Retrograde Inversion: Palindrome and technical memory

As Hollis Frampton’s photographic series, Word Pictures (1964—), was slowly transforming into the 60-minute work of 16mm film he eventually named Zorns Lemma (1970), Frampton was also experimenting with discarded 35mm film ends at the Technicolor lab in New York where he worked throughout the 1960s. Frampton’s rarely screened work, Palindrome (1969), was one outcome of his interest in the wasted film material clipped to the processing racks, often producing cloudy emulsions he understood as biomorphic. Arranging the sets of these frames into a palindromic composition on 16mm film by drawing upon the functional inversions of the tone row in serial music, Frampton developed an isotropic work which approached the paradox of cultural memory as technics in its oscillating circularity. This film was subsequently incorporated into the Magellan cycle, where it figures as a motor of the work as a whole in the section called the "dreams" of Magellan.

This paper will link Palindrome to Frampton’s technical skill as a dye-transfer printer at Technicolor, a process which required the set up of matrices to ensure the three-colour procedure produced a skilfully realised print from the original film image, and to his theory of film and photography. The products of Frampton’s work will then be shown to reveal a lasting significance for understanding film as it relates to techniques for memory and for art history.