I don’t think, yet, that I've really spoken about whole cycles of films. It feels like that approach would be quite ill suited to the way in which I put these newsletters together (i.e., by doing it really quite quickly during the week, trimmed back to the bone). I wanted to write about Frampton’s final cinematic project, but there was no real point in speaking about individual films that form the cycle. I suppose that the following thoughts are very incomplete, only partial, and potentially incorrect.
— Frampton’s last, great, unfinished cycle, Magellan, occupied the final decade of his life. I continue to hear that this long pulse of work has been “unrecognised” or “ignored”, and I often wonder if this is entirely true (you know, because I hear it all the time). The Magellan films are difficult, at times inscrutable; not because of their sublime visual arrhythmia (which they do have, yes) but because it is an incomplete body of work strung together by an intangible tracery of relationships and structures. Likening his body of work to Tatlin’s incomplete Monument to the Third International, he said: “the Monument was not built. There are other ways to build monuments. The ways to build them are to build them immaterially, in the mind”.
— What structure? Glancing, each of the films that make up the constituent/completed parts of Magellan bear little resemblance to each other. The reeking, ragged bones and skull fragments of cadavers, bifurcated into a red and a green channel; the under-exposed (it is almost too dark) footage of a wedding couple standing on an ornamental bridge (applause shutters into the frame, jarring and strangely improper); or the waving purple/red/black orbs of Noctiluca (1974), speaking to an earlier (un-anthropological) pulse within the avant garde. Brought together, what do each of these protrusions and experiments represent?
— Brief. Frampton had set out to orchestrate a metahistory of film; a project that would mirror (and so reproduce) the formal and even theoretical edges of film as it radiated outward from the galloping horse of Muybridge, back in 1879. In 1974, he reproduced (or resampled) the career of the Lumiere brothers, doing so through forty-nine fragments that reference both their work and his, while raising various analogies and ‘lenses’ to express the act of filmmaking itself (e.g., a stone portal, a wooden silo, a pool of water, curtains, a window). In MINDFAL I & VII, and in VI Birth of Magellan, he explored the effects of Eisenstein’s theory of ‘vertical montage’ - i.e., a structure that runs not horizontally-sequentially, but vertically (“like a chord”). Magellan is not a history of film. It is not Mark Cousins. It is not Andre Bazin.
— Sensate, even ‘experiential’. To watch the films (in dribs and drabs), we sense toward a kind of rhythm of the whole. Frampton never completed Magellan. Its completion may have been impossible. We might have to (or be asked to, pleadingly) read the cycle in the tradition of other grand Modernistic cycles, and its obsession with obfuscated structural conditions to be a kind of codex rather than a manual. Really, Frampton had hoped that the complete film cycle (what Michael Zyrd calls a “utopian” project, “in the tradition of Joyce” Etc) - which would last some 36 hours, of which ‘only’ eight hours were completed - would be screened across the full span of a calendar year, and that its ordering strategy was as much a part of the film project as these orbs of wobbling light, these fragments of skull, these ominously applauding hands.
— Is it good, though? I am partial to grand projects undergirded by systems and structures. As individual filmic experiences, they are often very beautiful and even funny. I enjoy them in the way that I enjoy Godard’s Image Book, albeit without the voice of an identifiable speaker to help guide us through the morass. It is a remarkably similar project, in some regards; just as it shares similarities with the Temenos/Eniaios project of Gregory Markopolous who, in his last years, removed his films from circulation so as to be brought together into a single vast film that is (even now) screened once every four years. This tendency toward ordering strategies and cycles, what does it tell us about the purpose of the post-war avant garde? I don’t really know. But the metahistorical “aspiration” of Frampton always seems the most compelling and good-natured of these efforts. The enjambed/disjointed use of sound and image is something we saw as early as 1971 and his (nostalgia). Its concern with repetition and superimposition is something we saw with Surface Tension in 1968. Puns, extremities, logical puzzle boxes. Of all the artists belonging to the long aftermath of Maya Deren, Frampton feels like the most welcoming - but also the most frustrating and inchoate.
— We’ve already touched on some of the ways in which the Magellan films (between 1971 and 1984) speak to a metahistory of film, a reproduction of its effects and energies directed into a single 36 hour pulse. Shapes, patterns, and their tumbling rhythms locate an allegiance with the very earliest experiments of the silent era (here I mean the Dadaist effort of Ballet Mecanique, whose interrogations of warped perspective, of visual form, and repetition are Magellan avant la lettre). This was the work of Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy.
— Magellan’s boundaries, too, can be felt beyond the cycle proper. In Public Domain (1972), Frampton (in the words of Bruce Jenkins) “recapitulates cinema’s infancy in a series of direct [visual] quotes from [early] works . . . as well as literal pieces of cinematic juvenalia”. Even here, he was reordering and recombining the various textual and visual references of film (as a history of a process) into new arrangements. This anticipates his interest, later, with the Lumiere brothers.
— Within the cycle and its lattice-work of interrelationships, we glimpse the arrangement of film beneath the banner of colour. There are the ‘red gates’ of death, and then there is The Green Gate (Magellan at the gates of death), from 1976. Death we read as a literal ending, but also as a kind of moment of transformation. His notes can lose us in the reeds, but from what I understand, he had hoped to ‘disassemble’ these two films into a series of twenty-four ‘encounters with death’ that would be shown in five-minute segments twice a moment. These filmed cadavers (shot at the Gross Anatomy Lab at the University of Pittsburgh) come to depict a kind of literal embodiment (and meditation) on death, which themselves arc back to the fertile mausoleum that film itself enacts (i.e., film obliterates, leaving behind it scattered/lost/disinterred pieces of itself, both unreachable and experiential). Film allows us to glimpse that which has already passed. Film itself, necessarily, is an encounter with death which, nonetheless, engenders a very active/alive moment of perceptive experience. Skulls, smashed fragments of bone, motionless jaws and teeth, cleaved-in-half bone. This “annotated calendar” reads both like a diary and a death notice. It’s only fitting that, when speaking to an interlocutor (Scott MacDonald) in 1978, he described his cycle as having a “skeletal form”, speaking yes to its overarching ‘umbrella’, but also I think to its predispositions and concerns. It is a work of formation and deformation. It speaks to birth and death, to the eschatology of an entire life. But passive it is not. Frampton was playful. His films are games and puzzles, even when they congregate around chillingly austere facts of death (bones). Zyrd suggests that Magellan was, “ultimately, a comedy”. Frampton himself argues that “the protagonist is the spectator of the work”. Magellan is a thing that happens to/toward us, but we are not merely - in the Scheferian sense - a pair of eyeballs suspended in the darkness between the ‘giant object’ of the green and the light that gushes through us. No. We look back, think toward/into. For Noctiluca (Magellan’s Toys No. 1) of 1974, the dancing purple-blue orbs that fizz and wobble across the frame become almost like a pair of eyeballs (ours), which - then - dance together. They reveal the object of looking itself, but also hint toward objects of measurement and navigation (Magellan’s so-called ‘toys’).
— We must also remember, of course, that during the time he was working on Magellan, he was working on other more sensate or (perhaps) ‘blatant’ cycles within the wider whole, including his Pans. These, as the name implies, are formed of variations of pans - be it light that strobes with a hallucinatory quickness from the top to the bottom of the frame (becoming like rain, or sparks of fire), or a camera that surge-runs through a field of ripe crops. Sped up, flickering and fast, these accelerated films encompass the hungry eye of the camera as it continues to swallow and regurgitate the world - a process that was happening in tandem with the more playful/subversive films of his Magellan cycle. It feels like Frampton is admitting that just as he tries to ‘reduce’ film to a metahistorical frame, it continues to reproduce itself faster than can be contained. This structure of tension is then like a kind of death by four horses, the body of cinema (of the filmmaker and the spectator-protagonist) being yanked in two opposing directions. We recall that Frampton enjoyed these hypotheticals, just as, with Information, he had created a “hypothetical ‘first film’”, consisting of overlapping, whizzing, jolting clusters of white light against a dark background. Early in his career, he had already turned his head toward the idea of a film that could supplant/mirror/reproduce the entirety of film itself, a mirror within the process - a shadow in the structure, folding film back onto itself, and enjambing new pathways and avenues for us (the spectator-protagonist) to explore.
— In 1956, around then, Frampton had met with the then much older Ezra Pound. They spoke, corresponded. Pound was unpopular, a little thrust out on the edges of the literary garden. During this time, Pound was finishing work on his Cantos, and I like to think that - in some way - there was a transference here, and that, through Magellan, Frampton was sort of persisting-through or otherwise sustaining the epic-cyclical impulse that had spawned Pound’s own poetics in this era. A gesturing-movement toward immense, seried structures; a kind of gigantic reflective object (mirror) that could focus the light of film back inside itself, causing a kind of rupture. Let us remember that Pound’s crisis - and he saw it in these terms, declared insane and shuttling back and forth between Tyrol and Rapallo - led to a series of what he saw as unworthy ‘drafts and fragments’, CX-CXVII [110-117]. At the very jettisoned end/edge of this last series, there is Canto CXVI - a passage in which Odysseus/Pound returns home, reconciled with the sea-god. But this place of home/coming is not the place he believed it would be when he set out. Like Magellan (the sea-crosser/Odysseus), he arrives with a profound albeit imponderable thing: “I have brought the great ball of crystal; / who can lift it?”. Here’s the desiring intervention toward the spectator-protagonist. Then, finally: “I am not a demigod / I cannot make it cohere.”
— Frampton, like the crystal-ball-bearing Odysseus-Pound, could not make Magellan ‘cohere’, strewn about with “errors and wrecks”. But unlike Pound, I do not experience Frampton’s final film cycle in a state of despair, but rather see it as a place of radiant (albeit fragmented) possibility. The wrecks are not wrecks, but merely scatterings of light that pour from a single, glittering object - an object whose totality we’ll never quite see. Film is a gate, a transition. Etc.
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