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 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.

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.

[11] Frampton's films are often titled after specialized scientific disciplines, as in the case of Maxwell's Demon, Prince Rupert's Drops, and Hapax Legomena.

[12] In the early 1960s minimalist artist Carl Andre described to Frampton the Dedekind cut, which partitions a totally ordered set into two subsets, one of whose elements are all less than those of the other, and can be used to construct the real numbers.

[17] J. Hoberman wrote that it "drove the audience mad",[18] and Howard Thompson observed that "never, at least so far during the Film Festival, have so many Philharmonic Hall viewers slithered outside for a cigarette.

[19] The film was released on home media by the Criterion Collection, as a part of A Hollis Frampton Odyssey in Blu-ray and DVD.

[20] Amos Vogel called Zorns Lemma a "radical example of reductive cinema" that warned of "things to come ... 'meaning' (political, psychological, personal, or whatever) has been eliminated and the work exists purely for itself, demanding attention to structure, pattern, and orchestration.

"[21] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "a thoroughly demanding but highly stimulating exercise in heightening our awareness of the possibilities of visual perception and, indeed, the ways in which we create meaning itself".

Created and put together by a very clear eye, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud.

"[23] Critics have interpreted Stan Brakhage's 1972 film The Riddle of Lumen as a response to Zorns Lemma.

[28] Zorns Lemma received three critics' votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films.