Alphabet Soup [by Lewis Saul]

For is tolerance weirdness what your?

Alphabet do like the you?

 

If you don't have a headache from my scrambled sentences, maybe you're ready for something a little stiffer.

**

Of Oz The Wizard

 

In 2001, Matt Bucy was challenged by a friend to agree that nothing original was possible. (Sheesh, my head hurts already.)

Matt disagreed and the idea of Of Oz The Wizard was born.

"Basically it was edited in Excel."

What makes Of Oz particularly special in my opinion is Bucy's editing; as soon a word is said or sung, the scene continues until the next word.

Thus, words like and, is, of, and the -- which are obviously plentiful, but are followed by a new repetition of the word in fractions of a second -- resulting in a dazzling Stockhausen-like blur of pure sound. (The words are all sorted in the film's chronological order).

On the other hand, if a word is said or sung -- and there is no more dialogue for awhile -- the pace reverts to "normal" mode; for instance, after Dorothy takes shelter in the farmhouse and says, Oh to Toto, we get to watch Dorothy open the door to Munchkinland and observe a beautiful lateral traveling shot.

Thank you, Ted, for introducing this wonderful weirdness to me.

[Someone applied the same concept for Star Wars, less successful, imo.]

 

**

 

Zorns Lemma (1970)

 

 

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an avant-garde filmmaker, who was friends with poet Ezra Pound, painter Frank Stella, and sculptor Carl Andre.

Zorns Lemma is a significant piece of experimental cinema. It is in three parts:

1. Joyce Wieland reads a Bay State Primer, a puritan work for children to learn the alphabet. ("In Adam's fall, we sinned all") ...
2. A twenty-four letter alphabet (I and U are omitted) is used; Frampton photographed all different types of signage to represent the letters -- they flash on the screen for exactly one second, and then loop back ... gradually, the word stills are replaced by an active film shot, such as washing hands, or peeling a tangerine, until their are only moving images. It is a hypnotic experience ...
3. A couple is walking across a snowy meadow. Six women are reading one word at a time from Theory of Light.

Some interpret Zorns as a comment on life's stages -- the Primer being childhood, the long alphabet section representing maturation and interaction with the world, and the third section representing old age and death.

Comments

[Walter Carey]

You continue to amaze.

[Alan Saul]

Great stuff!!!

I find it illuminating to know something about Zorn's Lemma. The primary relationship to the film is that Zorn based it on partial orders. That's what Frampton explores, these tree-like structures. Zorn's Lemma states that if every rising branch of a tree is bounded (lies entirely under some arbitrary height), then the entire tree is bounded. That sounds quite reasonable, even in the context of infinite trees. However, it can't be proved or falsified starting with the axioms of set theory. There are a lot of statements that are in this category, most famously the axiom of choice. The axiom of choice says that if you have an infinite collection of sets, you can form a new set by picking one item from each of the sets. It turns out that most of these statements that can't be proved or falsified are equivalent to the axiom of choice, including Zorn's Lemma.

This is what Frampton meditated on, creating metaphors for the mathematical structures. He faced the challenge of depicting infinite sets. His solutions to this are probably what people find most poetic about this transcendent film.