Zorns Lemma (1970)
In avante-garde US film director Hollis Frampton's
experimental, hour-long documentary - one that required and demanded
patience:
- the opening (about two minutes in length) - audio
only: female narration against a black screen - composed of words
read from The Bay State Primer (a version of The New England Primer,
an 18th century Puritan grammar textbook to teach the 24 letters
of the Roman alphabet (not the modern English alphabet with 26
letters), with Biblical phrases presented in alphabetical order,
i.e., "In Adam's fall We sinned all", "Thy
life to mend, This Book attend, The Cat
doth play, And after slay, A Dog will bite a thief
at night", An Eagle's flight Is out of sight,
etc.)
- the main section of the film (about 47 minutes in
length) - video only: repetitive cycling of the 24 letters of the
alphabet [Note: the letters J and U were missing from the Roman
alphabet] - illustrated by one second shots of the first letter
of single-word signs in Manhattan (New York state) (i.e., Abbey,
Baby, Cabinet, Daily, etc.), then gradually replaced by labels
and images that implied each letter
- the brief ending or epilogue (about 10 minutes in
length) with both audio and video: a human couple (Robert Huot and
Marcia Steinbrecher) and a dog distantly walked away across a snowy
field, then disappeared into faraway woods as the screen flared white;
on the soundtrack, six women's voices read in monotone - to the beat
of a metronome - one word apiece (one word per second) from a medieval
13th century text - Bishop Robert Grosseteste's On Light, or the
Ingression of Forms: "…the first bodily form I judge
to be light..."