Directly inspired by the Lumiére brothers' actualities, these one-minute films (49 collected in Drafts and Fragments) are arranged around the circumference of the Magellan Calendar. Named Panopticons they allude to Jeremy Bentham's famous plan for a prison, and point to the dark ironies of Magellan's Enlightenment project.

"A brief lyric film of death, which brings to equilibrium a single reactive image from a room of cadavers" (HF).

Shot in a steel mill, "a pre-textual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors" (HF), this film's rhythmic and compositional textures pay tribute not only to Eisenstein and Vertov, but also to Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

"Filmed in large pan during HF's lecture-screening tour of the [San Francisco] Bay area: visit(s) to the Museé Mechanique, Land's end, the Cliff House […] A visit to the Brakhage Colorado residence provided images of chickens/roosters" (Gail Camhi).

An exquisite homage to O'Keefe's "Radiator Building, Night."

"The viewer is engaged in a process of double vision that returns him to the image and subject in a manner more complex, more self-aware, and more temporal than the way most of us view photographs" (Fred Camper).

"After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard… and consecutive matters" (HF).

The last film of HF's oeuvre and the last completed of Magellan, this film encapsulates the meta-history of cinema (bridging early cinema and video) and distills Magellan's themes: the tension between image and language, Frampton's "sentimental science", tradition and memory, and the persistence of death.