Screening
Broken Alfabets: A screening of Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s
“Let’s just accept that there are risks… Let’s say that in Zorns Lemma the risk is concentrated within a single massive hole in the ground into which a few people have actually fallen. If you do not immediately begin to build the film for yourself as you perceive it, then there simply is no film. There is no work at all, and you only have a meaningless jumble of images.”
- Hollis Frampton
Zorn’s Lemma
Hollis Frampton
USA, 1970, 60 mins, 16mm
Akademirommet warmly welcomes you to a rare 16mm screening of the artist Hollis Frampton’s legendary film Zorn’s Lemma, together with a reading from Inger Christensen’s poem Alfabet programmed by Mike Sperlinger. The Reading of Alfabet starts at 19:00. Screening starts at 20:00.
Frampton’s film is completely unique. It seems at first to be a catalogue of images organised by alphabetical order – a collage of words found and photographed in 1960s Manhattan. But it gradually reveals itself as something much stranger: an occult history of cinema, a labyrinth of systems-within-systems, a quasi-mystical attempt to make a film which is the measure of the universe. The conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith called Zorn’s Lemma, “The best poetry film ever made”.
You will never watch Zorn’s Lemma online. It is there, but I guarantee you will never watch it on your laptop. Some films need to be seen projected, sitting (perhaps uncomfortably in a foldable chair) together with other people. As Frampton said: we are going to have to build this film ourselves.
Tonight we will begin with an extract from another work deeply rooted in mathematical and alphabetical systems: the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s extraordinary poem Alfabet.
Refreshments will be served.
Programmed and introduced by Mike Sperlinger.
With help from Emilia Sølvsten and Jasper Siverts.
Akademirommet is an arena for exhibitions and presentations located on the ground floor of Kunstnernes Hus with its entrance at the back of the building. This space has been run by the Oslo National Academy of the Arts since 2014. It is situated in a former professor studio and classroom that has been used by the Academy of Fine Art Oslo from the 1930s-90s.
Kunstnernes Hus, Wergelandsveien 17, Oslo
