Zorn's Lemma (Frampton, 1970)

It's like the opposite of a lot of Stan Brakhage's films, which are more like...being a baby and just watching the pretty colors, this film has literally approximated how to LEARN.

The film starts off with someone reading over a black screen a basic grammar book, followed by 45 minutes cycling through shots of words starting with each letter of the alphabet (i.e., a shop window with the word "Acme", "Barber" on a shop window, a sign that reads "Canvas") (although there's only 24 letters, I'll have to do some reading up to find out why), and, after numerous run-throughs, every so often, one of the letters is replaced by an image, and, after more than a few times, you come to associate the letter with the image, and expect that picture to show up when that letter is going to come around (i.e., a bonfire for the letter "X", and the rest of the film features two people reading some work, each alternating saying one word, while some people walk through the snow, I guess symbolizing the point where we understands words enough that substitutional symbols are no longer necessary, and we base it on the words themselves. That I'm not sure about, but that's my initial reaction.

Really quite fascinating. (I downloaded a torrent, then found it online *rolls eyes*, ON GOOGLE!) but yeah, great stuff if you're of the intellectual, avant-garde persuasion.

Also, this was my 600th film off the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" top 1000, a great film to achieve the milestone with.