contestation with, Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971). The films were to be divided into 24 sections, each section to be projected, right side up and forwards, and upside down and backwards according to the Magellan Calendar.
THE GREEN GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART II]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 53 min
STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS 1 [PANOPTICONS]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min
THE RED GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART I]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 52 min
THE GREEN GATE [MAGELLAN AT THE GATES OF DEATH: PART II]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 53 min
STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS 1 [PANOPTICONS]
1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 51 min
III. The Death of Magellan
APPARATUS SUM [STUDIES FOR MAGELLAN: #1]
1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
“A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a room of cadavers.” (HF)
OTHERWISE UNEXPLAINED FIRES [MEMORANDA MAGELANI]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 14 min
“Filmed in large part during HF’s lecture-screening tour of the [San Francisco] Bay area: Visits to the Musée Méchanique, Land’s End, the Cliff House […] A visit to the Brakhage Colorado residence provided images of chickens / roosters.” (Gail Camhi)
QUATERNION [PARES MAGELANI]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
A visual dialogue with the artist James Rosenquist: “A safari by Hollis into the categorical domains of artifactual debris.” (Patrick Clancy)
YELLOW SPRINGS [MAGELLAN: VANISHING POINT #1, PARES MAGELANI]
1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
“A portrait of the filmmaker Paul Sharits, in particular response to energies he generated one May afternoon in 1971.” (HF)
FOR GEORGIA O’KEEFE [PARES MAGELANI]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
An exquisite homage to O’Keefe’s “Radiator Building, Night.”
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE [TEMPORA MAGELANI]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
HF’s affinity with Duchamp informs this film: If Eisenstein remade Anemic Cinema (1926), this film might have been the result.
NOT THE FIRST TIME [TEMPERA MAGELANI]
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
“The viewer is engaged in a process of double vision that returns him to the image and subject in a manner more complex, more self-aware, and more temporal than the way most of us view photographs.” (Fred Camper)
TIGER BALM [MEMORANDA MAGELANI #1, MENS MAGELANI]
1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena, 1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in colour, a celebration of generative humours and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard … and consecutive matters.” (HF)
PROCESSION
1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
inc. BANNER, USA, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 40 sec / DRUM, USA, 1975, 16mm, colour, silent, 20 sec / TUBA, USA, 1976, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
A collection of three short films: “A trip to the New York State Fair filtered through a most rarefied formal film.” (Scott MacDonald)
GLORIA!
1979, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
The last film of HF’s oeuvre and the last completed for Magellan, this film encapsulates the meta-history of cinema, bridging early cinema and video, and distils Magellan’s themes: the tension between image and language, Frampton’s ‘sentimental science’, tradition and memory, and the persistence of death.
