‘When it was invented, cinema fostered, or impressed, a different way of seeing called editing, which is to put something in relation to someone in a different way than novels or paintings. This is why it was successful, enormously successful, because it opened people’s eyes in a certain way. With painting there was a single relationship to the painting, with literature there was a single relationship to the novel, but when people saw a film there was something that was at least double—and when someone watched it became triple. There was something different which in its technical form gradually came to be called editing, meaning there was a connection. It was something that filmed not so much things, but the connection between things.’ - Jean-Luc Godard

‘The specific character of cinema stems from montage, but what is montage? Or rather, what are the conditions of possibility of montage?’ Agamben proposes a solely theoretical response to these two questions: ‘There are two transcendental conditions of montage: repetition and stoppage’.

“In the 1830s, George Büchner wrote Woyzeck. Évarist Galois died, a victim of political murder, leaving to a friend a last letter, which contains the foundations of group theory, or the metahistory of mathematics. Talbot and Niépce invented photography. The Belgian physicist Plateau invented the phenakistoscope, the first true cinema. In the history of cinema these four facts are probably unrelated. In the metahistory of cinema, these four events may ultimately be related.” - Hollis Frampton

This vision of film history is attested to in some of Frampton’s other writing from the early 1970s. Alongside the Metahistory essay, Frampton published a review of two exhibitions of early photography, again for Artforum. Titled “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” Frampton imagines the utopian potential of an archive of photographic images he conflates with the Atlantis myth.23 Rediscovered, the archive is described as a “continent bounded in time,” and Frampton concludes the essay by asserting the fundamental didacticism of art in its function.24 The history of images is combined here with a technology – photography – and aimed at an artistic concept: metahistory. The outcome is the metaphor of Magellan, the first documented circumnavigation of the globe, which places it within a category of metaphorical work that has been determined as a kind of “atlas” of film. An ersatz terrain frames the endeavor as divergent from the literary forms that precede it. The tour of this unknown territory, therefore, is another iteration of the atlas metaphor. The figure of Clio, importantly, provides Frampton with the opening metaphor of the Metahistory essay, just as she concludes the Histoire(s):

    Once upon a time, according to reliable sources, history had its own Muse, and her name was Clio.

It is this epic model for what Frampton terms the “rational fictions” of metahistory as concerned with the events both real and imaginary, dispensing with what we know today as facts. Not only does Frampton’s notion of metahistory have a negative understanding of the fact, it also dispenses with temporal chronology and therefore operates closer to what we would today call memory, not unlike the position Godard inherits from Langlois at the Concordia lectures. At Concordia, Godard’s pronouncements once more closely echo Frampton’s metaphor of visual history as a lost archipelago of memory: “In fact, if we were to do the history of cinema, it’d be like a completely unknown territory that is buried somewhere we can’t find.”

The “metahistory of film” could be defined as film history as it should have occurred, rearranged so that the contingencies of causality are revealed in their essential necessity. The posited object of this metahistory is what Frampton calls the “infinite cinema,” which comprises not only all the films ever made (including the decidedly nonaesthetic, such as instructional films and medical imaging) but also every photograph ever taken.

“past and present become conflated in this process of translation, effectively creating new forms out of a dead language.”

Reading the metahistory essay it becomes clear that for Frampton the problem, if there is one, in fact lies with the invention of cinema as a transformative media which, like Elpenor, was not able to effect a clean transition from one world to the next. Put simply, history is not linear, but cyclical and unspools itself like a film reel.