Zorns Lemma

​"A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face."
This quote is the introduction to the hollisframpton.co.uk website that celebrates the work of American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton and shows clearly how Frampton agitates against the traditional approaches of narrative cinema, firmly striving for another form. His own films build their own narrative, with a wide range from mathematic formulas or structural riddles to even more complex philosophical labyrinths and don't forget: poetry. Frampton considered himself a poet for a long time, quoting Cocteau who states that a poet is a writer who does not write.
Zorns Lemma was made in 1970 and is the culmination of a period of filmmaking in which he investigates basic cinematic elements (image, sound, montage etc.) to construct his own 'phantasmagoria of language'. It consists of three chapters and begins with a dark screen and a woman narrating 24 rhymes from The Bay State Primer, an early American grammar textbook that teaches the letters of the alphabet by using them in sentences derived from the Bible. The second, longest part of the work presents us with a cyclic structure that perpetually moves throughout a 24-letter alphabet via various signs with words that propel the film along in 1 second (24 frame) segments. Gradually some of the letters are replaced with images of which some of them also develop in the process. It is a logical system which completes towards the end. Then in the final part a man, woman and dog are crossing a snowy field, while several narrators each narrate one word at a time read from an 11th century treatise, On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, by Robert Grosseteste. Are you still here? I bet you are.
Although Hollis Frampton was not happy with the labeling 'structural' film, many film lovers consider Zorns Lemma a veritable masterpiece of structural filmmaking. Fascinating it surely is, but it is something to see and decide for yourself, what it is exactly.

Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma, still taken from film print by M. Stefanowski / Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art