Zorns Lemma and A Lecture by Hollis Frampton
With Presentation by Film Scholar Michael Zryd
A Co-Presentation of Exploratorium Cinema Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque and Cabinetic
Thursday, October 29, 2009. McBean Theater at 7:30pm

The Exploratorium Cinema Arts Program, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Cabinetic co-sponsor a special evening of restored films by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984), an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer/theoretician, and a pioneer of digital art, on Thursday, October 29, 2009 in the Exploratorium’s McBean Theater at 7:30pm. Visiting Frampton scholar Michael Zryd, of York University, Toronto, will present two of Frampton’s most significant cinematic propositions, Zorns Lemma and A Lecture. Admission to this special evening event is $10; SF Cinematheque and Exploratorium members: $5.

In Frampton’s drive to explore and catalog the possibilities and parameters of cinematic representation, he delighted in paradox, frequently creating complex conceptual structures which pitted the precision of language against the abstraction and excess of photographic representation. Taking the projected white rectangle as a maximalist basis of all cinema, A Lecture evokes a profound consideration of cinematic “aboutness” and stands as one of the cinema’s most significant challenges to a re-conceptualization of the art form, while the 1970 masterpiece, Zorns Lemma—described by Peter Gidal as “the attempt to break down the authority of language”— leads viewers away from logical and linguistic order into an exhilarating world of imagery, color and light. (The original audio recording of A Lecture has been preserved and made available for this event by kind permission of Harvard Film Archive.)