Structural film was an avant-garde

experimental film Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that does not apply standard cinematic conventions, instead adopting Non-narrative film, non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many e ...

movement prominent in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

in the 1960s. A related movement developed in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

in the 1970s.

Overview

The term was coined by P. Adams Sitney who noted that film artists had moved away from the complex and condensed forms of cinema practiced by such artists as

Sidney Peterson Sidney Peterson (November 15, 1905 – April 24, 2000), was an American writer, artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and educator. He founded the first film courses at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1947. Bio ...

and

Stan Brakhage James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American experimental filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. Over the course of five decades, Brakhage cr ...

. "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 Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns t ...

''.

History

United States

The earliest films associated with the structural film movement emerged during the mid 1960s. New York filmmakers from this period whose work was later associated with the term were

Tony Conrad Anthony Schmalz Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016) was an American video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both ...

, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr,

Ken Jacobs Ken Jacobs (born May 25, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American experimental filmmaker. His style often involves the use of found footage which he edits and manipulates. He has also directed films using his own footage. Ken Jacobs directed ...

, George Landow,

Michael Snow Michael James Aleck Snow (December 10, 1928 – January 5, 2023) was a Canadian artist who worked in a range of media including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. His best-known films are ''Wavelength'' (1967) and '' La Rég ...

, and

Joyce Wieland Joyce Wieland (June 30, 1930 – June 27, 1998) was a groundbreaking artist and cultural activist who used diverse media to explore feminism and Canadian identity. Wieland found success as a Painting, painter when she began her career in Tor ...

The earliest flicker films associated with structural film were made in 1966. Conrad, a

minimalist music In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-m ...

ian, made '' The Flicker'', where solid black and white frames are arranged in different frequencies to produce a flicker effect. Visual artist Paul Sharits made several flicker films—''Ray Gun Virus'', ''Piece Mandala/End War'', and the

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

film ''Word Movie''—in an effort to revisit "the basic mechanisms of motion pictures…working toward a new conception of cinema." The two filmmakers made their respective works with knowledge of neither each other's practices nor earlier examples of flicker films. Snow's ''

Wavelength In physics and mathematics, wavelength or spatial period of a wave or periodic function is the distance over which the wave's shape repeats. In other words, it is the distance between consecutive corresponding points of the same ''phase (waves ...

'' (1967) quickly became a turning point. The film shows a loft for 45 minutes from a fixed perspective, progressively zooming across the room with variations in the image coming from

color gel A color gel or color filter ( Commonwealth spelling: colour gel or colour filter), also known as lighting gel or simply gel, is a transparent colored material that is used in theater, event production, photography, videography and cinematogr ...

s, different

film stock Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed, edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent pl ...

superimposition Superimposition is the placement of one thing over another, typically so that both are still evident. Superimpositions are often related to the mathematical procedure of superposition. Audio Superimposition (SI) during sound recording and repro ...

s, and

negative image In photography, a negative is an image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film, in which the lightest areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest areas appear lightest. This reversed order occurs because the ...

s. It won the International Experimental Film Festival and was soon recognized as the movement's most significant work. By the late 1960s, the structural film movement coincided with a shift in experimental cinema away from

1960s counterculture The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is oft ...

and toward closer affiliations with academia and

film theory Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for und ...

. In 1969 ''Film Culture'' magazine published P. Adams Sitney's essay "Structural Film", in which he coined the term. He published two revisions in the following years.

Anthology Film Archives Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the film preservation, preservation, film studies, study, and film distribution, exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent film, independent, experimental film, ex ...

, opened in 1970, was established as an exhibition venue for avant-garde cinema and included structural films in its programming. The structural film movement was concurrent with a renaissance of the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

's Paper Print Collection. Since the early 1950s, the library had been making

film negative In photography, a negative is an image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film, in which the lightest areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest areas appear lightest. This reversed order occurs because th ...

s from its archive of

paper print Paper prints of films were an early mechanism to establish the copyright of motion pictures by depositing them with the Library of Congress. Thomas Alva Edison’s company was first to register each frame of motion-picture film onto a positive pap ...

s, used to establish copyright on early cinematic works until 1912. These new prints began to circulate starting in the mid to late 1960s.Habib 2021, pp. 267–274. The sudden availability of these prints generated interest in their intermediate state between still and moving image. Filmmakers such as Jacobs and Frampton made use of the Paper Print Collection as source material for new films.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, a related "structural/materialist" film movement emerged during the 1970s, similarly focused on the material properties of film. These filmmakers, often associated with the

London Film-Makers' Co-op The London Film-makers' Co-operative, or LFMC, was a British film-making workshop founded in 1966. It was largely responsible for the rise of British avant-garde cinema in the later 1960s. Work produced by members of the LFMC in the late 1960s and ...

, included David Crosswaite, Fred Drummond, John Du Cane, Mike Dunford, Gill Eatherley, Peter Gidal, Roger Hammond, Mike Leggett,

Malcolm Le Grice Malcolm Le Grice (15 May 1940 – 3 December 2024) was a British artist known for his avant-garde film work. The British Film Institute claimed that he was "probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema". Biography Le Gri ...

, and William Raban.

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 George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...

that these characteristics are also present in

films.

Key films

*''

Sleep Sleep is a state of reduced mental and physical activity in which consciousness is altered and certain Sensory nervous system, sensory activity is inhibited. During sleep, there is a marked decrease in muscle activity and interactions with th ...

'' (

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

, 1963) *'' The Flicker'' (

, 1965) *''

'' (

, 1966–67) *'' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G'' ( Paul Sharits, 1968) *''One Second in Montreal'' (

, 1969) *''

Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19621. Lyrics and melody Modern versions of the rhyme include: Tom, Tom, the piper's son, Stole a pig, and away did run. The pig ...

'' (

, 1969) *''

Necrology An obituary ( obit for short) is an article about a recently deceased person. Newspapers often publish obituaries as news articles. Although obituaries tend to focus on positive aspects of the subject's life, this is not always the case. Ac ...

'' ( Standish Lawder, 1970) *'' Variations of a Cellophane Wrapper'' ( David Rimmer, 1970) *'' Zorns Lemma'' ( Hollis Frampton, 1970) *'' Serene Velocity'' ( Ernie Gehr, 1970) *'' Remedial Reading Comprehension'' ( George Landow, 1971) *
Hand Held Day
' (Gary Beydler, 1974) *
Pasadena Freeway Stills
' (Gary Beydler, 1974) *''

The United States of America The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguou ...

'' ( James Benning and

Bette Gordon Bette Gordon (born June 22, 1950) is an Americans, American filmmaker and professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is best known for her films ''Variety (1983 film), Variety'' (1983) and ''Handsome Harry'' (2009), both of which rec ...

, 1975) *'' The Girl Chewing Gum'' ( John Smith, 1976) *'' American Dreams: Lost and Found'' (James Benning, 1984)Viennale 2014. James Benning's "natural history" on Notebook, MUBI
/ref> *'' Landscape Suicide'' (James Benning, 1986) *''Passage à l'acte'' ( Martin Arnold, 1993) *''Window Work'' ( Lynne Sachs, 2000)Structural Film at the Turn of the Century, Thursday, 07, 2023 - Indiana University Cinema
/ref> *''*Corpus Callosum'' (

, 2002)

Key filmmakers

* James Benning *

* Hollis Frampton * Ernie Gehr * Standish Lawder * Birgit and Wilhelm Hein * Kurt Kren * George Landow (a.k.a. Owen Land) * Paul Sharits *

* Sharon Lockhart

Legacy

Ken Jacobs's ''Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son'' and Ernie Gehr's ''Serene Velocity'' were each inducted into the

National Film Registry The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation (library and archival science), preservation, each selected for its cultural, historical, and aestheti ...

. Several structural films have been included on DVD sets, including the works of Hollis Frampton (released by

The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...

as a part of ''A Hollis Frampton Odyssey'') and Standish Lawder's ''Necrology'' which appeared on the 2008 DVD set entitled '' Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986''.Alt URL
/ref>Lim, D (March 1, 2009). "Avant-garde film gems in 'Treasures IV' collection," ''The Los Angeles Times''

/ref>

References

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 {{DEFAULTSORT:Structural Film Experimental film Film and video terminology 1960s in film 1970s in film 1980s in film 2000s in film Film styles Collage film Modern art

Overview

History

United States

United Kingdom

Characteristics

Key films

Key filmmakers

Legacy

See also

References

Bibliography