Hollis Frampton’s Utopian Archeological Cinematic Allegories

Hollis Frampton’s Magellan project (1972-80) is a key high modernist project of a particularly ambitious period of American avant-garde filmmaking in the late 1970s. This paper explores two archeological allegories for cinema that Frampton wrote in 1972-73 as he was beginning to work in earnest on Magellan. The first is a story that opens his Artforum essay, “Digressions on the Photographic Agony” (1972), about the discovery of an “imaginary relic,” a massive collection of photographs called Atlantis. This allegory, in part, critiques the dismissal of photography in the art world during this period but also provides a Borgesian allegory that anticipates our current image-saturated simulacrum. The second is a story that Frampton wrote for an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1973, and revised in 1975, “A Stipulation for Maternal Hopi,” about the discovery of a collection of proto-filmic reels of ideographic images that outlines the parameters of cinema’s relationship to language, influenced by the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf. In both cases, the stories imagine the discovery of a lost culture devoted to the making of images, indeed cultures dedicated to art—though it is precisely the meaning of “art” that each story explores. Like Magellan, these collections of cultural artifacts articulate voluminous and mysterious image-making projects that have more speculative than instrumental value. These are metahistories that chart imaginary shapes of time: impossible archaeologies that evoke dreams of culture impossible under the conditions of capitalism, a framework that increasingly preoccupied Frampton’s politics through the 1970s until his death.