Figure 21 A tapestry of images in alphabetic order from the second part of Frampton's Zorn's Lemma.
It is no coincidence that Frampton came to make films, which seem to be suspended inside a no-man's land between words and still images. His first passion was poetry. Early on, he struck up a friendship with Ezra Pound, when the ageing poet was hospitalised in Washington D.C. After his move to New York in the late 1950's, while rooming with his old school friends Frank Stella and Carl Andre, photography became his primary medium. This resulted in a series of Word Pictures (1962-63),
where the idea of photographing words in an urban environment first surfaced. The power of words used to infect the visual medium, was a theme in his filmic work throughout his career. From Surface Tension (1968), where in the third part, text to a hypothetical film is superimposed on an image of a goldfish tank and waves, through Poetic Justice (1972), again a hypothetical film script, this time filmed page by page next to a plant and a cup of coffee, to Gloria (1979), part of his epic, uncompleted Magellan cycle, which uses computer generated text in the form of sixteen propositions about his maternal grandmother. The fact that he came to be associated with the structural film movement, was something he did not entirely agree with. In a 1976 talk, he seems to have raised an objection to film historian P. Adams Sitney's term 'Structural Film', stating that classifications like that 'render the work invisible' (Windhausen 2004: 76). Certainly his use of text in film was motivated by ideas beyond the strict ideological standpoint of the structural film theorists. An eloquent writer himself, he argues in a 1981 essay "Film in the House of the Word"', that cinema, ever since the invention of sound film, has developed a deep suspicion of the printed word:
Every artistic dialogue that concludes in a decision to ostracize the word is disingenuous to the degree that it succeeds in concealing from itself its fear of the word…and the source of that fear: that language, in every culture, and before it may become an arena of discourse, is, above all, an expanding arena of power, claiming for itself and its wielders all that it can seize, and relinquishing nothing. (Frampton 1983: 83)
Tension between word and image is exactly what is played out in Zorn's Lemma, and for all its formal construction, the piece reveals the very personal nature of this dilemma in Frampton's work. The work can be seen in two distinct ways, as a metaphor of language acquisition, and at the same time as a metaphor of film making itself. There is a gradual development in the film from the word to the image, and back again, which takes the viewer through a quasi recalibration of one's language capacity.
The film is constructed in three distinct parts, much like his previous work, Surface Tension, where the media relationships are differently configured in each one. In the first very short part, over a blank screen, a woman's voice reads from an alphabet primer used in schools in the early part of the 20th century:
In Adam's Fall / We sinned all.
Thy life to mend / God's Book attend (Bay State Primer).
This is to establish the authority of language, both in a strict Judaeo-Christian framework and to expose the idea of the alphabetical order which is used to structure the images in the subsequent part, the forty-minute main bulk of the film.
In this soundless part of the film, 1-second shots of words in an urban environment are presented in alphabetic groups of 24 (i/j and u/v are combined as in the Roman alphabet). The fact that in this part of the film, image is substituted for sound, underlines the subject of the alphabetic order, that was experienced only aurally in the first part. Interestingly, as this second part initially unfolds, it takes a minute or two before the structuring principle of the alphabetical order establishes itself in one's mind. At first it seems as if the image itself has dominance over our perception, we examine the space of where the words appear, understanding the context of the words becomes paramount: buildings, windows, store fronts, signs, fabrics, graffiti. The relation of word to context is the main source of meaning. Gradually as the relentless alphabetical order persists, environmental context seems to become less relevant. The viewer shifts attention to that which gives a clearer structure, the alphabetical order. This is a dynamic that relates to metaphor hierarchy (explained in the previous chapter), showing that when a part establishes its own inner structure, it becomes the primary focus (the target), and does not so readily lend its attributes to the other. Thus, the initial balance of image and word in the second part of Zorn's Lemma shifts from relative equilibrium to a state where the alphabetic order takes strong precedence in how we perceive the words, and image becomes less relevant.40 Then another shift occurs. As the set of words in each letter subset are used up, Frampton substitutes each of these 1-second slots with a set of wordless images, actions, which seem to have another metaphorical meaning. The first letter to be used up is 'x'. This is replaced with the image of a bonfire, so that whenever the letter 'x' comes up in the alphabetical order, we no longer see a word beginning with 'x' but a continuation of the film of the bonfire. Gradually after more than 100 cycles of the alphabet, all word images are replaced with action images: turning pages, frying an egg, washing hands, grinding meat, painting a wall, digging a hole, hands tying shoes, changing a tire. This gradual erosion of the alphabetical order that was set up in the mind has a profound effect. Frampton describes it as a 'long dissolve', a dissolve not only in the filmic sense but from one mode of perception to another. In an autobiographical context he writes in his notes:
'my adolescence & early childhood were concerned primarily with words & verbal values. I fancied myself a poet; studied living & dead languages - hence my early contacts with, for instance, Ezra Pound…That 13 years in New York saw a gradual weaning away of my consciousness from verbal to visual interests. I saw this as both expansion & shift… That I began, during the making of the film, to think about leaving the city. Part III is prophetic, in that sense, by about 5 months.' (Hollis Frampton, handwritten notes reproduced in MacDonald 1995: 58)
40 I have watched this film countless times, because I show it to students in my multimedia class.
From my own experience and from comments of the class, I can vouch for this shift in perception, even after repeated viewings.
Finally the third part, alluded here by Frampton as 'prophetic', is a single shot of a man, a woman and a dog in a snow covered landscape, moving away from the camera to a forest in the distance. The authorial voice returns, combined with the 1- second rhythm transformed from a visual cut to a sonic cut, though this time multiple voices are hocketing a philosophical text under the direction of what seems to be a metronome at 60 beats per minute. Even under normal circumstance, the text would be very difficult to comprehend: A medieval text, On Light, or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln as translated by Frampton, is a treaty on the universe, that speaks of form, matter, composition and entirety. But in this context, it becomes even harder to make any semantic sense of it, due to its fragmentation between the six voices. The relationship between image and language (carried in speech now rather than in text) shifts again. There is a wish to understand what is being spoken, a re-igniting of the semantic power of words (over the logic in the alphabetical order), but since the meaning remains difficult to penetrate, what stays prominent is the hypnotic rhythm of the hocketing. This reinforces the idea that Frampton sets up in the second part, that in language, just as in film, it is the temporal structure that creates the space of our perception. And just as there is an opposition set up in the image space between the second and third part, between the urban and the pastoral, there is a contrast in the text used between two different authorial uses of the word. In a written interview between Frampton and Gidal from the Structural Film Anthology, Frampton explains:
The key line in the text is a sentence that says, 'In the beginning of time, light drew out matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.' Which I take it is a fairly apt description of film, as the total historical function of film, not as an art medium but as this great kind of time capsule, and so forth. It was thinking on that which led me later to posit the universe as a vast film archive which contains nothing in itself and presumably somewhere in the middle, the undiscoverable centre of the whole matrix of film thoughts, an unfindable viewing room in which the great presence sits through eternity screening the infinite footage. (Frampton in Gidal 1976: 67)
This idea of a Borges-like Library of Babel in film comes close to unravelling the concept of Zorn's Lemma as a whole. The title refers to the mathematical principal named after mathematician Max Zorn, who in 1935 proved that 'every partially ordered set contains a maximal fully ordered subset' (Campbell 1978:77). What Frampton was trying to show, in his own words, was that the abstract subsets found in his film - all shots containing certain colours, the list-able aspect of words, the subsets of the fictive elements - are in fact not the maximal subset:
What you see (consciously) most of all is the 1-second cut, or pulse. So that what I imply, is that the maximal fully-ordered subset of all film (which this film proposes to mime) is not the "shot", but the CUT - the deliberate act of articulation. Beyond that, there is the pulse of 24 FPS which is truly the maximal fully-ordered subset of
all films-and, obliquely, of our perceptions, since that is the threshold at which they FAIL us. (Hollis Frampton, handwritten notes reproduced in MacDonald 1995:56)
What remains fascinating about this film in the context of the language and image relationship, is how the shifts of perception between the media are handled in such a conscious and poetic sense. The gradual disintegration from one order to another, is certainly something that was a concern to much minimal art practice of the time, but the shifts between the media, which Frampton accomplishes, is something quite unique. Thus, it is perhaps misleading to say that this film represents the category 'Language as Image', because the metaphoric relation is certainly not a static one. The work should not be seen in the sense that image, a picture, gives us an understanding of the meaning of the words, but rather that film, as a medium, is the source for understanding the idea of language as a whole. After all, language, not words, is the subject of this film, just as the material of cinema and not image, is the means through which he expresses this.