Hollis Frampton filming sections of Magellan at US Steel CompanyPittsburgh 1974 Photo Mike Chikiris Courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Hidden Noise Strategies of SoundMontage in the Films of Hollis Frampton

MELISSA RAGONA

OCTOBER 109 Summer 2004 pp 96ndash118 copy 2004 October Magazine Ltd and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The seductive equation made between silence and the sublime in avant-gardeart practices reaches back as far as Ferruccio Busonirsquos Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music(1911) in which the Italian composer pointed to the moment of holds and rests inmusic as constituting the most profound and ldquoessential nature of artrdquo In a sensesilence for the historical avant-garde was something that could reveal that whichwas hidden ormdashto borrow from Heideggermdashyet to be unconcealed In keepingwith this model Marcel Duchamprsquos ldquoassisted ready-maderdquo With Hidden Noise(1916)mdasha ball of twine bolted between two metal plates containing an unknownobject added by Walter Arensbergmdashwas one of the first turns toward what DouglasKahn has called the shift from the site of ldquoutterance to that of auditionrdquo1 This shiftwould mark languagersquos entrance into Conceptual art practices

By concealing both the sound source and the preparatory notes that culmi-nated in a particular kind of ldquonoiserdquo Duchamprsquos enigmatic sculpture alreadypointed to crucial questionsmdashof ldquosignaturerdquo ldquocompositionrdquo and ldquoperformancerdquomdashthat informed the historical avant-gardersquos turning away from purely object-basedworks toward eventlike forms In the postwar era John Cagersquos 4rsquo33rdquo (1952) madeldquohiddenrdquo silence the explicit content of the work Cagersquos replacement of pitchwith duration as a structuring principle shifted the emphasis from musical composi-tion onto sound space Silence was no longer a ldquorestrdquo or ldquopauserdquo or ldquogaprdquo butunintentional sound all that entered the space of duration2

This essay is drawn from a larger forthcoming book project on experimental film sound FromRadio-Ear to Granular Voice The Sound of Experimental Film The School of Art and the Center for the Arts inSociety at Carnegie Mellon University gave research support and a critical forum in which to discusssome of the ideas presented here my thanks to Liz Kotz Marie Lovrod Ernest Schimmerling TonyConrad Abigail Child and Malcolm Turvey for their readings and comments Elizabeth ThomasAssistant Curator of Contemporary Art Bill Judson former Curator of Film and Video at the CarnegieMuseum in Pittsburgh MM Serra at the Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative in New York and Robert Haller atAnthology Film Archives provided me with invaluable access to Framptonrsquos films files and photographs1 Douglas Kahn Noise Water Meat A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999)p 158 For a reading of event-based work with language that emerges in the wake of Duchamp and Cagesee Liz Kotz ldquoPost-Cagean Aesthetics and the lsquoEventrsquo Scorerdquo October 95 (Spring 2001) pp 55ndash90 2 F T Marinettirsquos I Silenzi Parlano fra di Loro (Silences Speak Among Themselves) of the early1930s arguably set a precedent for Cagersquos work in its focus on silence as a kind of presencemdashan epistemo-logical category as important if not more profound than sound

In the world of avant-garde film however this radical Cagean silence oftenbecame all too easily assimilated into a more conventionally modernist poetics ofsilence that stressed the phenomenal purity of visual experience over the radicalcontingency of chance interpenetrations and juxtapositions For example forfilmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Andrew Noren film sound tends to disruptor taint a purely visual focus or image-based knowledge system3 In revisiting thework of Hollis Framptonmdashespecially his sound films Surface Tension (1968) ZornsLemma (1970) Critical Mass (1971) and Mindfall (1977ndash80)mdashwe are brought backto a moment in avant-garde film history in which the status of the sound film wasin question both in terms of its political valence and its epistemological quest Infact Framptonrsquos early (pre-1968) work is primarily silent as he initially allied himselfwith the avant-garde position that the ldquotalkies ossified cinema into a standardsaleable productrdquo4 Other antirealist critiques argued that sync sound returnedldquothe film image to the status of an object in naturerdquo5 For Frampton at this time torenovate vision outside the straitjacket of Hollywood filmmaking and realist con-ventions of sync sound required purging film of both sound and language asbearers of overdetermined meaning and syntactic weight

Yet by the time he starts work on Surface Tension Frampton is beginning toinvestigate sound precisely as a means of divesting film of its syntactical burdenDrawing from Sergei Eisensteinrsquos concept of ldquovertical montagerdquo which proposesthat sound can offer a crucial ldquocontrapuntalrdquo or ldquoovertonalrdquo relation to visualmontage Framptonrsquos cinema generates a series of procedures that systematicallyconfound the relations between image and sound as well as between sound andlanguage By breaking with a purist impulse to cleanse the filmic image of thecorrupting influences of sound and language Frampton would reinvent film soundnot as a tool for a naturalized filmic realism or straightforward narration butinstead as a crucial vehicle for disrupting what he termed the ldquohorizontal axisrdquo ofconventional film narrative Rather than reinforcing the linear syntactic meaning-producing properties of narrative film soundmdashand indeed verbal language itselfdivested from its subordinate position as sync-sound dialogue and explanatory

OCTOBER98

3 Annette Michelson describes this moment ldquoFor the history of independently made film of thepostwar period is that of a transvaluation of values through which an enforced reversion to an artisanalmode of production (that of the silent 16mm format) enables the conversion of necessity to virtuerdquosee her ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 153 Brakhagersquos approach to sound (andsilence) is far too complex and varied to be accounted for here Though the major part of his film andtheoretical work was indeed concerned with what the ldquoeyerdquo could perceive he nonetheless thoughtdeeply about sound through his relation to modernist music paying close attention to works of OlivierMessiaen Pierre Boulez Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen among others In ldquoFilm andMusicrdquo (1966) Brakhage recounts that he ldquostudied informally with Cage and Vareserdquo in order to find aldquonew relationship between image and soundrdquo and a ldquonew dimension for the sound trackrdquo In EssentialBrakhage (Kingston NY McPherson and Co 2001) p 78 4 ldquoHollis Frampton An Interview by Michael Snowrdquo in New Forms in Film ed Annette Michelson(Montreux Dorbax 1974) p 615 Fred Camper ldquoSound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinemardquo in Elizabeth Weis andJohn Belton eds Film Sound Theory and Practice (New York Columbia University Press 1985) p 371

6 In their readings of Framptonrsquos project in the 1985 October special issue on his work Allen SWeiss and Annette Michelson come closest to recognizing the importance of his explorations in settheory for his filmmaking practices In her essay ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo Michelson points to the relationshipbetween Framptonrsquos interest in mathematics and comparative grammar and the retrograde inversionsemployed by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern In her reading of Critical Mass (1971) Michelsonputs her finger on the pulse of Framptonrsquos systemic method especially when she implies that ldquogestureand soundrdquo seem to be what reinforce the semantic engine of much of his work during 1968ndash73mdashthecritical period of Palindrome (1969) Surface Tension Zorns Lemma and the Hapax Legomena series(1971ndash72) Michelson pp 160ndash627 Robert L Vaught Set Theory An Introduction (New York Springer-Verlag 2001) p 18 See Roman Jakobson ldquoLinguistics and Poeticsrdquo (1958) in Language and Literature (CambridgeMass Harvard University Press 1987) pp 62ndash94

captionmdashwould give Frampton entirely new models for investigating film structureand montage In order to rethink the possibilities for vertical montage in the postwarera Frampton turned to the permutational and operational forms used in experi-mental music Minimalist sculpture and set theory These heterogeneous modelsallowed Frampton to envision a filmmaking practice that could resolve or at leastcomplicate the oppositions set up between narrative and nonnarrative filmmakingsynchronous and asynchronous sound and ultimately silent versus sound films

To understand Framptonrsquos unorthodox use of sound which perhaps owesmore to 1920s Soviet experiments in sound montage than to the 1950s poetics ofsilence propagated by the critical literature surrounding Brakhage we need totake seriously Framptonrsquos use of paradoxical systems drawn from his idiosyncraticreading of that branch of mathematics known as set theory6 While Framptonrsquosgnomic pronouncements about systems theory topos theory and a host of othermathematical and scientific discourses risk becoming unintelligible (or marginal-ized) to a generation of film theorists raised on semiotic and psychoanalyticmodels a series of quasi-scientific and quantitative models nonetheless allowedhim to open up operations of meaning-production beyond what he saw as morenormative ldquoclosedrdquo systems like semiotics

One of the most compelling aspects that set theory offers film theory is that itprovides a mode of analysis that uses its own object to study itself ldquoset theory is not abranch of mathematics but the very root of mathematics from which all branches ofmathematics riserdquo7 For Frampton set theory permits the abstract representation offilmrsquos capacity to catalog intersecting planes of perception in infinite combinationsallowing him to perceive and articulate the expansive range of film in a way thatsemiotics could not Of course the Saussurean model of semiotics that Framptonhad encountered in film criticism of the 1970s also included a metalinguistic func-tion that reflected upon its own language and processes However set theory spokemore directly to his ideas about montage since its principles describe unboundedways of dividing and ordering materials In contrast the communicative paradigmformalized by Roman Jakobson (drawn from the information theory of Claude EShannon) proposed a kind of ldquoverbal looprdquo or circuit that depended on six compo-nents in any speech event sender receiver message code contact and context8This relatively ldquoclosedrdquo system presented communication as its ultimate object

Hidden Noise 99

whereas set theory offered a world free of intended speech a world that couldaccount for infinite sets of relations unhinged from a unidirectional matrix

While Framptonmdashlike his contemporaries Tony Conrad Paul SharitsMichael Snow and Joyce Wielandmdashwas interested in film as a form that couldexpand as well as reflect consciousness one of the main thrusts of his work was topose an epistemology unique to film In ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo (1975) hecalls for this ldquoWe must invent a terminology and a descriptive mode appropriateto our object a unique sign that shall have as its referent the creative assumptionsproper to film and to film alonerdquo9 While he continues to use the language ofsemiotics as a way of describing his epistemological approach to film he is alsostruggling with its limitations ldquoThe compound sign and referent is of course aclosed system and all closed systems as we know tend to break down and to generatediscrepancies and contradictions at their highest levelsrdquo10

My contention here is that Frampton uses elements of conceptual mathematicsin order to open up what he believed was the ldquoclosed systemrdquo that film semiotics hadbegun to develop in the late 1960s Borrowing its title and form from aspects of settheory Zorns Lemma of course became the flagship example of Framptonrsquos use ofmathematical procedures in film However the underlying principles of thisapproach to filmic materials structure all of his post-1968 production Even beforebeginning work on Zorns Lemma Frampton was thinking of set theory in relation tofilm especially in reference to his growing Magellan project In a 1964 letter to hisfriend Reno Odlin Frampton explains in somewhat hermetic terms

Zorns Lemma states that within every partially ordered set there is amaximal fully ordered set The excernment of the fully ordered setconstitutes a cut Where there are several possible cuts the set of allcuts constitutes the maximal ordered set All cuts the operationswhereby they are made the elements that constitute each of them theintelligible species of their distinctness one from another AND theresidue of totally unordered elements left outside defined and appliedand all elements identified the field is not closed11

This passage comes out of a rich exchange from 1958 to 1968 betweenFrampton and Odlin about what would become Clouds of Magellan the passagebegins to suggest some of the profound discoveries or ldquoopeningsrdquo set theory madepossible for film allowing Frampton to isolate identify and exploit filmrsquosmedium-specific systems as well as locate the excess of filmrsquos own systemic behav-ior Framptonrsquos unorthodox reading of set theory may have been inspired by hisdiscussions with Carl Andre In one of the published dialogues between Framptonand Andre (1962ndash63) ldquoOn the Movies and Consecutive Mattersrdquo Frampton

OCTOBER100

9 Hollis Frampton ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo in Circles of Confusion Film Photography VideoTexts 1968ndash1980 (Rochester NY Visual Studies Workshop Press 1983) p 12310 Ibid11 Reno Odlin ldquoLetters from Framp 1958ndash1968rdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 47

Hidden Noise Strategies of SoundMontage in the Films of Hollis Frampton

MELISSA RAGONA

OCTOBER 109 Summer 2004 pp 96ndash118 copy 2004 October Magazine Ltd and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The seductive equation made between silence and the sublime in avant-gardeart practices reaches back as far as Ferruccio Busonirsquos Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music(1911) in which the Italian composer pointed to the moment of holds and rests inmusic as constituting the most profound and ldquoessential nature of artrdquo In a sensesilence for the historical avant-garde was something that could reveal that whichwas hidden ormdashto borrow from Heideggermdashyet to be unconcealed In keepingwith this model Marcel Duchamprsquos ldquoassisted ready-maderdquo With Hidden Noise(1916)mdasha ball of twine bolted between two metal plates containing an unknownobject added by Walter Arensbergmdashwas one of the first turns toward what DouglasKahn has called the shift from the site of ldquoutterance to that of auditionrdquo1 This shiftwould mark languagersquos entrance into Conceptual art practices

By concealing both the sound source and the preparatory notes that culmi-nated in a particular kind of ldquonoiserdquo Duchamprsquos enigmatic sculpture alreadypointed to crucial questionsmdashof ldquosignaturerdquo ldquocompositionrdquo and ldquoperformancerdquomdashthat informed the historical avant-gardersquos turning away from purely object-basedworks toward eventlike forms In the postwar era John Cagersquos 4rsquo33rdquo (1952) madeldquohiddenrdquo silence the explicit content of the work Cagersquos replacement of pitchwith duration as a structuring principle shifted the emphasis from musical composi-tion onto sound space Silence was no longer a ldquorestrdquo or ldquopauserdquo or ldquogaprdquo butunintentional sound all that entered the space of duration2

This essay is drawn from a larger forthcoming book project on experimental film sound FromRadio-Ear to Granular Voice The Sound of Experimental Film The School of Art and the Center for the Arts inSociety at Carnegie Mellon University gave research support and a critical forum in which to discusssome of the ideas presented here my thanks to Liz Kotz Marie Lovrod Ernest Schimmerling TonyConrad Abigail Child and Malcolm Turvey for their readings and comments Elizabeth ThomasAssistant Curator of Contemporary Art Bill Judson former Curator of Film and Video at the CarnegieMuseum in Pittsburgh MM Serra at the Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative in New York and Robert Haller atAnthology Film Archives provided me with invaluable access to Framptonrsquos films files and photographs1 Douglas Kahn Noise Water Meat A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999)p 158 For a reading of event-based work with language that emerges in the wake of Duchamp and Cagesee Liz Kotz ldquoPost-Cagean Aesthetics and the lsquoEventrsquo Scorerdquo October 95 (Spring 2001) pp 55ndash90 2 F T Marinettirsquos I Silenzi Parlano fra di Loro (Silences Speak Among Themselves) of the early1930s arguably set a precedent for Cagersquos work in its focus on silence as a kind of presencemdashan epistemo-logical category as important if not more profound than sound

In the world of avant-garde film however this radical Cagean silence oftenbecame all too easily assimilated into a more conventionally modernist poetics ofsilence that stressed the phenomenal purity of visual experience over the radicalcontingency of chance interpenetrations and juxtapositions For example forfilmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Andrew Noren film sound tends to disruptor taint a purely visual focus or image-based knowledge system3 In revisiting thework of Hollis Framptonmdashespecially his sound films Surface Tension (1968) ZornsLemma (1970) Critical Mass (1971) and Mindfall (1977ndash80)mdashwe are brought backto a moment in avant-garde film history in which the status of the sound film wasin question both in terms of its political valence and its epistemological quest Infact Framptonrsquos early (pre-1968) work is primarily silent as he initially allied himselfwith the avant-garde position that the ldquotalkies ossified cinema into a standardsaleable productrdquo4 Other antirealist critiques argued that sync sound returnedldquothe film image to the status of an object in naturerdquo5 For Frampton at this time torenovate vision outside the straitjacket of Hollywood filmmaking and realist con-ventions of sync sound required purging film of both sound and language asbearers of overdetermined meaning and syntactic weight

Yet by the time he starts work on Surface Tension Frampton is beginning toinvestigate sound precisely as a means of divesting film of its syntactical burdenDrawing from Sergei Eisensteinrsquos concept of ldquovertical montagerdquo which proposesthat sound can offer a crucial ldquocontrapuntalrdquo or ldquoovertonalrdquo relation to visualmontage Framptonrsquos cinema generates a series of procedures that systematicallyconfound the relations between image and sound as well as between sound andlanguage By breaking with a purist impulse to cleanse the filmic image of thecorrupting influences of sound and language Frampton would reinvent film soundnot as a tool for a naturalized filmic realism or straightforward narration butinstead as a crucial vehicle for disrupting what he termed the ldquohorizontal axisrdquo ofconventional film narrative Rather than reinforcing the linear syntactic meaning-producing properties of narrative film soundmdashand indeed verbal language itselfdivested from its subordinate position as sync-sound dialogue and explanatory

OCTOBER98

3 Annette Michelson describes this moment ldquoFor the history of independently made film of thepostwar period is that of a transvaluation of values through which an enforced reversion to an artisanalmode of production (that of the silent 16mm format) enables the conversion of necessity to virtuerdquosee her ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 153 Brakhagersquos approach to sound (andsilence) is far too complex and varied to be accounted for here Though the major part of his film andtheoretical work was indeed concerned with what the ldquoeyerdquo could perceive he nonetheless thoughtdeeply about sound through his relation to modernist music paying close attention to works of OlivierMessiaen Pierre Boulez Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen among others In ldquoFilm andMusicrdquo (1966) Brakhage recounts that he ldquostudied informally with Cage and Vareserdquo in order to find aldquonew relationship between image and soundrdquo and a ldquonew dimension for the sound trackrdquo In EssentialBrakhage (Kingston NY McPherson and Co 2001) p 78 4 ldquoHollis Frampton An Interview by Michael Snowrdquo in New Forms in Film ed Annette Michelson(Montreux Dorbax 1974) p 615 Fred Camper ldquoSound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinemardquo in Elizabeth Weis andJohn Belton eds Film Sound Theory and Practice (New York Columbia University Press 1985) p 371

6 In their readings of Framptonrsquos project in the 1985 October special issue on his work Allen SWeiss and Annette Michelson come closest to recognizing the importance of his explorations in settheory for his filmmaking practices In her essay ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo Michelson points to the relationshipbetween Framptonrsquos interest in mathematics and comparative grammar and the retrograde inversionsemployed by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern In her reading of Critical Mass (1971) Michelsonputs her finger on the pulse of Framptonrsquos systemic method especially when she implies that ldquogestureand soundrdquo seem to be what reinforce the semantic engine of much of his work during 1968ndash73mdashthecritical period of Palindrome (1969) Surface Tension Zorns Lemma and the Hapax Legomena series(1971ndash72) Michelson pp 160ndash627 Robert L Vaught Set Theory An Introduction (New York Springer-Verlag 2001) p 18 See Roman Jakobson ldquoLinguistics and Poeticsrdquo (1958) in Language and Literature (CambridgeMass Harvard University Press 1987) pp 62ndash94

captionmdashwould give Frampton entirely new models for investigating film structureand montage In order to rethink the possibilities for vertical montage in the postwarera Frampton turned to the permutational and operational forms used in experi-mental music Minimalist sculpture and set theory These heterogeneous modelsallowed Frampton to envision a filmmaking practice that could resolve or at leastcomplicate the oppositions set up between narrative and nonnarrative filmmakingsynchronous and asynchronous sound and ultimately silent versus sound films

To understand Framptonrsquos unorthodox use of sound which perhaps owesmore to 1920s Soviet experiments in sound montage than to the 1950s poetics ofsilence propagated by the critical literature surrounding Brakhage we need totake seriously Framptonrsquos use of paradoxical systems drawn from his idiosyncraticreading of that branch of mathematics known as set theory6 While Framptonrsquosgnomic pronouncements about systems theory topos theory and a host of othermathematical and scientific discourses risk becoming unintelligible (or marginal-ized) to a generation of film theorists raised on semiotic and psychoanalyticmodels a series of quasi-scientific and quantitative models nonetheless allowedhim to open up operations of meaning-production beyond what he saw as morenormative ldquoclosedrdquo systems like semiotics

One of the most compelling aspects that set theory offers film theory is that itprovides a mode of analysis that uses its own object to study itself ldquoset theory is not abranch of mathematics but the very root of mathematics from which all branches ofmathematics riserdquo7 For Frampton set theory permits the abstract representation offilmrsquos capacity to catalog intersecting planes of perception in infinite combinationsallowing him to perceive and articulate the expansive range of film in a way thatsemiotics could not Of course the Saussurean model of semiotics that Framptonhad encountered in film criticism of the 1970s also included a metalinguistic func-tion that reflected upon its own language and processes However set theory spokemore directly to his ideas about montage since its principles describe unboundedways of dividing and ordering materials In contrast the communicative paradigmformalized by Roman Jakobson (drawn from the information theory of Claude EShannon) proposed a kind of ldquoverbal looprdquo or circuit that depended on six compo-nents in any speech event sender receiver message code contact and context8This relatively ldquoclosedrdquo system presented communication as its ultimate object

Hidden Noise 99

whereas set theory offered a world free of intended speech a world that couldaccount for infinite sets of relations unhinged from a unidirectional matrix

While Framptonmdashlike his contemporaries Tony Conrad Paul SharitsMichael Snow and Joyce Wielandmdashwas interested in film as a form that couldexpand as well as reflect consciousness one of the main thrusts of his work was topose an epistemology unique to film In ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo (1975) hecalls for this ldquoWe must invent a terminology and a descriptive mode appropriateto our object a unique sign that shall have as its referent the creative assumptionsproper to film and to film alonerdquo9 While he continues to use the language ofsemiotics as a way of describing his epistemological approach to film he is alsostruggling with its limitations ldquoThe compound sign and referent is of course aclosed system and all closed systems as we know tend to break down and to generatediscrepancies and contradictions at their highest levelsrdquo10

My contention here is that Frampton uses elements of conceptual mathematicsin order to open up what he believed was the ldquoclosed systemrdquo that film semiotics hadbegun to develop in the late 1960s Borrowing its title and form from aspects of settheory Zorns Lemma of course became the flagship example of Framptonrsquos use ofmathematical procedures in film However the underlying principles of thisapproach to filmic materials structure all of his post-1968 production Even beforebeginning work on Zorns Lemma Frampton was thinking of set theory in relation tofilm especially in reference to his growing Magellan project In a 1964 letter to hisfriend Reno Odlin Frampton explains in somewhat hermetic terms

Zorns Lemma states that within every partially ordered set there is amaximal fully ordered set The excernment of the fully ordered setconstitutes a cut Where there are several possible cuts the set of allcuts constitutes the maximal ordered set All cuts the operationswhereby they are made the elements that constitute each of them theintelligible species of their distinctness one from another AND theresidue of totally unordered elements left outside defined and appliedand all elements identified the field is not closed11

This passage comes out of a rich exchange from 1958 to 1968 betweenFrampton and Odlin about what would become Clouds of Magellan the passagebegins to suggest some of the profound discoveries or ldquoopeningsrdquo set theory madepossible for film allowing Frampton to isolate identify and exploit filmrsquosmedium-specific systems as well as locate the excess of filmrsquos own systemic behav-ior Framptonrsquos unorthodox reading of set theory may have been inspired by hisdiscussions with Carl Andre In one of the published dialogues between Framptonand Andre (1962ndash63) ldquoOn the Movies and Consecutive Mattersrdquo Frampton

OCTOBER100

9 Hollis Frampton ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo in Circles of Confusion Film Photography VideoTexts 1968ndash1980 (Rochester NY Visual Studies Workshop Press 1983) p 12310 Ibid11 Reno Odlin ldquoLetters from Framp 1958ndash1968rdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 47

In the world of avant-garde film however this radical Cagean silence oftenbecame all too easily assimilated into a more conventionally modernist poetics ofsilence that stressed the phenomenal purity of visual experience over the radicalcontingency of chance interpenetrations and juxtapositions For example forfilmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Andrew Noren film sound tends to disruptor taint a purely visual focus or image-based knowledge system3 In revisiting thework of Hollis Framptonmdashespecially his sound films Surface Tension (1968) ZornsLemma (1970) Critical Mass (1971) and Mindfall (1977ndash80)mdashwe are brought backto a moment in avant-garde film history in which the status of the sound film wasin question both in terms of its political valence and its epistemological quest Infact Framptonrsquos early (pre-1968) work is primarily silent as he initially allied himselfwith the avant-garde position that the ldquotalkies ossified cinema into a standardsaleable productrdquo4 Other antirealist critiques argued that sync sound returnedldquothe film image to the status of an object in naturerdquo5 For Frampton at this time torenovate vision outside the straitjacket of Hollywood filmmaking and realist con-ventions of sync sound required purging film of both sound and language asbearers of overdetermined meaning and syntactic weight

Yet by the time he starts work on Surface Tension Frampton is beginning toinvestigate sound precisely as a means of divesting film of its syntactical burdenDrawing from Sergei Eisensteinrsquos concept of ldquovertical montagerdquo which proposesthat sound can offer a crucial ldquocontrapuntalrdquo or ldquoovertonalrdquo relation to visualmontage Framptonrsquos cinema generates a series of procedures that systematicallyconfound the relations between image and sound as well as between sound andlanguage By breaking with a purist impulse to cleanse the filmic image of thecorrupting influences of sound and language Frampton would reinvent film soundnot as a tool for a naturalized filmic realism or straightforward narration butinstead as a crucial vehicle for disrupting what he termed the ldquohorizontal axisrdquo ofconventional film narrative Rather than reinforcing the linear syntactic meaning-producing properties of narrative film soundmdashand indeed verbal language itselfdivested from its subordinate position as sync-sound dialogue and explanatory

OCTOBER98

3 Annette Michelson describes this moment ldquoFor the history of independently made film of thepostwar period is that of a transvaluation of values through which an enforced reversion to an artisanalmode of production (that of the silent 16mm format) enables the conversion of necessity to virtuerdquosee her ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 153 Brakhagersquos approach to sound (andsilence) is far too complex and varied to be accounted for here Though the major part of his film andtheoretical work was indeed concerned with what the ldquoeyerdquo could perceive he nonetheless thoughtdeeply about sound through his relation to modernist music paying close attention to works of OlivierMessiaen Pierre Boulez Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen among others In ldquoFilm andMusicrdquo (1966) Brakhage recounts that he ldquostudied informally with Cage and Vareserdquo in order to find aldquonew relationship between image and soundrdquo and a ldquonew dimension for the sound trackrdquo In EssentialBrakhage (Kingston NY McPherson and Co 2001) p 78 4 ldquoHollis Frampton An Interview by Michael Snowrdquo in New Forms in Film ed Annette Michelson(Montreux Dorbax 1974) p 615 Fred Camper ldquoSound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinemardquo in Elizabeth Weis andJohn Belton eds Film Sound Theory and Practice (New York Columbia University Press 1985) p 371

6 In their readings of Framptonrsquos project in the 1985 October special issue on his work Allen SWeiss and Annette Michelson come closest to recognizing the importance of his explorations in settheory for his filmmaking practices In her essay ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo Michelson points to the relationshipbetween Framptonrsquos interest in mathematics and comparative grammar and the retrograde inversionsemployed by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern In her reading of Critical Mass (1971) Michelsonputs her finger on the pulse of Framptonrsquos systemic method especially when she implies that ldquogestureand soundrdquo seem to be what reinforce the semantic engine of much of his work during 1968ndash73mdashthecritical period of Palindrome (1969) Surface Tension Zorns Lemma and the Hapax Legomena series(1971ndash72) Michelson pp 160ndash627 Robert L Vaught Set Theory An Introduction (New York Springer-Verlag 2001) p 18 See Roman Jakobson ldquoLinguistics and Poeticsrdquo (1958) in Language and Literature (CambridgeMass Harvard University Press 1987) pp 62ndash94

captionmdashwould give Frampton entirely new models for investigating film structureand montage In order to rethink the possibilities for vertical montage in the postwarera Frampton turned to the permutational and operational forms used in experi-mental music Minimalist sculpture and set theory These heterogeneous modelsallowed Frampton to envision a filmmaking practice that could resolve or at leastcomplicate the oppositions set up between narrative and nonnarrative filmmakingsynchronous and asynchronous sound and ultimately silent versus sound films

To understand Framptonrsquos unorthodox use of sound which perhaps owesmore to 1920s Soviet experiments in sound montage than to the 1950s poetics ofsilence propagated by the critical literature surrounding Brakhage we need totake seriously Framptonrsquos use of paradoxical systems drawn from his idiosyncraticreading of that branch of mathematics known as set theory6 While Framptonrsquosgnomic pronouncements about systems theory topos theory and a host of othermathematical and scientific discourses risk becoming unintelligible (or marginal-ized) to a generation of film theorists raised on semiotic and psychoanalyticmodels a series of quasi-scientific and quantitative models nonetheless allowedhim to open up operations of meaning-production beyond what he saw as morenormative ldquoclosedrdquo systems like semiotics

One of the most compelling aspects that set theory offers film theory is that itprovides a mode of analysis that uses its own object to study itself ldquoset theory is not abranch of mathematics but the very root of mathematics from which all branches ofmathematics riserdquo7 For Frampton set theory permits the abstract representation offilmrsquos capacity to catalog intersecting planes of perception in infinite combinationsallowing him to perceive and articulate the expansive range of film in a way thatsemiotics could not Of course the Saussurean model of semiotics that Framptonhad encountered in film criticism of the 1970s also included a metalinguistic func-tion that reflected upon its own language and processes However set theory spokemore directly to his ideas about montage since its principles describe unboundedways of dividing and ordering materials In contrast the communicative paradigmformalized by Roman Jakobson (drawn from the information theory of Claude EShannon) proposed a kind of ldquoverbal looprdquo or circuit that depended on six compo-nents in any speech event sender receiver message code contact and context8This relatively ldquoclosedrdquo system presented communication as its ultimate object

Hidden Noise 99

whereas set theory offered a world free of intended speech a world that couldaccount for infinite sets of relations unhinged from a unidirectional matrix

While Framptonmdashlike his contemporaries Tony Conrad Paul SharitsMichael Snow and Joyce Wielandmdashwas interested in film as a form that couldexpand as well as reflect consciousness one of the main thrusts of his work was topose an epistemology unique to film In ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo (1975) hecalls for this ldquoWe must invent a terminology and a descriptive mode appropriateto our object a unique sign that shall have as its referent the creative assumptionsproper to film and to film alonerdquo9 While he continues to use the language ofsemiotics as a way of describing his epistemological approach to film he is alsostruggling with its limitations ldquoThe compound sign and referent is of course aclosed system and all closed systems as we know tend to break down and to generatediscrepancies and contradictions at their highest levelsrdquo10

My contention here is that Frampton uses elements of conceptual mathematicsin order to open up what he believed was the ldquoclosed systemrdquo that film semiotics hadbegun to develop in the late 1960s Borrowing its title and form from aspects of settheory Zorns Lemma of course became the flagship example of Framptonrsquos use ofmathematical procedures in film However the underlying principles of thisapproach to filmic materials structure all of his post-1968 production Even beforebeginning work on Zorns Lemma Frampton was thinking of set theory in relation tofilm especially in reference to his growing Magellan project In a 1964 letter to hisfriend Reno Odlin Frampton explains in somewhat hermetic terms

Zorns Lemma states that within every partially ordered set there is amaximal fully ordered set The excernment of the fully ordered setconstitutes a cut Where there are several possible cuts the set of allcuts constitutes the maximal ordered set All cuts the operationswhereby they are made the elements that constitute each of them theintelligible species of their distinctness one from another AND theresidue of totally unordered elements left outside defined and appliedand all elements identified the field is not closed11

This passage comes out of a rich exchange from 1958 to 1968 betweenFrampton and Odlin about what would become Clouds of Magellan the passagebegins to suggest some of the profound discoveries or ldquoopeningsrdquo set theory madepossible for film allowing Frampton to isolate identify and exploit filmrsquosmedium-specific systems as well as locate the excess of filmrsquos own systemic behav-ior Framptonrsquos unorthodox reading of set theory may have been inspired by hisdiscussions with Carl Andre In one of the published dialogues between Framptonand Andre (1962ndash63) ldquoOn the Movies and Consecutive Mattersrdquo Frampton

OCTOBER100

9 Hollis Frampton ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo in Circles of Confusion Film Photography VideoTexts 1968ndash1980 (Rochester NY Visual Studies Workshop Press 1983) p 12310 Ibid11 Reno Odlin ldquoLetters from Framp 1958ndash1968rdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 47

6 In their readings of Framptonrsquos project in the 1985 October special issue on his work Allen SWeiss and Annette Michelson come closest to recognizing the importance of his explorations in settheory for his filmmaking practices In her essay ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo Michelson points to the relationshipbetween Framptonrsquos interest in mathematics and comparative grammar and the retrograde inversionsemployed by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern In her reading of Critical Mass (1971) Michelsonputs her finger on the pulse of Framptonrsquos systemic method especially when she implies that ldquogestureand soundrdquo seem to be what reinforce the semantic engine of much of his work during 1968ndash73mdashthecritical period of Palindrome (1969) Surface Tension Zorns Lemma and the Hapax Legomena series(1971ndash72) Michelson pp 160ndash627 Robert L Vaught Set Theory An Introduction (New York Springer-Verlag 2001) p 18 See Roman Jakobson ldquoLinguistics and Poeticsrdquo (1958) in Language and Literature (CambridgeMass Harvard University Press 1987) pp 62ndash94

captionmdashwould give Frampton entirely new models for investigating film structureand montage In order to rethink the possibilities for vertical montage in the postwarera Frampton turned to the permutational and operational forms used in experi-mental music Minimalist sculpture and set theory These heterogeneous modelsallowed Frampton to envision a filmmaking practice that could resolve or at leastcomplicate the oppositions set up between narrative and nonnarrative filmmakingsynchronous and asynchronous sound and ultimately silent versus sound films

To understand Framptonrsquos unorthodox use of sound which perhaps owesmore to 1920s Soviet experiments in sound montage than to the 1950s poetics ofsilence propagated by the critical literature surrounding Brakhage we need totake seriously Framptonrsquos use of paradoxical systems drawn from his idiosyncraticreading of that branch of mathematics known as set theory6 While Framptonrsquosgnomic pronouncements about systems theory topos theory and a host of othermathematical and scientific discourses risk becoming unintelligible (or marginal-ized) to a generation of film theorists raised on semiotic and psychoanalyticmodels a series of quasi-scientific and quantitative models nonetheless allowedhim to open up operations of meaning-production beyond what he saw as morenormative ldquoclosedrdquo systems like semiotics

One of the most compelling aspects that set theory offers film theory is that itprovides a mode of analysis that uses its own object to study itself ldquoset theory is not abranch of mathematics but the very root of mathematics from which all branches ofmathematics riserdquo7 For Frampton set theory permits the abstract representation offilmrsquos capacity to catalog intersecting planes of perception in infinite combinationsallowing him to perceive and articulate the expansive range of film in a way thatsemiotics could not Of course the Saussurean model of semiotics that Framptonhad encountered in film criticism of the 1970s also included a metalinguistic func-tion that reflected upon its own language and processes However set theory spokemore directly to his ideas about montage since its principles describe unboundedways of dividing and ordering materials In contrast the communicative paradigmformalized by Roman Jakobson (drawn from the information theory of Claude EShannon) proposed a kind of ldquoverbal looprdquo or circuit that depended on six compo-nents in any speech event sender receiver message code contact and context8This relatively ldquoclosedrdquo system presented communication as its ultimate object

Hidden Noise 99

whereas set theory offered a world free of intended speech a world that couldaccount for infinite sets of relations unhinged from a unidirectional matrix

While Framptonmdashlike his contemporaries Tony Conrad Paul SharitsMichael Snow and Joyce Wielandmdashwas interested in film as a form that couldexpand as well as reflect consciousness one of the main thrusts of his work was topose an epistemology unique to film In ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo (1975) hecalls for this ldquoWe must invent a terminology and a descriptive mode appropriateto our object a unique sign that shall have as its referent the creative assumptionsproper to film and to film alonerdquo9 While he continues to use the language ofsemiotics as a way of describing his epistemological approach to film he is alsostruggling with its limitations ldquoThe compound sign and referent is of course aclosed system and all closed systems as we know tend to break down and to generatediscrepancies and contradictions at their highest levelsrdquo10

My contention here is that Frampton uses elements of conceptual mathematicsin order to open up what he believed was the ldquoclosed systemrdquo that film semiotics hadbegun to develop in the late 1960s Borrowing its title and form from aspects of settheory Zorns Lemma of course became the flagship example of Framptonrsquos use ofmathematical procedures in film However the underlying principles of thisapproach to filmic materials structure all of his post-1968 production Even beforebeginning work on Zorns Lemma Frampton was thinking of set theory in relation tofilm especially in reference to his growing Magellan project In a 1964 letter to hisfriend Reno Odlin Frampton explains in somewhat hermetic terms

Zorns Lemma states that within every partially ordered set there is amaximal fully ordered set The excernment of the fully ordered setconstitutes a cut Where there are several possible cuts the set of allcuts constitutes the maximal ordered set All cuts the operationswhereby they are made the elements that constitute each of them theintelligible species of their distinctness one from another AND theresidue of totally unordered elements left outside defined and appliedand all elements identified the field is not closed11

This passage comes out of a rich exchange from 1958 to 1968 betweenFrampton and Odlin about what would become Clouds of Magellan the passagebegins to suggest some of the profound discoveries or ldquoopeningsrdquo set theory madepossible for film allowing Frampton to isolate identify and exploit filmrsquosmedium-specific systems as well as locate the excess of filmrsquos own systemic behav-ior Framptonrsquos unorthodox reading of set theory may have been inspired by hisdiscussions with Carl Andre In one of the published dialogues between Framptonand Andre (1962ndash63) ldquoOn the Movies and Consecutive Mattersrdquo Frampton

OCTOBER100

9 Hollis Frampton ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo in Circles of Confusion Film Photography VideoTexts 1968ndash1980 (Rochester NY Visual Studies Workshop Press 1983) p 12310 Ibid11 Reno Odlin ldquoLetters from Framp 1958ndash1968rdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 47

whereas set theory offered a world free of intended speech a world that couldaccount for infinite sets of relations unhinged from a unidirectional matrix

While Framptonmdashlike his contemporaries Tony Conrad Paul SharitsMichael Snow and Joyce Wielandmdashwas interested in film as a form that couldexpand as well as reflect consciousness one of the main thrusts of his work was topose an epistemology unique to film In ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo (1975) hecalls for this ldquoWe must invent a terminology and a descriptive mode appropriateto our object a unique sign that shall have as its referent the creative assumptionsproper to film and to film alonerdquo9 While he continues to use the language ofsemiotics as a way of describing his epistemological approach to film he is alsostruggling with its limitations ldquoThe compound sign and referent is of course aclosed system and all closed systems as we know tend to break down and to generatediscrepancies and contradictions at their highest levelsrdquo10

My contention here is that Frampton uses elements of conceptual mathematicsin order to open up what he believed was the ldquoclosed systemrdquo that film semiotics hadbegun to develop in the late 1960s Borrowing its title and form from aspects of settheory Zorns Lemma of course became the flagship example of Framptonrsquos use ofmathematical procedures in film However the underlying principles of thisapproach to filmic materials structure all of his post-1968 production Even beforebeginning work on Zorns Lemma Frampton was thinking of set theory in relation tofilm especially in reference to his growing Magellan project In a 1964 letter to hisfriend Reno Odlin Frampton explains in somewhat hermetic terms

Zorns Lemma states that within every partially ordered set there is amaximal fully ordered set The excernment of the fully ordered setconstitutes a cut Where there are several possible cuts the set of allcuts constitutes the maximal ordered set All cuts the operationswhereby they are made the elements that constitute each of them theintelligible species of their distinctness one from another AND theresidue of totally unordered elements left outside defined and appliedand all elements identified the field is not closed11

This passage comes out of a rich exchange from 1958 to 1968 betweenFrampton and Odlin about what would become Clouds of Magellan the passagebegins to suggest some of the profound discoveries or ldquoopeningsrdquo set theory madepossible for film allowing Frampton to isolate identify and exploit filmrsquosmedium-specific systems as well as locate the excess of filmrsquos own systemic behav-ior Framptonrsquos unorthodox reading of set theory may have been inspired by hisdiscussions with Carl Andre In one of the published dialogues between Framptonand Andre (1962ndash63) ldquoOn the Movies and Consecutive Mattersrdquo Frampton

OCTOBER100

9 Hollis Frampton ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo in Circles of Confusion Film Photography VideoTexts 1968ndash1980 (Rochester NY Visual Studies Workshop Press 1983) p 12310 Ibid11 Reno Odlin ldquoLetters from Framp 1958ndash1968rdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 47

implies that Andre first introduced him to thinking about the ldquocutrdquo in film interms of Dedekindrsquos ldquocutrdquo a mathematical theorem that characterizes real numbersas ldquothe system of cuts of rational numbersrdquo12

Frampton It seems to me it is a kind of cut in a sense you have usedrecently

Andre Ah Dedekind A number is represented as the partition of a linesegment ldquoNrdquo can then be the highest value to the left of the cut or thelowest value to the right of it An irrational number may even beassigned to the cut itself which is empty in the sense that the cut a pairof scissors makes across a piece of paper is empty but present andevident By extension one might say that any single perception is a cutacross the spectrum of stimuli available to us The cut itself then is notperceived it is an operation not a quantity13

This simple maxim fired Framptonrsquos imagination especially in terms of hisinterest in analyzing the ldquocutrdquo in film as the ldquocutrdquo in the order of film ForFrampton Dedekindrsquos construction of real numbers in terms of cuts in the rationalsenabled him to think of film editing as a method of passage from discrete tocontinuous time Via Andrersquos radical understanding of sculpture as a kind of cutin space (ldquoA thing is a hole in a thing it is notrdquo) Frampton was able to bring thissense of the cut as a perceptual operation to a complex rethinking of filmicmontage In Framptonrsquos project words images and sound would all be subjectedto ordering schemas drawn from an array of conceptual mathematical systems yetrather than repressing the referential dimension of these materials Framptonrsquosantilinear interpenetrating montage would instead propose to use film to recordcatalog and reorder the perceptual world

Surface Tensions Membership Translation Duration

Made during Framptonrsquos exploration of the possible relationships betweenset theory and Structural film Surface Tension acts I will argue as an early blue-print for his works that explore the formal ordering of film through what heunderstood as its ldquomembership attributesrdquo During this period Framptonrsquosexperiments in sound voice and text helped him isolate and identify subsets ofthis ldquomembershiprdquo by using the complex ordering properties of language as ananalogue and counter-system to filmrsquos metered form14

Hidden Noise 101

12 Shaughan Lavine Understanding the Infinite (Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 1994)pp 10ndash1113 Carl Andre Hollis Frampton 12 Dialogues 1962ndash1963 ed Benjamin H D Buchloh (Halifax NovaScotia College of Art and Design 1981) p 5514 Peter Kubelka beginning in 1956 when he began work on Adebar developed what he called themetric film whereby ldquoevery part of the film is precisely measured and set into relation to the film as a

Surface Tensionmdasha title like Zorns Lemma that refers to a formal processmdashisliterally the cohesive forces between liquid molecules that form a ldquofilmrdquo which inturn make it difficult to move an object through a surface Surface Tension evidencesFramptonrsquos fascination with Duchamprsquos and Joseph Cornellrsquos boxes the film isstructured as a triptych containing three discrete segments the final sequence isliterally a box a fish tank submerged in ocean water Each section serves as a kind ofldquoboxrdquo collecting a (silent) image track an unseen sound a text and a countingdevice Not only does the viewer struggle to establish correlations and relationsamong these disjunctive tracks but in Framptonrsquos boxlike structure these assembledmaterials somehow come to substitute for one anothermdashas if image soundlanguage and number could comprise open systems of interchangeable sets Mostnotably by repeatedly measuring the duration of human speech against a quantita-tive counting device Surface Tension insistently attempts both to correlate andunravel the incommensurable infrastructures of language and mathematics

The first sequence juxtaposes a moving body with a grid of an electrical clockfacemdasha knowing nod to Eadweard Muybridgersquos early photographic documentationsof human and animal movement measured against gridlike backdrops15 An actorappearing to talk very expressively (we do not hear his words) seems to mimic thechanging second-hand numbers on the clock as they fly past him on the left In asense the actor is timing his own performancemdashhe adjusts the clock at the end ofeach sequence His muted speech runs alongside the looping numbers effectivelyturning his speech into a counting system Similar to Paul Sharitsrsquos Word MovieFluxfilm 29 (1966) in which letters speeding by in vertical streams form words inslot machine-like chance combinations Surface Tension here equates the temporal-ity of ldquotalkrdquo with the quantitative measure of clocked time

Frampton however pushes a mathematical reading of film even further thanSharits or Tony Conrad16 In a sense he performs rather than represents film as amathematical operation Already in Surface Tension Frampton was experimentingwith Zornrsquos Lemma as a way of thinking about film editingordering every set canbe well-ordered and within each partial set there exists a maximally ordered setThe entire opening section consists of five sets of timed speech acts two are elevenminutes two are nine minutes in duration and the fifth begins at twenty-three

OCTOBER102

whole and that every part of the film communicates with all the other partsrdquo Thomas Korchilhttpwwwkortfilmfestivalennoarkivenglisharticles99_PeterKubhtml15 Framptonrsquos interest in Muybridge was spurred by his own fascination with photography as aproto-cinematic language Muybridgersquos interest in mapping sequential movement through photo-graphic time reflected Framptonrsquos own aesthetic inquiries from his black-and-white photography seriesWord Pictures (1962ndash63) to their transposition into ldquomoving picturesrdquo in Zorns Lemma see ChristopherPhillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 65 Frampton withMarion Faller also spoofed Muybridgersquos Motion Studies in his Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion(1975) replacing humans and animals with vegetables16 Tony Conrad studied mathematics at Harvard and was a colleague of Frampton and Paul Sharitsin Media Studies at SUNY Buffalo during the rsquo70s and early rsquo80s In Conradrsquos video Cycles of 3rsquos and 7rsquos(1976) harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be played by musical instruments are representedthrough the computation of their arithmetic relationships or frequency ratios on a calculator

Surface Tensionmdasha title like Zorns Lemma that refers to a formal processmdashisliterally the cohesive forces between liquid molecules that form a ldquofilmrdquo which inturn make it difficult to move an object through a surface Surface Tension evidencesFramptonrsquos fascination with Duchamprsquos and Joseph Cornellrsquos boxes the film isstructured as a triptych containing three discrete segments the final sequence isliterally a box a fish tank submerged in ocean water Each section serves as a kind ofldquoboxrdquo collecting a (silent) image track an unseen sound a text and a countingdevice Not only does the viewer struggle to establish correlations and relationsamong these disjunctive tracks but in Framptonrsquos boxlike structure these assembledmaterials somehow come to substitute for one anothermdashas if image soundlanguage and number could comprise open systems of interchangeable sets Mostnotably by repeatedly measuring the duration of human speech against a quantita-tive counting device Surface Tension insistently attempts both to correlate andunravel the incommensurable infrastructures of language and mathematics

The first sequence juxtaposes a moving body with a grid of an electrical clockfacemdasha knowing nod to Eadweard Muybridgersquos early photographic documentationsof human and animal movement measured against gridlike backdrops15 An actorappearing to talk very expressively (we do not hear his words) seems to mimic thechanging second-hand numbers on the clock as they fly past him on the left In asense the actor is timing his own performancemdashhe adjusts the clock at the end ofeach sequence His muted speech runs alongside the looping numbers effectivelyturning his speech into a counting system Similar to Paul Sharitsrsquos Word MovieFluxfilm 29 (1966) in which letters speeding by in vertical streams form words inslot machine-like chance combinations Surface Tension here equates the temporal-ity of ldquotalkrdquo with the quantitative measure of clocked time

Frampton however pushes a mathematical reading of film even further thanSharits or Tony Conrad16 In a sense he performs rather than represents film as amathematical operation Already in Surface Tension Frampton was experimentingwith Zornrsquos Lemma as a way of thinking about film editingordering every set canbe well-ordered and within each partial set there exists a maximally ordered setThe entire opening section consists of five sets of timed speech acts two are elevenminutes two are nine minutes in duration and the fifth begins at twenty-three

OCTOBER102

whole and that every part of the film communicates with all the other partsrdquo Thomas Korchilhttpwwwkortfilmfestivalennoarkivenglisharticles99_PeterKubhtml15 Framptonrsquos interest in Muybridge was spurred by his own fascination with photography as aproto-cinematic language Muybridgersquos interest in mapping sequential movement through photo-graphic time reflected Framptonrsquos own aesthetic inquiries from his black-and-white photography seriesWord Pictures (1962ndash63) to their transposition into ldquomoving picturesrdquo in Zorns Lemma see ChristopherPhillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo October 32 (Spring 1985) p 65 Frampton withMarion Faller also spoofed Muybridgersquos Motion Studies in his Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion(1975) replacing humans and animals with vegetables16 Tony Conrad studied mathematics at Harvard and was a colleague of Frampton and Paul Sharitsin Media Studies at SUNY Buffalo during the rsquo70s and early rsquo80s In Conradrsquos video Cycles of 3rsquos and 7rsquos(1976) harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be played by musical instruments are representedthrough the computation of their arithmetic relationships or frequency ratios on a calculator

minutes and eleven seconds These five ldquosetsrdquo of timed sequencesmdashall partial setsof incomplete speech actsmdashbecome fully ordered sets as they are divided into thelogic of their ldquocutsrdquo according to an underlying numerical schema

In Framptonrsquos search for an ldquoopen systemrdquo of selection and combination inand beyond language sound becomes crucial For example the persistent ringingof the telephone in Surface Tensionmdashbeginning with black leader and continuingthroughout the first segment of the filmmdashemphasizes the actorrsquos muted speechThis intrusive nagging ring reminds the viewer that the speech is neither intelligibleor accessible we only hear the ringing phone Nor is the actor himself cognizant ofthe sound around him he never picks up Nevertheless we are lulled into thecorrelation between counting (numbers) and reading (gestures) The repetition ofthe ring (thirty-seven times) also reiterates the stopping and starting of eachsequencemdashits recurrence insistence and eventual end as the film fades to black

The rest of the film mirrors this structure of repeating sets and at the sametime implicitly reflects on the metalanguage of ldquomembershiprdquo through systems oftranslation and as Frampton stressed in his ldquoNotes on Composing in Filmrdquo mistrans-lation or misreading A voice-over in German by Kasper Koumlnig describes an unseenfilm in three parts The first section recounts the story of a woman from Philadelphiawho is invited to go to the south of France for the weekend Koumlnig comments on thescene as if recounting his viewing of it on film ldquoWhatrsquos so strange is that the color ofthis first section is the color of an American cigarette advertisement And I donrsquotthink this could have been achieved without the help of professional filmlightingtechniciansrdquo He continues by describing two other sections of this unseen film atwelve-minute black-and-white documentary and a twenty-minute-long sequenceshot on water that has a brownish sheen like the color of ldquochocolate saucerdquo

The entire voice-over occurs over a relentless montage of single-frame shotsof city streets This montage gives the section a breathless speed a velocity that isheightened in contrast to the halting slow-paced rhythm of the German voice-overKoumlnigrsquos commentary is cut off by a lengthy piercingly loud beep that segues us intothe ldquorealrdquo third section of Surface Tension The untranslated German speech is usedhere as another way of staging the ldquoopen systemsrdquo of interchangeable sets Thestories told in German act as a MacGuffin the real tension exists between thesingle-framed frenetic images of an American city and the languidly paced voiceunfolding against them Image bytes are measured against sound bytes and theaxiomatic structures of translation and conversion are referred to but not enacted

The flashing single-word texts that comprise the third section of Surface Tensionmake it appear as though translation is occurring but instead the system is cut againindividual words stand in for a missing narrative some flashing like a marquee overa macabre seascape in which a trapped mocking goldfish floats midscreen The trip-tych structure is again emphasized as an intertitle announces ldquoPart 1 20 minutesPart 2 5 minutes Part 3 5 minutesrdquomdashrepeating the metastructure of Surface Tensionthrough the faux dimensions of a film within a film Through this series of mis-matched sets Surface Tension inaugurates the paradigm for Framptonrsquos experiments

Hidden Noise 103

in sound-image configurations Its puzzle-like structure plays with Duchampianhidden noise we never see the phone that rings the German man whose voice wehear or the obscure industrial machine that buzzes throughout the final sectionThe filmrsquos three ldquoboxed setsrdquo of image language sound and number give theviewer a selection of potentially mutually exclusive nonempty sets but in each weare given markers of what Frampton terms ldquoa characteristic sensible shape inspace and timerdquo17

The Perceptual Events of Ordered and Open Systems

Enclosed is my standard blah Itrsquos not quite up-to-date You can addprestigiously that Zorns Lemma was the first really hardnosed badassedfeature to be shown in the ldquoregularrdquo screenings in the New York FilmFestival I mean in Philharmonic Hall not the Alice Tully Freak show(THAT was funny as hell Irsquoll tell you all about it in January) Also threebits of P Adamsrsquos The two unpublished are ad copy from the forth-coming new Coop catalog There are three more articles due outmomentarily whatever that means amp Im starting to resent Zorns LemmaSLIGHTLY telling people that I have in fact made 14 other films etcetera

mdashHollis Frampton letter to Sally Dixon 197018

Whereas Surface Noise plays with the idea of sets as boxes Zorns Lemma synthe-sizes two closely related concepts from set theory the principle of the Axiom ofChoice and as the title suggests Zornrsquos Lemma19 For Frampton the two mostimportant ideas that stem from these mathematical assertions include ldquopartial order-ingrdquo (as in the Zorn Lemma) and ldquowell orderingrdquo (a consequence of the Axiom ofChoice)20 In Framptonrsquos cinematic version of the Zorn Lemma he loosely repro-duces the operations of partial ordering through his use of the alphabet Thetwenty-six letters provide a ldquomaximal chainrdquo or partial ordering of the larger struc-ture of the film In mathematics a maximal chain is partially ordered through somekind of rule and this rule in turn establishes a particular transitive relation betweenset members ie if x lt y and y lt z then x lt z Frampton plays with this transitivitywhen he substitutes certain letters and often pairs of letters with images of everydayhuman activities a woman talking someone washing her hands a child swinging a

OCTOBER104

17 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6218 Letter to Sally Dixon curator of Film and Video at the Carnegie Museum October 26 1970Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh19 The formal statement of the Zorn Lemma in mathematics is ldquoLet P be a partial orderingSuppose that whenever C is a chain of P there exists an upper bound for C in P Then P has a maximalelementrdquo The proof of the Zorn Lemma uses Axiom of Choice There is also a proof of the Axiom ofChoice that uses the Zorn Lemma Mathematicians often see Zornrsquos Lemma the Axiom of Choice aswell as Kuratowskirsquos Lemma (which Frampton actually quotes as Zornrsquos Lemma) as equivalent 20 Zornrsquos Lemma is most easily understood through the Axiom of Choice which states ldquoLet C be acollection of nonempty sets Then we can choose a member from each set in that collection In other

man dribbling a basketball hands peelingan orange someone driving a car Byestablishing ldquolimitsrdquo within the alphabetthrough substitutionmdashie E is replacedby a woman talking (in double exposure)G is substituted with someone washing herhands H is taken over by an image of ananonymous man walking down aManhattan streetmdashFrampton establishesa ldquohigher order substitutionrdquo wherein animage represents a letter setting both itsupper limits (in terms of a partial order-ing) as well as revealing the arbitraryrelations implied in alphabetic significa-tion Yet the effect of the substitutions isultimately to emphasize the structuralincompatibility of letters and numbersThe intelligibility of language presup-poses a prior cut just as the arbitraryphoneme cuts into the quantitative imagecontinuum of the film

While Zorns Lemma began with astilted read of the nineteenth-centuryMassachusetts Bay State Primer hereFrampton pokes fun at such intendedcorrelations of sound order and senseNarrative Frampton implies has beenhoodwinked by a deadly predictable finiteorder The randomized image sequencessuggest parallel problems in the way wethink about ordering in mathematics andin language The cardinal numbers withwhich we count (one two three) and theordinal numbers through which we orderevents (first second third) help us in theway a good Aristotelian narrative doesthey point to location position and orderof events They offer a palatable approachto the seeming finite world a beginning amiddle an end In contrast to narrative oreven Eisensteinrsquos ldquometricrdquo montage settheory offered Frampton a way to thinkabout infinite sets in a ldquowell-orderedrdquo but

Hollis Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970Bottom photo Biff Henrich Courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Hidden Noise 105

nonsequential way21 Exposing the pitfalls of measuring cinematic time throughfinite measures (narrative number of frames per second) Frampton was able topoint to the vertical structures of film montage through both the desecration of theordinal power of the alphabet as well as to his reflexive play with the ldquoconsecutiverdquoframes of film

Mathematics and Language

Writingmdashthe visual cue of words themselves on the screenmdashbecame a centralanalogue for the ldquofinite series of shotsrdquo which like their counterpart in narrativeexist in ldquoreal timerdquo22 In conversation with Frampton in the early 1970s Brakhageproposed ldquoFor any finite series of shots [lsquofilmrsquo] whatsoever there exists in realtime a rational narrative such that every term in the series together with itsposition duration partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirelyaccounted forrdquo23 Frampton then transposes Brakhagersquos ldquoaxiomatic theorem fornarrativerdquo into a series of mathematical equations

P = 30 can also meanP = P P P P 624

3 + 5 + 6 + 10 +

By stripping language of its syntactical meaning and position through theuse of numbers (and their membership sets) Frampton achieves a measuredindifference to linguistic affect and in turn dramatic effect P = 30 can beexpanded as any one narrative can into any number of divisible representations(such as above) Duchamp had described a similar process in his marginal notesldquoalgebraic comparisonsrdquo for The Green Box (1912) in which the ratio ab stands infor the narrative history describing the receptionrejection of his works a represent-ing the work(s) b standing in for its (or their) exhibition possibilitiesconditions25

Duchamp was interested in the notion of ratio to investigate the extended durations

OCTOBER106

words there exists a function f defined on C with the property that for each set S in the collectionf(S) is a member of Srdquo Let me illustrate the Axiom of Choice with a simple but vivid example supposethat on the floor in front of you are some buckets Somehow you know that each of the buckets has atleast one object inside it You could then order it you could go through and pick one object out ofeach bucket (This would constitute a set) This is easy the choices are finite However the Axiom ofChoice says that when there are an infinite number of bucketsmdasha seemingly overwhelming and impos-sible taskmdashthere is still a way to choose (a way to order sets)21 In ldquoA Dialectic Approach to Film Formrdquo in Film Form Essays in Film Theory (Harvest Books1969) Eisenstein defines metric montage as a technique of film editing in which shots are joinedtogether according to their length in a formulascheme corresponding to a measure of musicEisensteinrsquos October (1927) is a classic example of the use of metric montage 22 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6323 Ibid24 Ibid25 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo [marginal notes 1912] in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp ed

of reception and display By using the alphabet as a colossal set Frampton offers asimilar idea of ratio by juxtaposing ldquofound word setsrdquo with two other particular imagesets elemental images implying recurring structures from nature (fire water earth)and routinal images pointing to repetitive everyday durational activities (talkingwalking eating)

The different kinds of filmed durations represented here emerge fromFramptonrsquos keen awareness of the relationships between language and iconicityand ultimately their embodied forms (talking listening reading writing) Thekind of time that counting or listing represents (what Allen Weiss calls the ldquoenumera-tiverdquo) is quite different from the kind of time the referentiality of languagerepresents Filmic time that can both use and disrupt such durational structuresfunctions Frampton argues more algebraically like a ldquopolyhedronrdquo ldquoThe existence

Hidden Noise 107

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York Da Capo Press Inc 1973) p 28 In Kant AfterDuchamp (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999) Thierry de Duve elaborates upon this ratio in terms ofits illustration of the exhibition histories connected to Duchamprsquos Nude Descending a Staircase andFountain (pp 131ndash43)

Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970 Clockwise from upper left Forthe letter X for the letter Y for the letter Q for the letter ZCourtesy Anthology Film Archives

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

in sound-image configurations Its puzzle-like structure plays with Duchampianhidden noise we never see the phone that rings the German man whose voice wehear or the obscure industrial machine that buzzes throughout the final sectionThe filmrsquos three ldquoboxed setsrdquo of image language sound and number give theviewer a selection of potentially mutually exclusive nonempty sets but in each weare given markers of what Frampton terms ldquoa characteristic sensible shape inspace and timerdquo17

The Perceptual Events of Ordered and Open Systems

Enclosed is my standard blah Itrsquos not quite up-to-date You can addprestigiously that Zorns Lemma was the first really hardnosed badassedfeature to be shown in the ldquoregularrdquo screenings in the New York FilmFestival I mean in Philharmonic Hall not the Alice Tully Freak show(THAT was funny as hell Irsquoll tell you all about it in January) Also threebits of P Adamsrsquos The two unpublished are ad copy from the forth-coming new Coop catalog There are three more articles due outmomentarily whatever that means amp Im starting to resent Zorns LemmaSLIGHTLY telling people that I have in fact made 14 other films etcetera

mdashHollis Frampton letter to Sally Dixon 197018

Whereas Surface Noise plays with the idea of sets as boxes Zorns Lemma synthe-sizes two closely related concepts from set theory the principle of the Axiom ofChoice and as the title suggests Zornrsquos Lemma19 For Frampton the two mostimportant ideas that stem from these mathematical assertions include ldquopartial order-ingrdquo (as in the Zorn Lemma) and ldquowell orderingrdquo (a consequence of the Axiom ofChoice)20 In Framptonrsquos cinematic version of the Zorn Lemma he loosely repro-duces the operations of partial ordering through his use of the alphabet Thetwenty-six letters provide a ldquomaximal chainrdquo or partial ordering of the larger struc-ture of the film In mathematics a maximal chain is partially ordered through somekind of rule and this rule in turn establishes a particular transitive relation betweenset members ie if x lt y and y lt z then x lt z Frampton plays with this transitivitywhen he substitutes certain letters and often pairs of letters with images of everydayhuman activities a woman talking someone washing her hands a child swinging a

OCTOBER104

17 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6218 Letter to Sally Dixon curator of Film and Video at the Carnegie Museum October 26 1970Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh19 The formal statement of the Zorn Lemma in mathematics is ldquoLet P be a partial orderingSuppose that whenever C is a chain of P there exists an upper bound for C in P Then P has a maximalelementrdquo The proof of the Zorn Lemma uses Axiom of Choice There is also a proof of the Axiom ofChoice that uses the Zorn Lemma Mathematicians often see Zornrsquos Lemma the Axiom of Choice aswell as Kuratowskirsquos Lemma (which Frampton actually quotes as Zornrsquos Lemma) as equivalent 20 Zornrsquos Lemma is most easily understood through the Axiom of Choice which states ldquoLet C be acollection of nonempty sets Then we can choose a member from each set in that collection In other

man dribbling a basketball hands peelingan orange someone driving a car Byestablishing ldquolimitsrdquo within the alphabetthrough substitutionmdashie E is replacedby a woman talking (in double exposure)G is substituted with someone washing herhands H is taken over by an image of ananonymous man walking down aManhattan streetmdashFrampton establishesa ldquohigher order substitutionrdquo wherein animage represents a letter setting both itsupper limits (in terms of a partial order-ing) as well as revealing the arbitraryrelations implied in alphabetic significa-tion Yet the effect of the substitutions isultimately to emphasize the structuralincompatibility of letters and numbersThe intelligibility of language presup-poses a prior cut just as the arbitraryphoneme cuts into the quantitative imagecontinuum of the film

While Zorns Lemma began with astilted read of the nineteenth-centuryMassachusetts Bay State Primer hereFrampton pokes fun at such intendedcorrelations of sound order and senseNarrative Frampton implies has beenhoodwinked by a deadly predictable finiteorder The randomized image sequencessuggest parallel problems in the way wethink about ordering in mathematics andin language The cardinal numbers withwhich we count (one two three) and theordinal numbers through which we orderevents (first second third) help us in theway a good Aristotelian narrative doesthey point to location position and orderof events They offer a palatable approachto the seeming finite world a beginning amiddle an end In contrast to narrative oreven Eisensteinrsquos ldquometricrdquo montage settheory offered Frampton a way to thinkabout infinite sets in a ldquowell-orderedrdquo but

Hollis Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970Bottom photo Biff Henrich Courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Hidden Noise 105

nonsequential way21 Exposing the pitfalls of measuring cinematic time throughfinite measures (narrative number of frames per second) Frampton was able topoint to the vertical structures of film montage through both the desecration of theordinal power of the alphabet as well as to his reflexive play with the ldquoconsecutiverdquoframes of film

Mathematics and Language

Writingmdashthe visual cue of words themselves on the screenmdashbecame a centralanalogue for the ldquofinite series of shotsrdquo which like their counterpart in narrativeexist in ldquoreal timerdquo22 In conversation with Frampton in the early 1970s Brakhageproposed ldquoFor any finite series of shots [lsquofilmrsquo] whatsoever there exists in realtime a rational narrative such that every term in the series together with itsposition duration partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirelyaccounted forrdquo23 Frampton then transposes Brakhagersquos ldquoaxiomatic theorem fornarrativerdquo into a series of mathematical equations

P = 30 can also meanP = P P P P 624

3 + 5 + 6 + 10 +

By stripping language of its syntactical meaning and position through theuse of numbers (and their membership sets) Frampton achieves a measuredindifference to linguistic affect and in turn dramatic effect P = 30 can beexpanded as any one narrative can into any number of divisible representations(such as above) Duchamp had described a similar process in his marginal notesldquoalgebraic comparisonsrdquo for The Green Box (1912) in which the ratio ab stands infor the narrative history describing the receptionrejection of his works a represent-ing the work(s) b standing in for its (or their) exhibition possibilitiesconditions25

Duchamp was interested in the notion of ratio to investigate the extended durations

OCTOBER106

words there exists a function f defined on C with the property that for each set S in the collectionf(S) is a member of Srdquo Let me illustrate the Axiom of Choice with a simple but vivid example supposethat on the floor in front of you are some buckets Somehow you know that each of the buckets has atleast one object inside it You could then order it you could go through and pick one object out ofeach bucket (This would constitute a set) This is easy the choices are finite However the Axiom ofChoice says that when there are an infinite number of bucketsmdasha seemingly overwhelming and impos-sible taskmdashthere is still a way to choose (a way to order sets)21 In ldquoA Dialectic Approach to Film Formrdquo in Film Form Essays in Film Theory (Harvest Books1969) Eisenstein defines metric montage as a technique of film editing in which shots are joinedtogether according to their length in a formulascheme corresponding to a measure of musicEisensteinrsquos October (1927) is a classic example of the use of metric montage 22 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6323 Ibid24 Ibid25 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo [marginal notes 1912] in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp ed

of reception and display By using the alphabet as a colossal set Frampton offers asimilar idea of ratio by juxtaposing ldquofound word setsrdquo with two other particular imagesets elemental images implying recurring structures from nature (fire water earth)and routinal images pointing to repetitive everyday durational activities (talkingwalking eating)

The different kinds of filmed durations represented here emerge fromFramptonrsquos keen awareness of the relationships between language and iconicityand ultimately their embodied forms (talking listening reading writing) Thekind of time that counting or listing represents (what Allen Weiss calls the ldquoenumera-tiverdquo) is quite different from the kind of time the referentiality of languagerepresents Filmic time that can both use and disrupt such durational structuresfunctions Frampton argues more algebraically like a ldquopolyhedronrdquo ldquoThe existence

Hidden Noise 107

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York Da Capo Press Inc 1973) p 28 In Kant AfterDuchamp (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999) Thierry de Duve elaborates upon this ratio in terms ofits illustration of the exhibition histories connected to Duchamprsquos Nude Descending a Staircase andFountain (pp 131ndash43)

Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970 Clockwise from upper left Forthe letter X for the letter Y for the letter Q for the letter ZCourtesy Anthology Film Archives

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

man dribbling a basketball hands peelingan orange someone driving a car Byestablishing ldquolimitsrdquo within the alphabetthrough substitutionmdashie E is replacedby a woman talking (in double exposure)G is substituted with someone washing herhands H is taken over by an image of ananonymous man walking down aManhattan streetmdashFrampton establishesa ldquohigher order substitutionrdquo wherein animage represents a letter setting both itsupper limits (in terms of a partial order-ing) as well as revealing the arbitraryrelations implied in alphabetic significa-tion Yet the effect of the substitutions isultimately to emphasize the structuralincompatibility of letters and numbersThe intelligibility of language presup-poses a prior cut just as the arbitraryphoneme cuts into the quantitative imagecontinuum of the film

While Zorns Lemma began with astilted read of the nineteenth-centuryMassachusetts Bay State Primer hereFrampton pokes fun at such intendedcorrelations of sound order and senseNarrative Frampton implies has beenhoodwinked by a deadly predictable finiteorder The randomized image sequencessuggest parallel problems in the way wethink about ordering in mathematics andin language The cardinal numbers withwhich we count (one two three) and theordinal numbers through which we orderevents (first second third) help us in theway a good Aristotelian narrative doesthey point to location position and orderof events They offer a palatable approachto the seeming finite world a beginning amiddle an end In contrast to narrative oreven Eisensteinrsquos ldquometricrdquo montage settheory offered Frampton a way to thinkabout infinite sets in a ldquowell-orderedrdquo but

Hollis Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970Bottom photo Biff Henrich Courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Hidden Noise 105

nonsequential way21 Exposing the pitfalls of measuring cinematic time throughfinite measures (narrative number of frames per second) Frampton was able topoint to the vertical structures of film montage through both the desecration of theordinal power of the alphabet as well as to his reflexive play with the ldquoconsecutiverdquoframes of film

Mathematics and Language

Writingmdashthe visual cue of words themselves on the screenmdashbecame a centralanalogue for the ldquofinite series of shotsrdquo which like their counterpart in narrativeexist in ldquoreal timerdquo22 In conversation with Frampton in the early 1970s Brakhageproposed ldquoFor any finite series of shots [lsquofilmrsquo] whatsoever there exists in realtime a rational narrative such that every term in the series together with itsposition duration partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirelyaccounted forrdquo23 Frampton then transposes Brakhagersquos ldquoaxiomatic theorem fornarrativerdquo into a series of mathematical equations

P = 30 can also meanP = P P P P 624

3 + 5 + 6 + 10 +

By stripping language of its syntactical meaning and position through theuse of numbers (and their membership sets) Frampton achieves a measuredindifference to linguistic affect and in turn dramatic effect P = 30 can beexpanded as any one narrative can into any number of divisible representations(such as above) Duchamp had described a similar process in his marginal notesldquoalgebraic comparisonsrdquo for The Green Box (1912) in which the ratio ab stands infor the narrative history describing the receptionrejection of his works a represent-ing the work(s) b standing in for its (or their) exhibition possibilitiesconditions25

Duchamp was interested in the notion of ratio to investigate the extended durations

OCTOBER106

words there exists a function f defined on C with the property that for each set S in the collectionf(S) is a member of Srdquo Let me illustrate the Axiom of Choice with a simple but vivid example supposethat on the floor in front of you are some buckets Somehow you know that each of the buckets has atleast one object inside it You could then order it you could go through and pick one object out ofeach bucket (This would constitute a set) This is easy the choices are finite However the Axiom ofChoice says that when there are an infinite number of bucketsmdasha seemingly overwhelming and impos-sible taskmdashthere is still a way to choose (a way to order sets)21 In ldquoA Dialectic Approach to Film Formrdquo in Film Form Essays in Film Theory (Harvest Books1969) Eisenstein defines metric montage as a technique of film editing in which shots are joinedtogether according to their length in a formulascheme corresponding to a measure of musicEisensteinrsquos October (1927) is a classic example of the use of metric montage 22 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6323 Ibid24 Ibid25 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo [marginal notes 1912] in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp ed

of reception and display By using the alphabet as a colossal set Frampton offers asimilar idea of ratio by juxtaposing ldquofound word setsrdquo with two other particular imagesets elemental images implying recurring structures from nature (fire water earth)and routinal images pointing to repetitive everyday durational activities (talkingwalking eating)

The different kinds of filmed durations represented here emerge fromFramptonrsquos keen awareness of the relationships between language and iconicityand ultimately their embodied forms (talking listening reading writing) Thekind of time that counting or listing represents (what Allen Weiss calls the ldquoenumera-tiverdquo) is quite different from the kind of time the referentiality of languagerepresents Filmic time that can both use and disrupt such durational structuresfunctions Frampton argues more algebraically like a ldquopolyhedronrdquo ldquoThe existence

Hidden Noise 107

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York Da Capo Press Inc 1973) p 28 In Kant AfterDuchamp (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999) Thierry de Duve elaborates upon this ratio in terms ofits illustration of the exhibition histories connected to Duchamprsquos Nude Descending a Staircase andFountain (pp 131ndash43)

Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970 Clockwise from upper left Forthe letter X for the letter Y for the letter Q for the letter ZCourtesy Anthology Film Archives

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

nonsequential way21 Exposing the pitfalls of measuring cinematic time throughfinite measures (narrative number of frames per second) Frampton was able topoint to the vertical structures of film montage through both the desecration of theordinal power of the alphabet as well as to his reflexive play with the ldquoconsecutiverdquoframes of film

Mathematics and Language

Writingmdashthe visual cue of words themselves on the screenmdashbecame a centralanalogue for the ldquofinite series of shotsrdquo which like their counterpart in narrativeexist in ldquoreal timerdquo22 In conversation with Frampton in the early 1970s Brakhageproposed ldquoFor any finite series of shots [lsquofilmrsquo] whatsoever there exists in realtime a rational narrative such that every term in the series together with itsposition duration partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirelyaccounted forrdquo23 Frampton then transposes Brakhagersquos ldquoaxiomatic theorem fornarrativerdquo into a series of mathematical equations

P = 30 can also meanP = P P P P 624

3 + 5 + 6 + 10 +

By stripping language of its syntactical meaning and position through theuse of numbers (and their membership sets) Frampton achieves a measuredindifference to linguistic affect and in turn dramatic effect P = 30 can beexpanded as any one narrative can into any number of divisible representations(such as above) Duchamp had described a similar process in his marginal notesldquoalgebraic comparisonsrdquo for The Green Box (1912) in which the ratio ab stands infor the narrative history describing the receptionrejection of his works a represent-ing the work(s) b standing in for its (or their) exhibition possibilitiesconditions25

Duchamp was interested in the notion of ratio to investigate the extended durations

OCTOBER106

words there exists a function f defined on C with the property that for each set S in the collectionf(S) is a member of Srdquo Let me illustrate the Axiom of Choice with a simple but vivid example supposethat on the floor in front of you are some buckets Somehow you know that each of the buckets has atleast one object inside it You could then order it you could go through and pick one object out ofeach bucket (This would constitute a set) This is easy the choices are finite However the Axiom ofChoice says that when there are an infinite number of bucketsmdasha seemingly overwhelming and impos-sible taskmdashthere is still a way to choose (a way to order sets)21 In ldquoA Dialectic Approach to Film Formrdquo in Film Form Essays in Film Theory (Harvest Books1969) Eisenstein defines metric montage as a technique of film editing in which shots are joinedtogether according to their length in a formulascheme corresponding to a measure of musicEisensteinrsquos October (1927) is a classic example of the use of metric montage 22 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6323 Ibid24 Ibid25 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo [marginal notes 1912] in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp ed

of reception and display By using the alphabet as a colossal set Frampton offers asimilar idea of ratio by juxtaposing ldquofound word setsrdquo with two other particular imagesets elemental images implying recurring structures from nature (fire water earth)and routinal images pointing to repetitive everyday durational activities (talkingwalking eating)

The different kinds of filmed durations represented here emerge fromFramptonrsquos keen awareness of the relationships between language and iconicityand ultimately their embodied forms (talking listening reading writing) Thekind of time that counting or listing represents (what Allen Weiss calls the ldquoenumera-tiverdquo) is quite different from the kind of time the referentiality of languagerepresents Filmic time that can both use and disrupt such durational structuresfunctions Frampton argues more algebraically like a ldquopolyhedronrdquo ldquoThe existence

Hidden Noise 107

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York Da Capo Press Inc 1973) p 28 In Kant AfterDuchamp (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999) Thierry de Duve elaborates upon this ratio in terms ofits illustration of the exhibition histories connected to Duchamprsquos Nude Descending a Staircase andFountain (pp 131ndash43)

Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970 Clockwise from upper left Forthe letter X for the letter Y for the letter Q for the letter ZCourtesy Anthology Film Archives

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

of reception and display By using the alphabet as a colossal set Frampton offers asimilar idea of ratio by juxtaposing ldquofound word setsrdquo with two other particular imagesets elemental images implying recurring structures from nature (fire water earth)and routinal images pointing to repetitive everyday durational activities (talkingwalking eating)

The different kinds of filmed durations represented here emerge fromFramptonrsquos keen awareness of the relationships between language and iconicityand ultimately their embodied forms (talking listening reading writing) Thekind of time that counting or listing represents (what Allen Weiss calls the ldquoenumera-tiverdquo) is quite different from the kind of time the referentiality of languagerepresents Filmic time that can both use and disrupt such durational structuresfunctions Frampton argues more algebraically like a ldquopolyhedronrdquo ldquoThe existence

Hidden Noise 107

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York Da Capo Press Inc 1973) p 28 In Kant AfterDuchamp (Cambridge Mass MIT Press 1999) Thierry de Duve elaborates upon this ratio in terms ofits illustration of the exhibition histories connected to Duchamprsquos Nude Descending a Staircase andFountain (pp 131ndash43)

Frampton Zorns Lemma 1970 Clockwise from upper left Forthe letter X for the letter Y for the letter Q for the letter ZCourtesy Anthology Film Archives

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

of the whole body [suspended weightless in a void with each of its vertices touching the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere] is utterly dependent upon theintegrity of all its facets every facet represents a storyrdquo26 Thus Framptonrsquos methodof traversing the enumerative with embodied activities creates a chordlike effectvertical and horizontal axes of language and image intersect and begin to ldquoplayrdquoeach other in dissonant but contiguous ways This is a kind of vertical image montagethat Frampton will continue to experiment with and fully utilize in his sound workby the time he begins Mindfall (Part I of Magellan)

In its desire to express an overtonality that is more about temporal simul-t aneit y than language play Zorns Lemma is not unlike Shar it srsquosSTREAMSSECTIONSECTIONSSECTIONED (1968ndash71) As Sharits would say about STREAMthe relationship in ldquosimultaneous occurrence and in overlapping structural (or wave-form) congruenciesrdquo occurs ldquonot in the work but in perception itselfrdquomdashin an almostindiscernible continuous passage of both auditory and visual events27 Both filmsregister a series of perceptual events or as Frampton had imagined for Magellan ldquoaninventory of modes of perception and [the] classification thatrsquos involvedrdquo28

Paradoxically the veritable flood of words that take over Framptonrsquos workduring this period (reaching its apex in the filmed script for Poetic Justice [1972])represents Framptonrsquos impulse to drain both the image and speech of their affectiveprescriptive relationships to representation Framptonrsquos ldquoopen allusionrdquo to alpha-betization in Zorns Lemma stresses his use of letters as a system of random orderingso that he could ldquoavoid imposing [his] own taste and making them into little punsrdquo29

Writing and the ldquoliftingrdquo of found words off signs billboards and graffiti (in ZornsLemma) unhinge words from their subordinate position as synchronous accompani-ment to image while disrupting their static position as signs of articulated speech

Instead of scratching directly on the surface of the film as Sharits does inSTREAM Frampton uses the momentum of editing producing a series of interfer-ence patterns that produce a vertical structure on the horizontal sequencing of thealphabet However this systematic interruption is not necessarily about disruptionbut instead sharpens the focus on perception as a nonlinear process In this wayZorns Lemma was a training ground for Magellan in which ldquothe parts of the wholething instead of following one another linearly are constantly interpenetratingrdquo30

OCTOBER108

26 Frampton ldquoA Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrativerdquo Circles of Confusion p 6727 Paul Sharits ldquomdashUR(i)N(ul)LS TREAM S S ECTION S ECTION S S ECTIONED (A)(lysis)JO 1968ndash70rdquoFilm Culture 65ndash66 (1978) p 1628 Frampton in Mitch Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo [interview] Film Comment 13 no 5(1977) p 5829 Frampton in Peter Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo [1972] October 32 (Spring 1985) p94 In 1970 the same year as Framptonrsquos Zorns Lemma Carl Andre used an alphabetical ordering ofchemical symbols Al Cu Fe Mg Pb and Zn for his floor installation of 37 Pieces of Work (GuggenheimMuseum) which consisted of an array of foot-square plates of aluminum copper steel magnesiumlead and zinc ldquoEach metal was used alone to constitute one 36 unit square then alternated checkerboardfashion with each of the other metals thus demonstrating the possible permutationsrdquo DavidBourdon Carl Andre Sculpture 1959ndash77 (New York Jaap Rietman Inc 1978) p 3230 Frampton in Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 58

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

A kind of ludic volley between images is echoed in the random play betweenwords Similar to other artists during this period like Vito Acconci Dan Grahamand Bruce Nauman Frampton uses the performativity of writing speech andgesture in what Benjamin H D Buchloh elsewhere describes as ldquototal oppositionto traditional definitions of theatricalityrdquo31 Thus Frampton rethinks the phenom-enological project in terms of a theatrical position that dissolves conventions ofdramatic narrative by reducing speech to noise and plot to structural repetition ashe does in Critical Mass At the end of Zorns Lemma Frampton employs the voicesof six women reading a text by medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste punctuatedor made rhythmic by the constant click of a metronome in one-second takesHere the mathematical ordering principle turns performance into operationwithout losing the performativity of its parts The numerical performs the linguisticand the imagistic quietly sparingly and not unironically ldquoWhen the number oneof form and the number two of matter and the number three of composition andthe number four of entirety are added together they make up the number tenwhich is the full number of the universerdquo32 The mechanical almost computer-generated sounding voices that accompany two figures walking out toward thesnowy horizon signal a strangely re-embodied mathematical analysis of thefilmrsquos construction

While Frampton is building a case for the metahistory of film as a catalogof phenomenological sensory perceptions ldquothe total historical function of filmnot as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsulerdquo he is also occupiedwith its ability to perform language beyond what he describes as the ldquopuritanicalauthority-ridden death-saturatedldquo ideologies of American Midwestern cultureanother kind of linguistic metahistory of which he and his contemporaries wereproducts33

Streams of Utterance in Critical Mass

Writing for Frampton is ldquoa kind of talkingrdquo34 In Critical Mass he uses audiodesign to write his sound track in a circuitous form so that sound and film function

Hidden Noise 109

31 Benjamin H D Buchloh ldquoJames Colemanrsquos Archeology of Spectaclerdquo in his Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge Mass MIT Press2000) p 15332 Text loosely adapted from Robert Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms (thirteenth-century manuscript) by Frampton for Zorns Lemma In ldquoFramptonrsquos Lemma Zornrsquos Dilemmardquo Allen SWeiss focuses on Grossetestersquos ldquotheology ontology and cosmology of lightrdquo but Grosseteste was also amathematician writing on geometry and optics as well as astronomy Brakhage however was moreinterested in Grossetestersquos focus on light than Frampton At the 1974 Canegie Institute premiere ofText of Light he paraphrased Grossetestersquos On Light or the Ingression of Forms ldquoAll that sense can compre-hend is Light because it partakes of that which it isrdquo Arthur Cantrill ldquoThe Text of Lightrdquo CantrillsFilmnotes 2122 (April 1975) pp 32ndash5333 Gidal ldquoInterview with Hollis Framptonrdquo p 9834 Ibid p 99

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

in ldquosymmetrical orbit around one anotherrdquo35 While many of his other works payhomage to early cinema or proto-cinematic phenomena Critical Mass serves asFramptonrsquos most sustained critique of the advent of the Hollywood ldquotalkierdquo rdquoIt wasnot simply sound then that threatened to destroy all the lsquopresent formal achieve-mentsrsquo of montage but the dubious gift of speech the Prime Instance of languagethe linear decoding of the terrain of thought into a stream of utterancerdquo36

Avant-garde directors from Eisenstein to Brakhage Frampton argues manifesta propensity for logophobia the word threatened to sully the ideal form of theimage Embracing the ldquocorruptingrdquo capacities of language Frampton uses thespoken word in Critical Mass as he did the written script in Poetic Justice it functionsas a virus transmutating morphing paralleling and infiltrating the graphicrhythms and dimensions of the image As Michelson notes ldquoFrampton saw his taskas the devising of a rigorous scheme for the organization of the material such that itwould still lsquorhymersquo in various ways with the enacted incidentsrdquo37 Though Framptonis influenced by Eisensteinrsquos dictum that sound should be in ldquodistinct nonsynchro-nizationrdquo with images he is also critical of Eisensteinrsquos fear that language wouldsomehow corrupt the image or as Eisenstein charged ldquoretard its tempordquo38

According to Frampton the only kinds of systems that would deter languagersquosinertia-ridden influence on the moving image would have to be ldquoa universal naturallanguagerdquo or a ldquoperfect machinerdquo39 The former he saw in mathematics or sciencethe latter in the apparatus of film Critical Mass addresses the problem of languagein terms of its potential to stagnate the cinematic soundtrack into what he deridesas an ldquoinformation channelrdquo for montaged images40

By staggering successive shots of male and female speakers so that they collide(one hitting right before the other has finished) Frampton achieves through analogediting techniques what would come to be known as digital delay The overlappingwords cause a dislocation between the action and the sound of speaking As in theopening of Zorns Lemma Frampton begins Critical Mass in black with voice-overbut a tripping doubling effect is already in action

just fine just finewhere the hell were youI was just awayawaywhereaway where you know hayou know ha

While in the first section of the film relationships between the speaking subjects andlanguage remain somewhat intact by the end of the film gendered as well as syntacti-cal arrangements of speaking dissolve the female speakerrsquos voice seems to come fromthe male speaker (and vice versa) and often especially during the sections where theimage goes to black their voices merge into a glossolalia of phonemic utterances

OCTOBER110

35 Hollis Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo [1981] Circles of Confusion p 8536 Ibid p 8237 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163 38 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8439 Ibid p 8440 Ibid p 85

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

Thus the enacted ldquoscriptrdquo in Critical Mass (like the written script in PoeticJustice) acts as an extension of the recording device of film its narrative meaninghas universal significance a discursiveness that functions regardless of its distinctivedetail or context Brakhage confirms this when he notes that Critical Mass ldquoisquite universal it deals with all quarrels (those between men and women or menand men or women and women or children or war)rdquo41 This kind of script actsfor Frampton almost like an optical sound track its visual cues marking variationsin rather than illustrations of sound

Recording Machines Writing Photography Film

The dialectical relationships between writing and image initiated in ZornsLemma (which was first imagined as a photographic project) are taken up evenmore explicitly in Nostalgia (1971) and Poetic Justice42 The possible relationsbetween the recording devices of photography film and writing were alreadybeing theorized by Frampton in terms of image-sound relations in 1964 when hewrote to Odlin about his thoughts for Clouds of Magellan

Hidden Noise 111

41 Stan Brakhage Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative Catalogue No 7 (New York Film-Makersrsquo Cooperative1989) p 17142 As Phillips notes ldquoHis series of black-and-white photographs of environmental words WordPictures (1963ndash63) served as the germinal idea for Zorns Lemma Nostalgia which features the burningof twelve of Framptonrsquos early photographs to the accompaniment of an asynchronous mock-confessionalspoken narrative can be seen as the filmmakerrsquos interim judgment on his prior incarnation as a stillphotographerrdquo Phillips ldquoWord Pictures Frampton and Photographyrdquo p 65

Frampton Critical Mass1971 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

A constellation is an ldquoimagerdquo The image may be nothing more than aroughly isosceles triangle but there it is But that image is not a wholeand literal DRAWING it is a group of elements that we construe meaning-fully as we construe the letters b-i-r-d a constellation of unrelatedsounds as the general name of feathered flying warmblooded egglayersOr a-b-c-d-ampc as the alphabet our name for an arbitrary grouping of asmall number of symbols standing for a rather larger number of thesounds a human throat can make43

Language (and its substructures of alphabet phonetics syntax) helped Framptonfigure filmrsquos relationship to legibility while photography and its historical concernswith ldquoselection collection and classificationrdquo propelled Framptonrsquos desire toempty film of its diegetic affect44 In photographing a ldquoshooting scriptrdquo for PoeticJustice Frampton achieves a parody of narrative filmmaking as well as a complexrendering of the relationship of word to image An inversion takes place wordsact as instructional images that we only ldquoseerdquo through reading the text thatappears as written shot directions on the screen ldquoYourdquo the spectatorreaderbecome interpolated at once as director camera operator and actor ldquoyou lowera camera from your eyerdquo ldquoyour face in profile squinting through camerardquo

Inspired by Edward Westonrsquos approach to the photograph as that which likelanguage is ldquodoubly identifiedmdashonce with itself and once again with its referentrdquoFrampton calls for a stripping of film the visual image or the linguistic artifact totheir own ldquoproper set of specificationsrdquo45 What the works of Samuel Beckett JorgeLuis Borges or Alain Robbe-Grillet have in common with photography impliesFrampton is their ability to ldquostrip the Thing that is being said the referent of thediscourserdquo so that their objects (words images) refer only to the materiality of theiroperations46 Similarly in Poetic Justice causality and temporality have beendispossessed from the text (as we read it) and our viewing takes place in a time thatis ldquoexplicitly and entirely disjunct from the atemporality of the textrdquo47

As the hand holding a still photograph would interrupt the filmic space inPoetic Justice the photographs burning over the stove (accompanied by the synchro-nous voice-over out of chronology etc) in Nostalgia signaled a collapse ofspatiotemporal relations in the world of 2-D forms Framptonrsquos use of voice-overfor Nostalgia begins the project of inscription that would continue in Poetic Justiceand other photographictext projects of this period that explore the disjuncture ofword-image relations Bill Simon writing in 1975 claims that in Nostalgia

there is always a gap between what we imagined from the spoken com-mentary and the actual photograph Frampton induces an imaginative

OCTOBER112

43 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4644 Phillips ldquoWord Picturesrdquo p 64 45 Frampton ldquoImpromptus on Edward Weston Everything in Its Placerdquo Circles of Confusion p 14246 Ibid 47 Ibid p 143

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

visualization on our part and then jolts our imagination by showing usthe real image That jolt amply demonstrates the inadequacy of words todeal with images and the privileged status of an image48

However rather than privileging the ldquostatus of the imagerdquo over wordsFrampton strives throughout his work to reveal how image-based knowledge isintimately often brutally tied to systems of language49 The interpenetration ofthese meaning-producing systems is what he strives to reveal thus he moves fromexamining the relations between text and image to a study of vertical sound-imagearrangements

Toward Vertical Sound Montage

Montage is not something I invented but something I inherited I ampursuing suggestions latent in montage culture for 50 years In these

48 Bill Simon ldquoThe Films of Hollis Framptonrdquo New Forms in Film p 5649 Michelson underlines how Frampton achieves a kind of ldquosuspended violencerdquo through his soundediting practices in Critical Mass ldquoThe complex polyphony of the dissociative cutting projects the uncon-trollable chain of recrimination of violence suspended rather than arrested unresolved irresolvablerdquo(ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 163) A similar project is taken up by Martin Arnold in Passage agrave lrsquoActe (1993) inwhich ldquonoise and language become sound events of equal value and importancerdquomdashan aggressive stutter-ing sound track that underlines the hegemonic narratives of white masculinity in Hollywood films of the1950s and early 1960s See Scott MacDonald ldquoMartin Arnoldrdquo [interview] A Critical Cinema 3 Interviewswith Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley University of California Press 1998) p 360

Frampton Nostalgia 1971 Courtesy Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

sections I am tilting at the windmill of linearity I am concerned withvertical montage

mdashHollis Frampton 198050

In the unfinished Magellan begun in 1972 Frampton had hoped to construct360 one-minute films with sound However only Cadenzas (1977ndash80) Mindfall(1977ndash80) and Gloria (1979) have sound and a large part of the project remainsunfinished due to Framptonrsquos untimely death in 198451 In this never-to-becompleted masterwork vertical montage was to be the main strategy for achievingthe incessant movement of ldquointerpenetratingrdquo structures of the metahistory offilm replete with all four solstices and equinoxes as well as the metaphoricadventures of Ferdinand Magellanrsquos circumnavigation of the globe

Soundmdashespecially Framptonrsquos goal of achieving a vertical sound montagemdashwas to be of central importance in his pursuit of what he saw as the ldquolargestpossible inventory of modes of classifying and perceiving experiencerdquo (a projectbegun in Zorns Lemma)52 In a sense Frampton approached sound as an incompleteproject in cinema history which was lost after the advent of the ldquoTalkiesrdquo Thecomplexity of this project Frampton believed was lost again after Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos studies in film sound were curtailed by ldquothe extreme pressure of Stalinistlsquorestorationrsquordquo53 Especially compelling for Frampton was Eisensteinrsquos focus on thesimultaneity of radically disparate elements of sound and image

From the viewpoint of montage structure we no longer have a simplehorizontal succession of pictures but now a new ldquosuperstructurerdquo iserected vertically over the horizontal picture structure Piece for piecethese new strips in the ldquosuper-structurerdquo differ in length from those inthe picture structure but needless to say they are equal in total lengthPieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential orderbut in simultaneous order54

In Birth of Magellan Mindfall (Parts I and VII) the sounds that accompanyshots of ldquolush rainforest flora and fauna oceanscapesrdquo in Puerto Rico areldquomechanicalrdquo they tend to be associated with communicationmdashteletypes printingpresses and telephones55 Frampton in a sense revisits the mechanical nature ofsound invention and interfaces it in an ironic relationship with the primeval landof the ldquonew worldrdquo as ldquodiscoveredrdquo by Columbus on his second voyage

OCTOBER114

50 Frampton in Amy Taubin ldquoTilting at Linearityrdquo SoHo Weekly News (1980) p 5851 Brian Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Exploration of Framptonrsquos Magellanrdquo October 32 (Spring1985) p 13352 Tuchman ldquoFrampton at the Gatesrdquo p 5853 Frampton ldquoFilm in the House of the Wordrdquo p 8154 Sergei M Eisenstein The Film Sense trans and ed Jay Leyda (New York Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1974) p 7855 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellan An Interview with Hollis Framptonrdquo Millennium FilmJournal 789 (FallndashWinter 1980ndash1981) p 16

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

Reminiscent of his montage method in Zorns Lemma Frampton builds a catalogof sound-image relationships and then begins repeating them in syncopated hurriedrhythmsmdashsuggesting their interchangeability (sound for image and vice versa) aswell as their collision Noticeably absent is the stark Minimalist sensibility of hisearlier films which contributed to his aesthetic experiments with set theory anddrew crisp lines around images (which were often words) using sound to repeat thesystemic quality of sharply metered cuts of footage Instead with the agility of aMarie Menken-like roving camera eye on foliage Frampton creates an almost lyricalsense of an Edenic landscape violets lilies water rocks animals succulents treessky This arcadian world however is intermittently interrupted with television oreven computer-like commercial wipes bright graphic diagonals and dizzying irisshots that separate many of the images in both parts of Mindfall Matching the rudefunny graphic wipes Framptonrsquos sound track bursts with unpredictable segments ofcartoon sounds often blasphemously juxtaposed against churches or temples

Missing often from analyses of Magellan is Framptonrsquos charge that thismetahistory is also intended to be a comedy

In an interview with James Joyce that took place in the rsquo30s after Ulysseshad been in print for several years Joyce remarked that after all thistime no one has yet noted that the book was funny I consider theMagellan cycle a comedy56

And yet Frampton had somber grandiose aspirations for Magellan His goalsincluded the rationalization of the history of art resynthesis of the film traditionmaking malleable the sense and notion of time in film examining the function ofthe written and spoken word in film rethinking the synesthesic ldquoproblem ofsound in filmrdquo making ldquorhetoricalrdquo or technological options available to film (digitalprocessing video synthesizers) and revealing how film is ldquoan epistemologicalmodel for human consciousnessrdquo57

The tension between the comic and the systemic in Framptonrsquos later films ispart of the larger project of attempting to create a vertical montage structureSound functions as a central part of this project insisting upon the ldquomoveability theportability the malleability of the montage piecerdquo58 In Magellan sound functionsmuch as image had functioned in Palindrome (1969) We hear locomotives watercars bowling Then we hear the same in reverse bowling cars water locomotivesAs Brian Henderson notes ldquoPalindrome would maintain its identity shown back-wardsmdashnot only in reverse order but upside downrdquo59 It is this kind of palindromicsound montage that Frampton is exploring in terms of how it can create vertical aswell as horizontal relationships with cinematic images and other audio constructions

Hidden Noise 115

56 Taubin ldquoTilting at Libertyrdquo p 5857 Hollis Frampton ldquoStatement of Plansrdquo Magellan grant proposal ca 1971 Frampton files at theCarnegie Museum Pittsburgh58 Bill Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1759 Henderson ldquoPropositions for the Explorationrdquo p 137

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

OCTOBER116

60 Michelson ldquoFramptonrsquos Sieverdquo p 16061 Feldman httpswipenetsesonoloco9modefeldman4html62 Simon ldquoTalking about Magellanrdquo p 1663 Ibid p 1764 Ibid65 Even earlier in Special Effects (1972) Frampton is experimenting with Magellanrsquos ironic humor-ous relationship to synchronous sound The sound track which was generated entirely on a Buchlasynthesizer screams like a sci-fi thriller over a cartoonlike square made of dotted lines threatening tofloat off the screen (and acts as its nemesis mirroring the limits and possibilities of both the cinematicldquoframerdquo as well as the projection screen) It also demonstrates the tenuous relationship sound has tothe visual making a vaudeville out of what Michel Chion has called the acousmetre (disembodiedvoice) and soundrsquos ability to float on and off the screen or to be everywhere at once66 Letter to Sally Dixon August 22 1971 Frampton files at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh np

As Michelson suggested the palindromic not only stems from literary models ldquobutjust as surely from Framptonrsquos experience of serial composition employed bySchoenberg and Webernrdquo60 Frampton was most likely aware of Morton Feldmanrsquospost-serial composition of the same name The Straits of Magellan from 1961 in whichFeldman creates a similar tension between what he calls ldquosimultaneous soundsrdquo andldquosuccessively played single notesrdquo61

Although Frampton is constructing sound within the frame of Eisensteinrsquos andVertovrsquos calls for an asynchronous relationship between sound and image he is alsoreexamining the complexity of synchronous sound or as he put it ldquosimultaneousavailability of essentially covalent chains of causal linkagerdquo62 As he explains in a 1980interview with Bill Simon ldquoThe most unsettling [issue about film sound] concernsthe notion of sync-sound itself Because sync-sound as we have it in the movies is anabsolute artifice that is concerned not with generating but with excluding synchro-nous soundrdquo63 The routine of comedy with its expected laugh lines gag effects orsubtle ironic twists makes a travesty of the purported technical agility of synchro-nous sound technology Canned laughter can be turned on or off with ease a linecan by synched with a laugh or a shotndashreaction shot can serve the gag-laughsequence As Frampton would put it ldquosynchronicity is a lot more obscure a lot lessclearrdquo than the movie industryrsquos plastic use of it suggests64 In Magellan Framptoncamps the industry of sync sound cactus prickers purr with the sound of a pneu-matic hammer rivers honk as if theyrsquore busy urban streets phallic towers toppedwith flaming torches are accompanied by five minutes of canned laughter65

Found Noise

If Ezra is my father then Rrose Selavy is my mother

mdashHollis Frampton 197166

From his earliest micro-experiments in Surface Tension to his grand projectMagellan Framptonrsquos studies in sound montage were permeated with a sense thatsoundmdashif done rightmdashcould transform the cinematic project even more profoundly

Hidden Noise 117

67 Odlin ldquoLetters from Framprdquo p 4568 Bill Judson former film and video curator from the Carnegie Museum believes that if this doodleis not from Frampton directly it was made by him during a phone conversation with Frampton (inOctober of 1978) as per Framptonrsquos description of his plans for further development of Mindfall andthe larger Magellan project

than phenomenological silence Palindrome is Framptonrsquos Hidden Noise AsMichelson has suggested Framptonrsquos systemic montage projects were as deeplyrelated to his lifelong literary interests in the great open systems of Pound Joyceand Stein as they were to the serialists and post-serialist composers or mostimportantly to the experimental music of John Cage

Finally Frampton saw Magellan especially Mindfall as having an intimaterelationship to Duchamprsquos layered projects especially The Bride Stripped Bare by herBachelors Even (The Large Glass) (1915ndash23) and its written component The GreenBox (1912ndash34) Frampton invokes Duchamprsquos Large Glass as early as 1964 in a letterto Odlin in order to explain how he imagines his master project Magellan ldquoBothMAGELLANS to be rather kits along the lines of BRIDEBOXES etc that is the pieces tobe accompanied by their working-drawings macquettes etc CLOUDS in particularwill need a substantial atlas or installation manualrdquo67

In an informal note almost a doodle found at the Carnegie MuseumArchive Frampton draws a rectangle around the word Magellan and next to itwrites ldquogreen boxrdquo Then he writes ldquoMindfallrdquo underlines it and next to it writesldquoSoundrdquo and circles the latter several times68 In a sense Frampton sees the soundin Mindfall and eventually the larger Magellan project as enacting a similar turnthat Duchamprsquos written notes in the Green Box would do for The Bride Stripped Bare(Duchamprsquos writing on Hidden Noise would serve similar purposes) it would translate

Frampton Special Effects1972 Courtesy AnthologyFilm Archives

OCTOBER118

69 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo p 29

and extend the visual into a system of linguistic and mathematical terms Thissystem like Framptonrsquos film projects contained horizontal and vertical axeswhich Duchamp described in the Green Box as slowly losing their positions to oneanother ldquothere is gradually less differentiation from axis to axis all the axesgradually disappear in a fading verticalityrdquo69 For Frampton Duchamp takesEisensteinrsquos notion of vertical montage and turns it on its head the inscriptive ofthe visual performs itself underneath an open system Through his experimentsin sound montage Frampton discovers the horizontal axis slowly turning into theverticalmdashalways already there in audible rotation

OCTOBER118

69 Marcel Duchamp ldquoThe Green Boxrdquo p 29

and extend the visual into a system of linguistic and mathematical terms Thissystem like Framptonrsquos film projects contained horizontal and vertical axeswhich Duchamp described in the Green Box as slowly losing their positions to oneanother ldquothere is gradually less differentiation from axis to axis all the axesgradually disappear in a fading verticalityrdquo69 For Frampton Duchamp takesEisensteinrsquos notion of vertical montage and turns it on its head the inscriptive ofthe visual performs itself underneath an open system Through his experimentsin sound montage Frampton discovers the horizontal axis slowly turning into theverticalmdashalways already there in audible rotation