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The term was coined byP. Adams Sitney who noted that film artists had moved away from the complex and condensed forms of cinema practiced by such artists asSidney Peterson andStan Brakhage. "Structural film" artists pursued instead a more simplified, sometimes even predetermined art. The shape of the film was crucial, leaving the content peripheral. This term should not be confused with the literary and philosophical termstructuralism.[3]
The Flicker (1966) byTony Conrad produces a flicker effect with alternating solid black and white frames.
The earliest flicker films associated with structural film were made in 1966. Conrad, aminimalist musician, madeThe Flicker, where solid black and white frames are arranged in different frequencies to produce a flicker effect. Visual artistPaul Sharits made several flicker films—Ray Gun Virus,Piece Mandala/End War, and theFluxus filmWord 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.[4]
Snow'sWavelength (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 fromcolor gels, differentfilm stocks,superimpositions, andnegative images. It won the International Experimental Film Festival and was soon recognized as the movement's most significant work.[4][5]
By the late 1960s, the structural film movement coincided with a shift in experimental cinema away from1960s counterculture and toward closer affiliations with academia andfilm theory.[6][7] In 1969Film Culture magazine publishedP. Adams Sitney's essay "Structural Film", in which he coined the term.[8] He published two revisions in the following years.[4]Anthology Film Archives, opened in 1970, was established as an exhibition venue for avant-garde cinema and included structural films in its programming.[9]
The structural film movement was concurrent with a renaissance of theLibrary of Congress's Paper Print Collection. Since the early 1950s, the library had been makingfilm negatives from its archive ofpaper prints, used to establish copyright on early cinematic works until 1912. These new prints began to circulate starting in the mid to late 1960s.[10][11] 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.[10][12]
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 theLondon Film-Makers' Co-op, included David Crosswaite, Fred Drummond, John Du Cane, Mike Dunford, Gill Eatherley,Peter Gidal, Roger Hammond, Mike Leggett,Malcolm Le Grice, and William Raban.[13][14]
Gidal, Peter.Materialist Film Routledge; First Edition, Second Impression edition (Mar. 1989).
de Lauretis, Teresa and Stephen Heath (eds).The Cinematic Apparatus. Macmillan, 1980.
Habib, André (2017). "Drafts and Fragments: Reflections around Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection". In Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.).The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive.Amsterdam University Press.ISBN978-90-8964-996-6.
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