Perpetual Speech: Gloria! as Lyric Poem

Gloria! (1979) was a film in which Hollis Frampton made radical inroads in illuminating the ‘tense mutuality’ between language and cinema that obsessed him from his earliest efforts in poetry and film. I argue that Frampton’s last film project opens new pathways for poetic language, particularly the lyric poem, to find expression in the ‘camera arts’ through its deftly original invocations of ‘perpetual speech’.

I explore Frampton's early relationship with Ezra Pound and the shaping influence of Pound's poetics of voices, locutions and multi-lingual translation on Frampton's critical investigations of cinematic language. I frame Gloria! as the work in which Frampton's assumption and disavowal of Pound is complete and 'made new' by means of a purpose-built, digital transportation for the lyric voice in Gloria!.

The fact that Frampton’s grandmother taught him to read and write on a typewriter is seen as significant and explored through a number of lenses. I draw connections between Frampton’s nascent ‘fingerings’ of a keyboard with his pioneering work years later at SUNY Buffalo’s Digital Arts Lab in writing code that would allow him to feature a digital “typewriter voice” in Gloria!.

By displacing elements within the digital text of the film to other aural and visual components, Frampton mines expressive elements within lyric language and shows how these can be adapted to the imminent medium he called ‘the counter-machine to the machine of language’.