THE STRUCTURALISTS
Sunday 8 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

The history and development of the Structural movement was defined and discussed at length in P. Adams Sitney’s essay Structural Film (Film Culture #47, 1969), which was subsequently expanded for his book Visionary Film (1974). The historical details proposed in this paper drew defiant responses from Peter Kubelka (claiming that he was the originator and master of the Structural tendency) and George Maciunas (who offered a Flux diagram proposing that the form was an extension of ideas from other artistic disciplines, particularly citing Fluxus as a major influence). Sitney cites the new form as “a radical shift of aesthetic tactics” from the majority of films by the likes of Markopoulos, Brakhage, Anger and Kubelka in which visual (and aural) information is rapidly projected at the viewer. It is accurate to say that Structural Film is similar to conceptual or minimal art, in that the films are usually realisations of a predefined plan. It may also be seen as the antithesis of the developments of many experimental films up to that time. With Structural Film, time (and duration) is introduced as a major factor. In addition, the use of the fixed camera position (and tripod) was in contrast with the freedom of the camera, which had been liberated and hand-held by the ‘underground’ filmmakers. The most obvious recent precursors of the Structural trend were the early works of Andy Warhol (not only the static and prolonged film like Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) but also his later use of the zoom and rapid fixed panning) and the films of Peter Kubelka (in which a complex schemata was constructed and then followed). The innovative work of Robert Breer, Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs may also claim some influence on the initial developments of the new movement.

In the Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalogue #1 (1969) George Landow stated “My films are not intended as entertainment or easy viewing. They do not attempt to engage the spectator on an emotional level. A showing for the wrong type of audience could be commercially disastrous, though not necessarily without benefit.” His first 16mm film was Fleming Faloon (1963-64), a precursor to the Structural movement in which layers of images are built up and occasionally presented side by side as unsplit 8mm frames. Landow subsequently made an 8mm film Fleming Faloon Screening (1963-64) which showed people in a room watching the movie. In the 1980s he withdrew Fleming Faloon from distribution and personally prefers not to show it now.

FLEMING FALOON
George Landow, USA, 1963-64, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“In the history of painting, in Flanders, the Flemings were among the artists to develop portraiture to a very high degree. It was very illusionistic painting. The film also deals with illusion. The attempt was to bring people back to the realization that they are still looking at a flat surface with the illusion of depth. And that leads to the realization that the illusion of depth is in itself a ‘reality’. In other words, ideally the person who saw Fleming Faloon could now assign reality to anything at will – he was in control. And this control was the result of realizing that everything – or, if you prefer, nothing – is real. It is this ideal situation that forms the basis of the film.” (George Landow interviewed by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture #47, 1969)

George Landow’s next film was developed out of a loop called This Film Will Be Interrupted After Ten Minutes by a Commercial, which actually was interrupted after ten minutes by a Dutch Masters TV commercial for cigars featuring Rembrandt’s painting Town Council. With Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles Etc. (1965-66), Landow used the same basic visual material and was one of the first artists to use a loop, together with other important innovations, as one of the primary elements of a complete film. His found fragment of a standard ‘China Girl’ Kodak test strip was split down the middle and optically printed with the sprocket holes down the centre. The loop degenerates and collects dust as it progresses. Theoretically, the film is still developing as it gets dirtier each time it is projected. Bardo Follies (1967) also concerns the degeneration of a repeating loop. It was later cut down from forty-five to seven minutes and retitled Diploteratology. In The Film That Rises To The Surface Of Clarified Butter (1968), Landow uses a cycle of loops to depict animations that have a life of their own. Institutional Quality (1969) (later redeveloped as New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environment Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops, 1976) and What’s Wrong With This Picture? (1972) invite the participation, and test the logic, of the audience. Hollis Frampton also pursued this concept, as did Robert Nelson in his classic Bleu Shut (1970). Another film, Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970) exposes and confuses the distance between the film and the viewer. Landow has continued to make challenging work including No Sir, Orison (1975) and On The Marriage Broker Joke As Cited By Sigmund Freud In Wit And Its Relation To The Unconscious, Or Can The Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1980). In the 1980s, he changed his name to Owen Land and now distributes his work under that name. He is currently completing a 35mm feature-length film called Undesirables.

FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES, EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES ETC.
George Landow, USA, 1965-66, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min

“The original image is used by the Kodak company to test color reproduction. It went through many different operations of cutting, re-joining and printing until it got the way it is now with sprocket holes printed in the middle. When it was printed into the final version I told the lab to leave the dirt on because the dirt was quite interesting. Somehow it seemed part of the image. The film is experienced as a composition of images, letters and other elements which is more or less constant. Although it is never exactly the same from frame to frame, the changes are so subtle compared to the changes that normally take place within a film that people tend to see no change (aside from the blinking eye). In other words, it is on a completely different level of expectation. Ideally it would fit into a situation where the spectator is ambulatory.” (George Landow interviewed by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture #47, 1969)

Michael Snow is a prolific filmmaker whose work investigates time and spacial relationships. Wavelength (1967) was his fourth film and remains his most popular. The description of Wavelength as a continuous slow zoom across an empty loft space does not indicate the complexity of the film, which includes use of superimposition, negative images, filters, transition between day and night and scripted events. It is also interesting to note that the film was not shot in sequence and Snow actually began shooting with the middle section. After exposing the zoom in Wavelength, he investigated the fixed pan in (Back And Forth) (1968-69). This film takes place in a classroom and again contains acted scenarios. The panning becomes quite violent and the film becomes a study of velocity. His next major work, La Region Centrale (1970-71), involved building an automatic camera that could rotate 360 degrees in all directions, which was positioned on a completely barren plateau in Northern Canada where it made a three hour long film of its environment. An even longer film, “Rameau’s Nephew” By Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) By Wilma Schoen (1974) starts out as a conventional narrative but then the soundtrack begins to slip out of sync and over the course of four and a half hours, Snow systematically deconstructs the idea of a sound cinema and leaves it to the viewer to try and make sense of the confused information. His other films include New York Eye And Ear Control (1964), Presents (1980) and So Is This (1982). Michael Snow is also a respected artist, sculptor and musician.

WAVELENGTH
Michael Snow, Canada-USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 45 min

“Wavelength was shot in one week Dec ‘66 preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May ‘67. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of ‘illusion’ and ‘fact’, all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).” (Statement by Michael Snow, 1967)

Hollis Frampton is known for introducing a new mode of syntax and grammar into the cinema. Much of his work is constructed so that the viewer may attempt to deduce the systems that produced them, and many people find his films too theoretical. From a background in art and photography, Frampton began to work in film with a series of portraits brought together as Manual Of Arms (1966). Surface Tension (1968) and Lemon (for Robert Huot) (1969) are his most successful early works. Artificial Light (1969) repeats a simple loop twenty times and each time it is visually treated in a different manner. His next film, Zorns Lemma (1970), is a masterpiece which uses the twenty-four letter Roman alphabet as the basis for a new filmic system of language. He then made the seven part Hapax Legomena (1971-72), which includes nostalgia (1973), one of his most enjoyable and accessible films. Around this time, Frampton conceived of Magellan (1972-1980) as “a 36 hour film, organized and meant to be viewed calendrically over the course of 371 days.” Many sections of this epic cycle were completed but it was left unfinished when he died in 1984. He left behind hundreds of films, together with a huge amount of photographs and writings.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, silent, 25 min

“Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait shots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lap-dissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon. There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. That chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis; his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formulae. Usually the logic he invokes is that of a paradox.” (from the essay Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney, 1969, reprinted in The Film Culture Reader, 1970)

In the late 1960s Standish Lawder made Corridor (1968-70), which perfectly marries the hypnotic organ music of Terry Riley with a succession of differently treated movements down the corridor of the title. Using positive/negative images, varied exposures and superimposition he exposed the grain of the film and the depth of the shots. Necrology (1969-70) was a twelve minute continuous view of tired commuters on an escalator that Hollis Frampton described as “without doubt, the sickest joke I’ve ever seen on film.” With Runaway (1969), Lawder took four seconds of a commercial animation called The Fox Hunt and made a continuous loop that was then rephotographed and sequentially abstracted so that the cartoon dogs could not escape the frame. Lawder made other films, including Intolerance (Abridged) (date unknown) for which he optically double printed every twenty-sixth frame of the D.W. Griffith epic, thus retaining the essence of the narrative but reducing the running time from over two hours to ten minutes.

RUNAWAY
Standish Lawder, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

“Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques in a small film called Runaway, in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop motion, reverse printing, video scanning, and other techniques, by manipulating a few seconds of an old cartoon, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly, funny cartoon. He elevates the cartoon imagery to the visual strength of an old Chinese charcoal drawing.” (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1970)

Before developing his own entirely new film form, Barry Gerson spent four years working on the expanded narrative film The Neon Rose (1960-64). After a couple more fruitless years developing other more commercial films he changed direction to pursue his own vision with Automatic Free Form Film (1968), completely abandoning sound to investigate perspective, light and the shapes of objects. In 1969 he began a series of Groups in which two to four short films are combined. Group V (1970) consists of three short films of equal length, and each is a single shot of a minimal space. All of Gerson’s films are meticulously crafted and precisely composed. His highly developed technique forces the viewer to comprehend what is being seen and how the image was created.

GROUP V: ENDURANCE / REMEMBERANCE / METAMORPHOSIS
Barry Gerson, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min

“I feel a strong sense of communication between my being and the objects and elements which I film. These objects and elements are alive – I feel their energy – whether they are created by man or nature they live by virtue of their chemical and energy relationships which are further determined by their shapes. It is a monumental task to place one object next to another – to place one image next to another. My films, as objects, have a life of their own once they leave my hands and it becomes an increasingly strange experience, as time passes, to see these films and know that they contain a part of me which I have willingly given up. So I am dying a little bit with the creation of each film, I am dying a joyously slow death filled with the wonder of what I see.” (A statement by Barry Gerson, Film Culture #63-64, 1977)

After making several 8mm films which he describes as being in the style of early Brakhage, Ernie Gehr switched to a 16mm camera that was usually kept on a tripod. He developed a system using f-stops in an attempt to articulate on film a similar idea to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic music. Wait (1968) was his first film with this new aesthetic and others followed in the next two years. Serene Velocity (1970) is entirely composed of a sequence of stills which each last for four frames. Gehr filmed an empty academic corridor using the mid-point of the zoom as his starting point. He filmed four frames at 50mm, four at 55mm and then alternated between the two depths for sixty feet of film before increasing to 50mm and 60mm, 45mm and 60mm and so on. Over the course of the film this gives the impression of movement in both directions and opens out the corridor while keeping a flat image. Gehr continues to make groundbreaking films which often meditate on the world from odd perspectives. Later films include Shift (1973-74), Table (1976), Untitled, Part One, 1981 (1981) and Side / Walk / Shuttle (1991).

SERENE VELOCITY
Ernie Gehr, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, silent, 23 min

“Serene Velocity is so emphatic of means it almost spills over into being a satire on single-minded concern with pictoral plasticity. It’s so perfect it inspires hilarity (not audience participation “I got it. You got it ?” giggles, but high, very high up in the brain): it’s divine! and the divine is too much. Only its whopping aesthetic transcendence saves it from being merely the definitive movie illustration of the great, contradictory 2 / 3D reciprocal reinforcement. It is surely the most intellectually and emotionally accessible, to general film audiences, of the the new purist works; if you’re in visual range you’re hit, no need to tolerate culture here.” (Ken Jacobs on Serene Velocity, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

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