Book Event: Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema
Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema
Book event with Author Michael Zryd, PhD
Friday, October 27 at 5:00pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway
Hollis Frampton was an American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist who bridged the experimental film and contemporary art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for avant-garde films including Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), Frampton spent his later years working on the unfinished epic Magellan, a monumental cycle that used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world to rethink the natures and meanings of history, modernity, and cinema. Frampton’s career was cut short by cancer at age 48, with his vast ambitions for the project left incomplete.
Michael Zryd (NYU MA & PhD ‘99) is the author of Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2023), which attempts a comprehensive account of Frampton’s work from his earliest films through Magellan. Zryd, who began his research on Frampton during his studies at NYU Cinema Studies, explores the connections linking the filmmaker’s art and thought to other media forms, histories, and cultural frameworks. He foregrounds Frampton’s notion of the “infinite cinema,” which redefined the parameters of the medium to encompass all forms of moving image and sound media across the past and future of cinematic possibility. Zryd analyzes Frampton’s ambivalent relationship with modernism and the Enlightenment, showing how the artist navigated between attraction to radical artistic investigation and awareness of this tradition’s implication in colonialism and other oppressive power structures. The book sheds new light on Frampton’s project of exploring and critiquing how cinema attempts to capture and understand the world.
Two Frampton films will be screened at the event, his first film, Manual of Arms (1966, color, silent) and the last completed film in the Magellan cycle, Gloria! (1979, color, sound). Zryd will introduce the films, discussing themes of order, experience, and memory in the constellation of the artist’s work.
Free and open to the public. RSVP required.
About the Author
Michael Zryd (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University. He is a researcher, critic, and curator of experimental film and media with an interest in its institutional infrastructures and ecologies and its intersections with the academy and the art world. He was founding co-chair of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group. He has published essays in October, Cinema Journal, CJFS, The Moving Image, and in collections like Useful Cinema, Optic Antics: Ken Jacobs, and Inventing Film Studies. Book publications include Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2023), October Files: Hollis Frampton (editor, MIT Press, 2022) and Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (coauthor, Goose Lane Editions, 2021). He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on the archiving and history of film and media cooperatives in Canada.