Structural film

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Structural film was an American experimental film movement.

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, 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 philisophical term structuralism.

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.

[edit] Bibliography

• P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film. The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, Second Edition, Oxford University Press 1979
• George Maciunas, Some Comments on Stuctural Film by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture, No. 47, 1969.