| Zorns Lemma | |
|---|---|
 Title screen | |
| Directed by | Hollis Frampton |
| Starring |
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Release date |
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Running time | 60 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Zorns Lemma is a 1970 Americanstructuralexperimental film byHollis Frampton. Originally starting as a series of photographs, thenon-narrative film is structured around a 24-letterclassical Latin alphabet. It remains, along withMichael Snow'sWavelength andTony Conrad'sThe Flicker, one of the best known examples of structural filmmaking.
The opening section ofZorns Lemma is roughly 5 minutes long. In it a woman reads anabecedary of 24 couplets fromThe Bay State Primer, an eighteenth century book designed to teach children the alphabet.[2] The film is entirely black during this section.
The film's main section is silent and lasts 45 minutes, broken into 2,700 one-second units. It shows the viewer a 24-part "alphabet" (i &j andu &v are interchanged) that slowly evolves. The section begins by presenting each letter typed on a sheet of tin foil.[2] The alphabet is initially composed of words that appear on street signs, photographed inManhattan. As the film continues to cycle through the alphabet, individually filmed letters are slowly substituted with abstract moving images. The first four substitutions—fire (x), waves (z), smoke (q), and reeds (y)–depict the fourclassical elements, and by the end, it is fully composed of moving images which represent them.[3][4]
The film's conclusion lasts 11 minutes. It shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow. Six women's voices alternate in reading the words of a passage fromRobert Grosseteste's medieval documentOn Light, or the Ingression of Forms, which Frampton translated and edited for the film.[2] The voices read the text at a rate of one word per second.[5] As the film ends, it fades to white.[2]
Zorns Lemma emerged fromWord Pictures, a photography project that Frampton made from 1962 to 1963.[6] ForWord Pictures, Frampton shot over 2000 black-and-white35mm photographs of environmental words, seeking to explore the illusions of photography as a medium.[2] However, he had difficulty devising a form in which to present the photographs. During this period, Frampton became less active as a photographer and first started to experiment with filmmaking.[6] He started to make a film by shooting the photographs on a stand but thought the result looked "dead", deciding that he should film the words in color.[7] He began filming static shots of words, carefully framing them with the use of atripod.[8]
Frampton thought that imposing his own order on the film would make it too similar to a poem, so he decided to use alphabetical order and avoid any conscious connections between words. Because the number of times he had captured each letter varied greatly, he decided to use the "double alphabet" and continuously cycle through the letters.[7] This structure left "holes" to be filled in the film.[7] Frampton decided to gradually substitute out the letters for images, originally planning to use entirely different images each time.[2] Frampton's production notes outline three criteria for selecting the images used. He preferred banal images, with the exception of animals included for "shock value". He preferred "sculptural" images showing work or the "illusion of space or substance". These included painting a wall (k) and changing a tire (t). Frampton worked in "cinematic or para-cinematic reference", often subtly so. The letterd is substituted with cookie dough being sliced with a star-shaped cookie cutter, as a cinematic reference to film "stars". Modular actions—such as a child swinging (l) or assemblingTinkertoys (r)—serve as para-cinematic references to modular time.[9] Frampton set the length of each shot to be one second, or 24 frames. However, 24 of the shots have slight irregularities in their lengths. Frampton instructedkey grip David Hamilton that 12 shots should have 23 frames and 12 shots should have 25 frames.[10]
The final section ofZorns Lemma was shot in 1970.[11] Frampton envisioned it as a time for the audience "to empty the mind".[7] When loading and unloading the film rolls, he intentionally exposed them to sunlight and created reel-end flares to emphasize "the materiality of film".[11]
Frampton's films are often titled after specialized scientific disciplines, as in the case ofMaxwell's Demon,Prince Rupert's Drops, andHapax Legomena.[12] In the early 1960s minimalist artistCarl Andre described to Frampton theDedekind cut, which partitions atotally ordered set into twosubsets, one of whose elements are all less than those of the other, and can be used to construct thereal numbers.[13] He became interested in the relationship betweenset theory and film while working on his ongoing projectMagellan. Frampton titledZorns Lemma afterZorn's lemma (also known as the Kuratowski–Zorn lemma), a proposition of set theory formulated by mathematicianMax Zorn in 1935. Zorn's lemma describespartially ordered sets where everytotally ordered subset has an upper bound. The letters and images inZorns Lemma are sets whose order is discovered during the course of the film.[14]
Zorns Lemma premiered at thePhilharmonic Hall for the 1970New York Film Festival.[15][16] It was the first experimental feature film to be screened there.[17]J. Hoberman wrote that it "drove the audience mad",[18] andHoward Thompson observed that "never, at least so far during the Film Festival, have so many Philharmonic Hall viewers slithered outside for a cigarette."[16] Nevertheless, the sale ofZorns Lemma was a financial success for Frampton.[19]
The film was released on home media bythe Criterion Collection, as a part ofA Hollis Frampton Odyssey in Blu-ray and DVD.[20]
Amos Vogel calledZorns Lemma a "radical example of reductive cinema" that warned of "things to come ... 'meaning' (political, psychological, personal, or whatever) has been eliminated and the work exists purely for itself, demanding attention to structure, pattern, and orchestration."[21]Kevin Thomas of theLos Angeles Times described the film as "a thoroughly demanding but highly stimulating exercise in heightening our awareness of the possibilities of visual perception and, indeed, the ways in which we create meaning itself".[22] The experimental filmmakerErnie Gehr stated, "Zorns Lemma is a major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyondFreud."[23]
Critics have interpretedStan Brakhage's 1972 filmThe Riddle of Lumen as a response toZorns Lemma.[24][25] DirectorPeter Greenaway has cited the film as an influence on his work, based on its illustration of how to "structure a film without necessarily using narrative".[26] Greenaway's 1973 short filmH Is for House presents long lists of words beginning with the letterh, and his later feature filmsThe Draughtsman's Contract andA Zed & Two Noughts feature children reciting abecedaries.[27]Su Friedrich adapted the structure ofZorns Lemma for her 1990 filmSink or Swim. Originally intending to represent each letter of the alphabet with multiple words, Friedrich ultimately used a 26-segment structure that moves in reverse alphabetical order.[28]
Zorns Lemma received three critics' votes in the 2012Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films.[29] It is now part ofAnthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection.[30]