Structural film

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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.

1 Overview
2 Characteristics
3 Key Films
4 Bibliography

[edit] 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, 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.

[edit] Characteristics

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] Key Films

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
Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971) George Landow

[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.