zorns lemma’s z’s
in Zorns Lemma, another challenging z is found, well many, as the film that established Hollis Frampton in the alternative cinema world. The name derives from the mathematician Max Zorn’s “lemma,” the eleventh axiom of set theory, which proposes that, given a set of sets, there is a further set composed of a representative item from each set. The allusion to this “existential axiom” fits with the film’s set of sets structure.
The film occurs in three parts beginning with a dark screen as a woman reads from The Bay State Primer (Euro-America’s first English grammar text) that highlight words beginning with the successive letters of the Roman alphabet. For Z:
Zacharias, he did climb the tree, his Lord to see.
Allen S. Weiss, from his Frampton’s Lemma, Zorn’s Dilemma, furthers this z:
the structure of absence is…supported by the last enunciation from The Bay State Primer…This futile task, to see the invisible, provides the articulation of the film’s three parts: from Zacharias’s tree we do indeed see the forest depicted in the third part of the film. But before that we are presented with the transformational complex of the film’s second section, which is composed of sequences of one-second-long shots, ordered according to the alphabetical system already provided by the primer. The first sequence depicts only words; in subsequent sequences a shot of a word will be replaced by a shot without words, of a person, place, thing, or event. This is the ultimate pronomination: God is represented by His creation, that is, by the world’s diversity of Logos and Physis. Such is precisely the cinematic representation of that “broken and scattered God” referred to by [Jorge Luis] Borges in his tale, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108,” which indicates that “something infinite had been lost.” The death of God is expressed in an epiphany of His partial representations. What remains is a disjunctive world and the set of arbitrary relations between words and things.
…Zacharias’s gaze indicate[s] the subject of [Robert] Grossetestes neo-Platonic ontology/theology of light, which is related by the text of the film’s third section. The object is God, made manifest in the purity of light, from which all else emanates, especially the cinema.
the z’s found in the second section, in correspondence with z history, relate in some way to dividing and cutting with the zone as an sign announcing an area separated, the tracking shot cutting across the plane and the waves breaking along the ocean surface:
In the films three-part structure, the suggestions of early film history reveal another fascinating z in Muybridge’s use of the Zoopraxiscope:
is it any wonder that the leading company responsible for so many innovations in optics is any other than Zeiss!?!
z thinks their themeline is an appropriate ending to this z:
“we make it visible”