Briefly: what's it going to be like?
One of the great experimental films. A 60 minute, three part riddle that maybe approximates intellectual development by moving from imageless words (childhood?), to the recognition of silent images and the learning of simple tasks (maturity?) and finally a serenity and acceptance of death (old age). It does all this by activating the viewer in deciphering what they see and hear.
In more detail:
Frampton is another of the last century's great filmmakers; he's a key figure in the movement that saw films created around a priori structural concepts (numbers of frames/ shots, their order, fixed camera positions, serialist use of a set of individual frames...), as a means of freeing film from symbolism and narrative.
One of the many reasons why we admire him so much is that, in order to get the most from his films, he doesn't assume that you the viewer knows everything, or that you know the basis of his chosen structure this time (you often need to look to philosophy, physics and set theory to grasp his films impulse1), but assumes that you can reasonably be expected to get up and do some research.
Zorns Lemma sets out to activate the viewer away from passive consumption and towards active participation, and to create a tripartite analogy for the development of human intellect by presenting a riddle that approximates childhood, maturity and old age; pre-knowledge, ability to perform tasks, acceptance of death. Or at least that's one reading of it, and the one I get the most from. Frampton made tens of silent films, and only a handful of sound films. However, I get the impression that this was due largely to the depth of his thinking about the potentials of sound film, and perhaps no small measure of disappointment that those potentials had not been fully explored. As such, the use of sound in any Frampton film is both rare and significant.
We've included Zorns Lemma in the programme here because it treats the sound-image relationship quite a good deal more complexly than your average syneasthetia based experimental film. Frampton's idea of sound in film is based on a deep reading of Eisenstein's notion of vertical montage, where discordant sound and image could be made to occur synchronously, in the process creating what Eisenstein called a filmic analogy to harmony. Here, the means to which sound is used (or not) in different sections of the film is deeply considered, and integral to the wider aims of the film.
As mentioned above, the one reading of the film that I find the most useful is by Scott MacDonald: he puts it better than I could here:
"The most fruitful approach to the (film), however, is to see it as a narrative mapping of human intellectual development. This approach accounts not only for the film's particular imagery and sound, but for the unusual experience the film creates for viewers. Essentially, the three sections of Zorns Lemma correspond to three phases of life - childhood, youth or young adulthood, and maturity - phases that are often characterized by different forms of intellectual process. Frampton places the viewer in relationships to imagery and sound that are analogous to the successive phases of development."
That's quite a lot to say while trying to not give the game away, so I'll end by saying that you really should see this film.
1. Maxwell's Demon is based on a thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, which raises questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics, Zorns Lemma is a axiom of Set Theory, the equivalent to the well-ordering theorem and the axiom of choice, and states that “Every partially ordered set in which every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound contains at least one maximal element".
