Zorns Lemma

Made by Hollis Frampton in 1970, Zorns Lemma remains one of the key works of the American avant-garde in that period. The film marked a shift towards more radically formalist investigations into visual perception and the nature of the film medium. For Frampton, film was a ‘metaphor for consciousness’, and through his cinema, he sought to represent the world while also exploring the way in which we perceive it.

An elegant and erudite thinker, Frampton studied language, poetry and mathematics before he turned his attention to cinema. Combining his interests in art and science, he began making short films that used different types of serial structures in the 1960s. Following on from those early forays, Zorns Lemma was a more ambitious proposition, both formally and thematically. Interweaving a wide range of references to painting, sculpture, cinema, philosophy, literature and mathematics into a complex structure, the film focuses on the process of experiencing while simultaneously seeking to establish film as part of a wider cultural tradition.

Word-images

Running at 60 minutes, Zorns Lemma is divided into three sections. In the first, over a black screen, a schoolmistress reads a text from a seventeenth-century manual that aims to teach both the alphabet and moral principles. The second, and longest, section of the film is made up of a succession of images containing words (shop signs, billboards, posters, etc.), organised alphabetically (according to a 24-letter alphabet), one image per second. As the filmmaker runs out of ‘word-images’, they are gradually replaced by a new series of images picturing various activities or phenomena bearing no relation to the alphabet.

The third and final section pictures a man, a woman and a dog walking across a snowy field towards the woods. The soundtrack consists of six female voices reading Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century essay ‘On Light’, each voice reading one word at a time, at the speed of one word per second. After the couple and the dog have disappeared into the woods, the image fades out to white.

Totalising ambition

Spellbinding and enigmatic, Zorns Lemma has been the subject of much discussion. For Scott McDonald, it can be seen as the ‘narrative mapping of human intellectual development’, from childhood to maturity. For Bruce Jenkins, the film offers ‘a virtual catalogue of the principal aesthetic practices of sixties’ art-making’.

What both of these quotes hint at is Frampton’s totalising ambition, inherited from writers such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, an ambition that courses throughout his work. In that perspective, Zorns Lemma can be seen as a tentative encyclopaedic compendium of modes of knowledge, in which cinema is given its full place, and as such it is one of Frampton’s most synthetic and successful films. (Text: Virginie Sélavy)

Dr Virginie Sélavy is a writer and film scholar. She is the author of a Ph.D. on Zorns Lemma and was the founding editor of Electric Sheep Magazine and co-director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London.