Structural film

Structural film was an experimental film movement prominent in the US in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the UK in the 1970s.

Overview

The term was coined by P. Adams Sitney who noted that film artists such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (aka Owen Land), Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka had moved away from the complex and condensed forms of cinema practiced by such artists as Sidney Peterson and Stan Brakhage. "Structural film" artists pursued instead a more simplified, sometimes even predetermined art. The shape of the film was crucial, the content peripheral. This term should not be confused with the literary and philosophical term structuralism.

Characteristics

The Flicker by Tony Conrad produces a flicker effect with black and white frames.

Sitney identified four formal characteristics common in Structural films, but all four characteristics are not usually present in any single film:

• fixed camera position (an apparently fixed framing)
• flicker effect (strobing due to the intermittent nature of film)
• loop printing
• rephotography (off the screen)

It has been noted by George Maciunas that these characteristics are also present in Fluxus films.

Key Films

• The Flicker (1965) Tony Conrad
• Wavelength (1966–67) Michael Snow
• T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) Paul Sharits
• One Second in Montreal (1969) Michael Snow
• Zorns Lemma (1970) Hollis Frampton
• Serene Velocity (1970) Ernie Gehr
• Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971) George Landow

See also

• Non-narrative film

Bibliography

• Gidal, Peter. Materialist Film Routledge; First Edition, Second Impression edition (Mar. 1989).
• de Lauretis, Teresa and Stephen Heath (eds). The Cinematic Apparatus. Macmillan, 1980.
• Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
• Maciunas, George. "Some Comments on Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney." Film Culture, No. 47, 1969.
• O'Pray, Michael. The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995: An Anthology of Writings. Indiana University Press, 2003.
• Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978. Second Edition, Oxford University Press 1979