Magellan, Hollis Frampton's (1936-1984) most ambitious and complex film project, is generally less recognized than his other work, and its invisibility is understandable. The spectator who approaches the unfinished Magellan confronts only fragments; the completed Magellan films comprise only about 8 out of the 36 hours planned. Moreover, Frampton intended Magellan to be a calendrical cycle, with specific films to be shown on each day of the year-properly viewed it would be 369 days long. Metaphorically modeled on Ferdinand Magellan's exploratory circumnavigation of the world, the project aspired to remarkable aesthetic, historiographic, and conceptual challenges to cinema and perception. Structurally complex, the films in the cycle are divided at the first level into three groups (Birth of Magellan, The Straits of Magellan, and Death of Magellan), forming a "a series of shaped observations that include portraits, cadaver footage, re-stagings of Lumière films, visits to slaughterhouses, double exposures, a field of peaceful dairy cattle, allusions to Muybridge, electronic imagery, industrial pictures, a state fair—a kind of capsule version of the twentieth century that might have been placed on the Voyager spacecraft as it soared out of the solar system to worlds unknown" (Robert Haller).