Zorns Lemma (1970)

This film combines several clues into a structured film. In the first part of the movie, on a blank screen, a woman's voice reads an ABC ballad selected from a literacy textbook in a colonial United States. In the second part, the one-second shot shows some individual words, usually on the sign, arranged in alphabetical order. Shallowly, when the director browses the alphabet over and over again, each time using a different set of words, the position of each letter is filled with images-flames, waves, ground hamburgers. By the end of this part, the film has created a unique pattern alphabet, with each image associated with a letter. The last part of the film consists of several long shots of a man, a woman and a dog walking slowly through the snow, accompanied by the sound of reading medieval texts about light. The middle part reflects the strict and systematic side of the structured film, with fixed cameras and long final shots showing a gradual change in the way Gottheim's "Fog Line" and other meditative works. The formal complexity of Zorn Lemma has been widely interpreted. It's about a child's language acquisition, competition between vision and sound, or self.