Lindsey Coven - Frampton Final Movie

For my final I wanted to focus on one aspect of Frampton’s Zorns Lemma. I tried to create a more modern, yet juvenile version. Although MacDonald said that Zorns Lemma had minimal content, I found the most meaning out of what was most ambiguous. So in my film, I tried to mirror Frampton’s patterns but with my own rules.

My goal was to confuse the audience, as his film did, but with some added humor and an air of lightness. Hopefully, for those who saw Zorns Lemma, my film will make more sense, although making sense is not really the point.

My main point in creating this film was to exemplify MacDonald’s statement about how the filmic progression of Zorns Lemma was a “narrative mapping of human intellectual development.” Frampton’s three sections correspond to childhood, young adulthood, and mature phases of life. As I wrote in my previous response, I placed myself somewhere between the first and second sections of life – I am just at the point where my environmental words are being fully replaced by experiences or activities. My movie tells the story and process of my development into college but how I still hold onto my childhood memories. The synchronization and repetition symbolize how quickly life goes and shows the concept of déjà vu. Many of the shots are purposely out of focus to show how time flashes us by.

I had a lot of fun creating this project – it felt like I was taking apart an already completed puzzle and putting it back together. The one part of Zorns Lemma that I disliked was its length, so I tried to keep the repetition and speed, just in a shorter period of time.

While I was filming and editing this piece I tried to keep in mind Max Zorn’s “lemma,” or 11^th axiom of set theory, which says that in a set there is a further set with representative items. Each item or word used in this film has some meaning in my life, whether as a child, teenager, or young adult.

In dealing with Frampton’s interest in languages, I replaced the Bay State Primer textbook verses with classic childhood nursery rhymes. Although didactic in using successive letters of the alphabet, I found the woman’s voice to be somewhat eerie and more geared to an adult audience. For my more innocent audience, I hoped these nursery stories would enlist the rhyming technique while simultaneously bringing back memories. While still somewhat eerie, I found these new voices to also be humorous to go along with my theme.

While I found the metronome in Frampton’s work to be irritating, I felt it was necessary to keep in some parts of my work to keep the steady beat. Also like his piece, I included sections, one with alphabetically chronological words, one with actions or images representing alphabetically chronological words, and lastly, one of two people in love, walking into the distance. With this last episode especially, I hoped to add humor to Frampton’s relatively monotonous conclusion. Rather than signify death towards a white light, I signified a new beginning and the unknown future.

If you can’t follow the pattern, don’t. “There are no complex ideas, only long series of simple ideas.” Just watch.

Citing MacDonald once more, this is my “phantasmagoria” of memory.