Circles of Confusion: Film Photography Video Texts 1968 1980

by Hollis Frampton

199pp. Very Good+++. Foreword by Annette Michelson.

Genres: Film, Art

199 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Hollis Frampton was a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Among his best-known works are (nostalgia), Zorns Lemma, and the unfinished epic film cycle Magellan. He was one of the founders of the Digital Arts Laboratory in the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.

Reviews

[Eugene]

new american cinema figure who wrote a great film theory/history book... a great autodidact who took something like a year's worth of lunches with pound at the asylum... his learning and eccentricity comes across in his strange range and odd vocabulary--a little show-offy but incredibly vast. very quotable, e.g.:

"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. It is probably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses.
It is customary to mark the end of the Age of Machines as 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's Geography of the Body.
The notion that there was some exact constant 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."

[Stephen]

Eventually got through this weighted text. Very very interesting prose, especially those about the nature of narrative. Frampton is a non-denominational, multi-dimesional thinker. His words and their content provoke and probe. Amazing read, third-eye opening. Thank you Barbara Lattanzi for suggesting it.

[Geoffrey Rhodes]

A really amazing collection of essays on photography and film, including 'Fragments of a Tesseract', Frampton's essay on Eadweard Muybridge that inspired my thesis film.