Works and Days

Now, let us imagine the watchmen of twin poles. One asks, “How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’” The other responds, “D’autre part le cinéma est un langage.” Let us station the latter at the North, alone and nearest to God, and the former at the South, frolicking in exotic domestic bliss amongst the penguins. Their quarrel is theoretically indefinite. Somewhere between, in constant, ghostly motion on the high seas, is a ship captained by a sailor of many names. As the hero of his cine-roman à clef, he is called Magellan. In his vegetable form, a grand and gregarious aspiration, Stropharia cubensis (or, in keeping with the subsequent judgment of a perspicacious German, Psylocibe cubensis). Professionally, in homage to the poet who taught him how to be and how not to be, he is HF, rendered pictogramatically as a variation of 日, a being intimately involved with the light. To dear friends, at least a few of them, he was Framp, recalling two of the great comics of his century, Chaplin and Beckett. While the rest know him, if they know him at all, by the name he was given at birth, Hollis Frampton.

When Frampton succumbed to lung cancer in 1984, weeks after his 48th birthday, he had finished roughly a fifth of the only project in the history of his art that, in its ambition, matches those of the revolutionary era of the Soviet cinema. This film, a calendric work composed of hundreds of discrete but imbricated movements, is, as mentioned above, called . His goal, stated with appropriate modesty, was to produce “a kind of synoptic conjugation of… the infinite