Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 7:30pm
Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by Michael Zryd
Hollis Frampton was an American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist who bridged the worlds of contemporary art and experimental cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for avant-garde films like Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), he spent his later years working on the unfinished epic Magellan, a monumental cycle that used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe to rethink the natures and meanings of history, modernity, and cinema. Frampton’s career was cut short by cancer at age 48, with his vast ambitions for the project left incomplete.
This evening at Light Industry we will be hosting a book launch for Michael Zryd’s Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema. A comprehensive account of Frampton’s work, the study foregrounds his notion of the “infinite cinema,” which redefined the parameters of the medium to encompass all forms of moving image and sound media across the past and future of cinematic possibility. Zryd analyzes Frampton’s ambivalent relationship with modernism and the Enlightenment, showing how the artist navigated between an attraction to radical aesthetic inquiry and an awareness of this tradition’s implication in colonialism and other oppressive power structures, shedding new light on Frampton’s project of exploring and critiquing how cinema attempts to capture and understand the world.
Portions of two little-seen Frampton films will be screened, Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments (1974, 16mm) and The Birth of Magellan: Mindfall I (1977-80, 16mm). Zryd will introduce the films, with special attention to Frampton’s interest in encyclopedism and vertical montage.
Copies of Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema will be available for sale at the event.
Michael Zryd is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Cinema and Media Studies at the Department of Film, York University, Toronto.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.