Hollis Frampton

At long last, we have an authoritative guide to the work of one of experimental film's most intriguing and polymathic figures. Through his meticulous study of Hollis Frampton's unfinished Magellan project, Michael Zryd illuminates the filmmaker's oeuvre as a whole, shedding light on the relationship among cinema, modernism, and epistemology. -- Erika Balsom, author of <i>After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation</i> Hollis Frampton was a rigorous and complex individual, as well as a passionate and generous filmmaker/teacher. As a Meta-Historian of film, his radical work bridged the fields of cinema, poetry, mathematics, photography, xerography and early digital art. He made one of the defining films of the structural film canon, Zorns Lemma (1970), following it with the seminal, (anti-)autobiographical work nostalgia (1971). Magellan (1976-) was perhaps Frampton's equivalent to Wagner's Ring Cycle; an epic, wildly ambitious, calendrical film cycle lasting 36 hours that was only partially completed before his tragic premature death in 1984. Taking on the intimidating task of deciphering and decoding Frampton's project from the fragments left behind, Zryd not only renders Magellan legible for film scholars but contextualizes and evaluates the entire project in hugely readable and nourishing prose. This book will surely become the authoritative text, not only on Magellan, but on Frampton's oeuvre as a whole. -- Luke Fowler, filmmaker and artist Michael Zryd's elegant treatise on Hollis Frampton's late metafilms is the first to map the terrain of his accomplishment with commensurate intelligence and comprehensiveness. Zryd synoptically conjugates the master's filmmaking, photography, and writing as an interlaced summa of the history of cinema and the most prescient bridge to its digital successors. -- David E. James, author of <i>Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern</i> Zryd brings unmatched expertise to the task of resurrecting Hollis Frampton's last major work. The strength of this book resides in its ability to make the complexity of this massive cultural and artistic undertaking legible. Even for scholars of avant-garde cinema and veteran viewers of Frampton's films, it offers revelatory readings. -- Bruce Jenkins, coauthor of <i>The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne: 1963-1965</i> This groundbreaking book offers a richly layered map for navigating Frampton's complex films and their intertexts. Devoting particular attention to the epic, encyclopedic, unfinished Magellan cycle, Zryd takes us on a deep dive into a speculative metahistory grounded in meticulous and expansive research. Frampton finds an articulate and generous interlocutor here: the energy of his last work endures through Zryd's engagement with the idea of a cinema that moves past all limits, towards the infinite. -- Sarah Keller, author of <i>Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies</i>