ZORNS LEMMA by Hollis Frampton
Curated by Daniel Fitzpatrick
18.30 / Tuesday 26th May 2015
Irish Film Institute, 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
Book Tickets
To mark their 50th programme, Experimental Film Club highlight the work of Hollis Frampton. Frampton remains a highly influential figure in terms of both his filmmaking and his writing on film. Zorns Lemma (1970) is a truly seminal work, a key work in the development of a 'structural film' tradition. As Brakhage once noted, Frampton “strains cinema through language” and by doing so radically expands our understanding of cinema and its potential. An excellent essay on the work of Frampton by Rebecca Travis can be found here - http://writing.rebeccatravis.co.uk/post/6565223198/framptons-legacy
“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception” – Stan Brakhage.
- "To mark what is their 50th screening, since forming in 2008, EFC have decided to focus here on the work of Hollis Frampton. Frampton is a constantly recurring figure within the histories of artists' moving image and experimental film. Most recently David Gatten, a key contemporary, closed his screening at the PLASTIK festival with a long citation from Frampton's Circles of Confusion. One of many contemporary filmmakers to align their work with what Frampton outlined in 1971 as a 'metahistorical' approach Gatten and other contemporaries (including Michael Robinson, Ben Russell and Keith Sanborn) have used Frampton's writings and work as a jumping off point through which a 'past' of artists' film can be reimagined and reinvented. Through these kinds of engagement Frampton's time seems as much now as it is does the past of an 'historical avant-garde' and with that in mind 'now' is a good time to revisit one of the artist's richest and most complex works - ZORNS LEMMA.
The screening of this seminal work will be followed by a discussion with the EFC curatorial team - Aoife Desmond, Alice Butler, Alan Lambert and Daniel FItzpatrick- addressing EFC's legacy to date as well as its possible futures." - Daniel Fitzpatrick
IFI Tuesday 26th May 18.30
More notes on the film below-
(courtesy of White Light Cinema)
“One of Frampton's monumental achievements, a playful puzzle of a film, full of wry autobiographical allusion, in which the artist experiments with systems of learning and language; narrative, action, and seriality; the disjunctive rhythms of sound and image; and the sensuous and the intellectual.” (Museum of Modern Art)
*****“
Zorns Lemma is a major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye and head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud" (Ernie Gehr)
*****“
In his most important work to date, and the most original new work of cinema I have seen since Brakhage's Scenes From Under Childhood: Part IV. Frampton's film is an exercise in mathematical logic in cinema. Or is it a mechanical logic?... It's about alphabet. It's about the unities of similarities. It's about sameness in a confusion. It's about logic in chance. It's about structure and logic. It's about rhythm. Ah, what a difference between Zorns Lemma and all the 'serious' commercial movies that I occasionally praise!" (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice)
*****
"Zorns Lemma is divided into three sections: an initial imageless reading of the Bay State Primer; a long series of silent shots, each one second photographed signs edited to form one complete Latin alphabet; and finally a single shot of two people walking across a snow-covered field away from the camera to the sound of a choral reading.
The first of several intellectual orders which Frampton provides as structural models within the film is, of course, the alphabet. The Bay State Primer announces, and the central forty minutes of this hour long film elaborates upon it. Within that section a second kind of ordering occurs; letters begin to drop out of the alphabet and their one-second pulse is replaced by an image without a sign. The first to go is X, replaced by a fire; a little later Z is replaced by waves breaking backwards. Once an image is replaced, it will always have the same substitution; in the slot of X the fire continues for a second each time, the sea roll backwards at the end of each alphabet once the initial substitution occurs. On the other hand, the signs are different in every cycle.
The substitution process sets in action a guessing game and a device. Since the letters seem to disappear roughly in inverse proportion to their distribution as initial letters of words in English, the viewer can with occasional accuracy guess which letter will drop out next. He also suspects that when the alphabet has been completely replaced, the film or the section will end.
A second timing mechanism exists within the substitution images themselves, and it gains force as the alphabetic cycles come to an end. Some of the substitution images imply their own termination. The tying of shoes which replaces P, the washing of hands (G), the changing of a tire (T), and especially the filling of the frame with dried beans (N) add a time dimension essentially different from that of the waves, or a static tree (F), a red ibis flapping its wings (H), or cat-tails swaying in the wind (Y). The clocking mechanism of the finite acts is confirmed by the synchronous drive toward completion which becomes evident in the last minutes of the section.
In Zorns Lemma Frampton followed the tactics of his two elected literary masters Jorge Luis Borges and Ezra Pound. From Borges he learned the art of labyrinthine construction and the dialectic of presenting and obliterating the self. Following Pound, Frampton has incorporated in the end of his film a crucial indirect allusion; it is to the paradox of Arnulf Rainer's reduction. In Grosseteste's essay, materiality is the final dissolution, or the point of weakest articulation, of pure light. But in the graphic cinema that vector is reversed. In the quest for sheer materiality - for an image that would be, and not simply represent - the artist seeks endless refinement of light itself. As the choral text moves from Neo-Platonic source-light to the grosser impurities of objective reality, Frampton slowly opens the shutter, washing out his snowscape into the untinted whiteness of the screen." (P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film)
“
The substitution process sets in action a guessing game and a device. Since the letters seem to disappear roughly in inverse proportion to their distribution as initial letters of words in English, the viewer can with occasional accuracy guess which letter will drop out next. He also suspects that when the alphabet has been completely replaced, the film or the section will end.
A second timing mechanism exists within the substitution images themselves, and it gains force as the alphabetic cycles come to an end. Some of the substitution images imply their own termination. The tying of shoes which replaces P, the washing of hands (G), the changing of a tire (T), and especially the filling of the frame with dried beans (N) add a time dimension essentially different from that of the waves, or a static tree (F), a red ibis flapping its wings (H), or cat-tails swaying in the wind (Y). The clocking mechanism of the finite acts is confirmed by the synchronous drive toward completion which becomes evident in the last minutes of the section.
In Zorns Lemma Frampton followed the tactics of his two elected literary masters Jorge Luis Borges and Ezra Pound. From Borges he learned the art of labyrinthine construction and the dialectic of presenting and obliterating the self. Following Pound, Frampton has incorporated in the end of his film a crucial indirect allusion; it is to the paradox of Arnulf Rainer's reduction. In Grosseteste's essay, materiality is the final dissolution, or the point of weakest articulation, of pure light. But in the graphic cinema that vector is reversed. In the quest for sheer materiality - for an image that would be, and not simply represent - the artist seeks endless refinement of light itself. As the choral text moves from Neo-Platonic source-light to the grosser impurities of objective reality, Frampton slowly opens the shutter, washing out his snowscape into the untinted whiteness of the screen." (P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film)
