The opening section of Zorns Lemma is 5 minutes long.
In it a woman reads an abecedary of 24 couplets from The Bay State Primer, an eighteenth century book designed to teach children the alphabet.
The film is entirely black during this section.

The film's main section is silent and lasts 45 minutes, broken into 2,700 one-second units.
It shows the viewer a 24-part "alphabet" (i & j and u & v are interchanged) that slowly evolves.
The section begins by presenting each letter typed on a sheet of tin foil.
The alphabet is initially composed of words that appear on street signs, photographed in Manhattan.
As the film continues to cycle through the alphabet, individually filmed letters are slowly substituted with abstract moving images.
The first four substitutions—fire (x), waves (z), smoke (q), and reeds (y)–depict the four classical elements, and by the end, it is fully composed of moving images which represent them.

The film's conclusion lasts 10 minutes.
It shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow.
Six women's voices alternate in reading the words of a passage from Robert Grosseteste's medieval document On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, which Frampton translated and edited for the film.
The voices read the text at a rate of one word per second.
The opening section of Zorns Lemma is 5 minutes long. In it a woman reads an abecedary of 24 couplets from The Bay State Primer, an eighteenth century book designed to teach children the alphabet. The film is entirely black during this section.
The film's main section is silent and lasts 45 minutes, broken into 2,700 one-second units. It shows the viewer a 24-part "alphabet" (i & j and u & v are interchanged) that slowly evolves. The section begins by presenting each letter typed on a sheet of tin foil. The alphabet is initially composed of words that appear on street signs, photographed in Manhattan. As the film continues to cycle through the alphabet, individually filmed letters are slowly substituted with abstract moving images. The first four substitutions—fire (x), waves (z), smoke (q), and reeds (y)–depict the four classical elements, and by the end, it is fully composed of moving images which represent them.
The film's conclusion lasts 10 minutes. It shows a man, woman and dog walking through snow. Six women's voices alternate in reading the words of a passage from Robert Grosseteste's medieval document On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, which Frampton translated and edited for the film. The voices read the text at a rate of one word per second.
Zorns Lemma (film)