A2 Unit 3: Art And The Moving Image - Structuralism

Unit 3: Art and the Moving Image 1970’s - Structural Film

Definitions 

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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. 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.

Definitions 

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Narrative film creates an illusion of a real world in two dimensions on the screen. The “structuralist” filmmakers were aware that film was until then used as a representation of the reality and they chose to make this the subject of their films. Their films could only be watched in a state of hyper-awareness where the viewer was constantly reminded that the content of the image was no more than an illusion.

Characteristics 

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The film society and self-financing model of the pre-war era continued over the next two decades, but by the early 1960s, a different outlook became perceptible in the work of American avant-garde filmmakers. Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man exemplified a shift from personal confessional to abstraction. Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising was an inverted musical of sorts and a camp commentary on Hollywood mythology. Jack Smith and Andy Warhol incorporated camp minimalism into their work. Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative. Whereas the New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, Structural-Materialist filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow created a highly formalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly time itself. By breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema. 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)

Structure, Process, Chance 

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Similarly in other areas of the Arts artists were focussing on structure, Process and Chance. American Composer John Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was a pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the twentieth century. http://www.soundnet.org/concerts/mov_refs/2002.shtml#cage

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 –2008) 

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Robert Rauschenberg (1925 –2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that implies. In this respect, his work is contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art. 10 comments Latest by Charlie Triplett

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This obituary of Robert Rauschenberg contains some great quotes from the artist… An improvisatory process was what mattered most to him: ‘Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea’. Embracing change is essential: ‘John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change’.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 –2008)

Wavelength 

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Filmmakers began to respond to a new wave of minimalism and self-referentiality in the arts during the 1960’s . Evidence of this can be heard in the music of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich. Films were also marked by their abandonment of montage. In Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) for 45 minutes a camera slowly and irregularly zooms into the far wall of a loft apartment, accompanied by a rising sine wave. http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_wavelength.html Long duration is used to challenge mainstream narrative. Many filmmakers were also interested in systems, numbers and linguistics.

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984)    

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Poetic Justice (1972) 31:30 min 16mm Poetic Justice explores a "cinema of the mind", wherein the film takes place in the viewers' imagination(s) as they read title cards. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9an96_hollis-frampton-poetic-justice-part_shortfilms?from=rss There is almost no change in the image but the story keeps changing. It is destabilizing, as it is not easy to understand at first sight why Frampton makes us read so many pages in a film. If the whole idea were to read the story, would it not be better to just give the audience the pages? Why bother to make them watch it? All these questions reflect back to the fact that what is in front of us is not the reality but it is a film. Reading a page is not the same as reading a page out of a film and with a similar reasoning watching events unfold on the screen should not create the same reaction as witnessing the events themselves. Again, Frampton expects us to become aware of the medium and reminds us the limits of what cinema can be. Beginning as a photographer, Frampton’s filmwork was generally concerned with concepts and the structure of filmmaking itself. Other works focused on the relationship between sound and image. Perhaps his other most famous works are; Zorns Lemma ( 1970) 60 minutes 16mm (Mathematical title alluding to an ‘axiom of disorder’ – based on the number 24, linking film speed to the letters of the Roman Alphabet. Shots of alphabet letters are replaced by images. http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton_zorns.html (nostalgia) (1971) 36 min 16mm

Simplicity and Form 

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In his book Visionary film, P. Adams Sitney defines the structural film as a “cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film” (348). In an ordinary film, the form changes over time and the viewer spends his/her energy to understand how the individual choices work to create a meaningful whole. The different choices of camera angles and/or cuts have only significance as long as they complement or oppose the flow of the film. In a structural film, the form is so simple that the viewer does not have to spend much energy on understanding their place in the whole work. Usually, the ideas are repeated again and again so that it becomes a meditative process where the viewer starts thinking only about “the” choice made by the filmmaker that in Sitney’s terms can be called “a simple shape”. There can be no illusions of reality as the “shape” attracts all the attention, making the content of secondary importance. The fact that an illusion is created by a representation becomes the subject of the film. This meditative process cannot be achieved if there is a story or many different forms that viewer has to make connections with; there has to be a simple form.

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In Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G The word “destroy” would go unnoticed if it were used once in a sentence. However, when it is repeated over and over again our brain starts being tricked and we lose the certainty on what the word is. This is very destabilizing because we are used to understanding the words so that we can put them in the context to make a sense of the film. Although we hear the same sound; we hear many different words or phrases, most of them having violent meanings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihTynFLMy2Y

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The fact that the forms are simple can lead many people to think that it is easy to make structural films. Once the idea is found, it usually really is easy to execute, unlike the films of Brakhage where the director has to think about each cut so that the film has a deeper meaning as a whole. However, finding the idea is exactly what constitutes the most important part of the process through which the structural films are created. Structural films are almost always conceptual artworks where the actual experience is the process of thinking about the film and not just consuming what is on the screen.

Ernie Gehr 

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Ernie Gehr’s own films are perfect examples of how the medium can both make us think and create moving experiences despite the fact that we are always aware that they are nothing but films. They question not only the representation and the film medium but also the perception itself. In Shift that he made two years later, Gehr reveals again the vulnerability of our perception of perspective. The cars driving in different speeds in an auto park are shown in either usual perspective or upside down. In both images the white lines look alike so much that whenever there are no cars on the screen we cannot be sure whether the image is the right side up or not. That encourages the audience to imagine a world where humans saw things upside down. Eventually, they would be used to it and they would be sure that that was the only realistic perception. http://www.ubu.com/film/gehr_shift.html

Structural Film in Britain 

Structural Film is the name that has been attached to some of the work produced by members of the London Filmmakers' Co-op in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Modernist rather than post-Modern, it broadly combines analysis of the structuring of perception with an exploration of film's material components.

Malcolm LeGrice Berlin Horse 1970 film fragments provided Malcolm Le Grice with the material 9 Two minutes. from which to make Berlin Horse: 8mm home-movie footage shot 

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by the artist near Berlin, and archive footage of a related subject. He weaves these together in repeating cycles of action, refilming images from the screen and colouring them, to heighten the viewer's awareness of film-time and the film-image. This film is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects. It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the "real" time which exists when the film was being shot, with the "real" time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.

Clouds 1969, 10 min, silent, b&w 

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"The anti-illusionist project engaged by Clouds is that of dialectic materialism. There is virtually nothing on screen, in the sense of in screen. Obsessive repetition as materialist practice not psychoanalytical indulgence." - PG (Nov 1975) "Gidal's film Clouds establishes an awareness of position, a confrontation, and it takes you back to you from the far reaches of eternal space the confrontation as with you." - Steve Dwoskin, Independent Cinema (1970) Peter Gidal is both the chief theorist of the 1970s film avantgarde, and its most austere image-maker. Clouds , which depicts just sky and an occasional plane, keeps the viewer guessing as to what if anything is moving?

Summing Up 

Many filmmakers lamented the definition of this period of film as Structuralist, as they feared it would lead to an era of theory over practice. Structural film can often be seen as the typical and pretentious definition of experimental film and the successive decades did lead to over-theorising and conceptualism.Brakhage lamented that Structuralism was the worst thing to happen to Artists film.

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Overall similarities in works can be defined by

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Predetermination – Often camera positions, numbers of frames, exposure, repetition are predetermined) Focus on the structure of the film Interest in systems, maths, languages Flicker effect Looping Re-photography Fixed camera position

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