Infinite Cinema: The Films of Hollis Frampton

Programmed by: Olivia Hunter Willke

“A film is a machine made of images,” said Hollis Frampton, the avant-garde filmmaker, artist, writer, and theoretician. While exploring theories of series and sets in photography, he became interested in film and the sequential nature of moving images, creating meaning from image sequence, textural qualities, and processes of the medium. His films balance an intellectual rigidity with a focus on structure: a fascination with the materials of film itself, how to mold, form, and engage with the properties of cinema through a conceptual and systematic framework. All the same, he leaves room for lyricism and individual interpretation in the “cinematic arts,” as he referred to it. While Frampton’s films could easily be impenetrable due to the depths of their formal intention, they exude a warm curiosity and an analytical playfulness, imbued with the soul of a creative aware of his boundary-pushing and trail-blazing sensibility. His earnestness is apparent in his concept of “infinite cinema,” a cerebral, polymorphous term meant to capture “all the appearances of the world,” or all that cinema was, is, and has the potential to be in image, technology, and infrastructure. An experimenter at heart, he used the medium as a conduit for scientific interpretation and also spiritual practice, keyed into the meditative nature of arranging images and expanding consciousness that can be achieved in “infinite cinema.” To this day, his ideas and theories echo in the avant-garde.