Zorns Lemma (1970) on Netflix
NR19701hDocumentary
A woman reads couplets from an early grammar textbook over a black screen, then a silent alphabet of words photographed on Manhattan street signs cycles, letters giving way to moving images.
- Watch on NetflixThis title is not on Netflix right now. Please check back later for updates.
- Watch on NordVPN
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.4/10921 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Zorns Lemma (1970)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Hollis Frampton first tried making Zorns Lemma by shooting his photographs on a stand, but he thought the result looked "dead", so he filmed the words in color instead, framing static shots of words with a tripod.
- Zorns Lemma premiered at Philharmonic Hall during the 1970 New York Film Festival and was the first experimental feature film ever screened there.
- Hollis Frampton timed each shot of Zorns Lemma to one second, or 24 frames, but told key grip David Hamilton that 12 shots should run 23 frames and 12 shots 25 frames, leaving 24 shots slightly irregular.
- Director Peter Greenaway cited Zorns Lemma as an influence for showing how to "structure a film without necessarily using narrative"; his 1973 short H Is for House lists words beginning with h, and The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed & Two Noughts have children reciting abecedaries.
- Hollis Frampton named Zorns Lemma after Zorn's lemma, the set-theory proposition formulated by mathematician Max Zorn in 1935, which describes partially ordered sets where every totally ordered subset has an upper bound.
- For the final section of Zorns Lemma, Hollis Frampton deliberately exposed the film rolls to sunlight while loading and unloading them and created reel-end flares to emphasize "the materiality of film".
