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Structural Film THE MOST SIGNIFICANT development in the American avant-garde cinema since the trend toward mythopoeic forms in the early 1960s was the emergence and development of what I have called the structural film. 1 The pattern which operated within the work of Maya Deren was echoed, as I have shown, in the entire thrust of the American avant-garde cinema between the late forties and the midsixties; on the simplest level it was a movement toward increased cinematic complexity. Film-makers such as Gregory Markopoulos, Sidney Peterson, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Peter Kubelka, to name a few of the most conspicuous, moved toward more condensed and more complex forms. Since the mid-sixties a number of filmmakers have emerged whose approach is quite different, although dialectically related to the sensibility of their predecessors. Michael Snow, George Landow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Ernie Gehr, and Joyce Weiland have produced a number of remarkable films apparently in the opposite direction of that 348 VISIONARY FILM formal thrust. Theirs is 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. The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer's perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen. Very seldom will one find all four characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements. What then would be the difference between the lyrical film I have described and the structural film? What would be their relationship? The lyrical film too replaces the mediator with the increased presence of the camera. We see what the film-maker sees; the reactions of the camera and the montage reveal his responses to his vision. In the opening sequence of Hammid and Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, we found the roots of firstperson cinematic consciousness. They filmed the first approach and exploration of the house from the point of view of the puzzled participant. But they immediately qualified — or mediated — that forceful opening by showing the figure of the protagonist in subsequent variations. In creating the lyrical film, Stan Brakhage accepted the limitations of that opening sequence as the basis for a new form. Out of the optical field and metaphors of the body's movement in the rocking gestures of the camera, he affirmed the film-maker as the lyrical first person. Without that achievement and its subsequent evolution, it would be difficult to imagine the flourishing of the structural film. The four techniques are the more obvious among many subtle changes from the lyrical film in an attempt to divorce the cinematic metaphor of consciousness from that of eyesight and body movement, or at least to diminish these categories from the predominance they have in Brakhage's films and theory. In Brakhage's art, perception is a special condition of vision, most often represented as an interruption of the retinal continuity (e.g., the white flashes of the early lyric films, the conclusion of Dog Star Man). In the structural cinema, however, apperceptive strategies come to the fore. It is cinema of the mind rather than the eye. It might at first seem that the most significant precursor of the structural film was Brakhage. But that is inaccurate. The achievements of Kubelka and Breer and before them the early masters of the graphic film did as much to inform this development. The structural film is in part a synthesis of the formalistic graphic film and the Romantic lyrical film. But this description is historically incomplete. By the mid-1960s the contributions of the lyrical and graphic cinema had been totally assimilated into avant-garde film-making. They were part of the vocabulary a young film-maker acquired at the screenings of the Film-Makers' Cinematheque or the Canyon Cinema Cooperative. They were in the air. The new film-makers were not responding to these forms STRUCTURAL FILM 349 dialectically, because they situated themselves within them, no matter which films they preferred and which they rejected. The major precursor of the structural film was not Brakhage, or Kubelka, or Breer. He was Andy Warhol. Warhol came to the avant-garde cinema in a way no one else had. He was at the height of his success in the most lucrative of American arts — painting. He was a fully developed artist in one medium, and he entered another, not as a dabbler, but with a total commitment. He immediately began to produce major cinema. For years he sustained that production with undiminished intensity, creating in that time as many major films as any of his contemporaries had in a lifetime; then, after completing The Chelsea Girls (1966), he quickly faded as a significant film-maker. Warhol began to take an interest in the avant-garde film in 1963 when it was at the height of the mythic stage. He quickly made himself familiar with the latest works of Brakhage, Markopoulos, Anger, and especially Jack Smith, who had a direct influence on him. On one level at least — and that is the only level of importance to us — Warhol turned his genius for parody and reduction against the American avant-garde film itself. The first film that he seriously engaged himself in was a monumental inversion of the dream tradition within the avant-garde film. His Sleep was no trance film or mythic dream but six hours of a man sleeping. (It was to have been eight hours long, but something went wrong.) At the same time, he exploded the myth of compression and the myth of the film-maker. Theorists such as Brakhage and Kubelka expounded the law that a film must not waste a frame and that a single film-maker must control all the functions of the creation. Warhol made the profligacy of footage the central fact of all of his early films, and he advertised his indifference to direction, photography, and lighting. He simply turned the camera on and walked away. In short, the set of concerns which I have associated with the Romantic heritage of the American avant-garde film were the object of Warhol's fierce indifference. Stephen Koch has something to say on this subject: The Duchampian game in which objects are aestheticized merely by turning to them with a certain glint in your eye does have continuing value, though not as the comical anti-art polemic so often ascribed to it . . . It is possible to understand this rather specialized aesthetic experience as a metaphor, in consciousness, for the perception of things at large, in which the unlike things compared and fused are the self and the world. ... It is a major modernist procedure for creating metaphors, and an antiromantic one, since it locates the world of art's richness not in Baudelaire's "Elsewhere" but in the here and now. At least almost. 350 VISIONARY FILM Warhol goes further. He wants to be transformed into an object himself, quite explicitly wants to remove himself from the dangerous, anxiety-ridden world of human action and interaction, to wrap himself in the serene fullness of the functionless aesthetic sphere. 2 Warhol defines his art "anti-romantically." Pop art, especially as he practiced it, was a repudiation of the processes, theories, and myths of Abstract Expressionism, a Romantic school. Warhol's earliest films showed how similar most other avant-garde films were and, to those looking closely, how Romantic. Yet whether or not the anti-Romantic stance can escape the dialectics of Romanticism is an open question. Koch seems to think it cannot: Transforming himself into the object celebrity, Warhol has made a commitment to the Baudelairean "resolution not to be moved" — an effort to ensconce himself in the aesthetic realm's transparent placenta, removed from the violence and emotions of the world's time and space. So Warhol turns out to be a romantic after all. 3 The roots of three of the four defining characteristics of the structural film can be found in Warhol's early works. He made famous the fixedframe in Sleep (1963), in which a half dozen shots are seen for over six hours. In order to attain that elongation, he used both loop printing of whole one-hundred-foot takes (23/4 minutes) and, in the end, the freezing of a still image of the sleeper's head. That freeze process emphasizes the grain and flattens the image precisely as rephotography off the screen does. The films he made immediately afterwards cling even more fiercely to the single unbudging perspective: Eat (1963), forty-five minutes of the eating of a mushroom; Empire (1964), eight continuous hours of the Empire State Building through the night into dawn; Harlot (1965), a seventy-minute tableau vivant with offscreen commentary; Beauty #2 (1965), a bed scene with off- and on-screen speakers lasting seventy minutes. Soon afterwards, he developed the fixed-tripod technique of reconciling stasis to camera movement. In Poor Little Rich Girl: Party Sequence (1965), Hedy (1966), and The Chelsea Girls (1966) he utilized camera movements, especially the zoom, from the pivot of an unmoving tripod without stopping the camera until the long roll had run out. Yet Warhol as a pop artist is spiritually at the opposite pole from the structural film-makers. His fixed camera was at first an outrage, later an irony, until the content of his films became so compelling to him that he abandoned the fixed camera for a species of in-the-camera editing. In the work of Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr, the camera is fixed in a mystical contemplation of a portion of space. Spiritually the distance between these poles cannot be reconciled. STRUCTURAL FILM 351 In his close analysis of Warhol's early work, Koch views these films with the kind of intensity and perspective that the structural film-makers brought to them. He sees in them the framework of an apperceptive cinema. In the end of Haircut (1963), in which someone in a barber's chair, after a long stare into the camera, breaks into unheard laughter as the final roll of film flares up in whiteness, he sees "the cinematic drama of the gaze, reaching its final and reflexive development": The moment is a gently felt turn of self-consciousness suggesting the gentlest of put-ons — a put-on not in the sense of artistic fraud but that implied by a kind of Prosperolike cadenza (if I may compare great to small), a breaking of the spell. With it we realize that, like all the other early films, Haircut is about the hypnotic nature of the gaze itself, about the power of the artist over it. 4 Koch sees that beyond the obvious aggressions and ironies of the early Warhol films — and perhaps because of them — there is a conscious ontology of the viewing experience. What the critic does not say is that these apperceptive mechanisms are latent or passive in Warhol's work. To the film-makers who first encountered these films the mid-sixties (those who were not threatened by them), these latent mechanisms must have suggested other conscious and deliberate extensions: that is, Warhol must have inspired, by opening up and leaving unclaimed so much ontological territory, a cinema actively engaged in generating metaphors for the viewing or rather the perceiving, experience. Thus the structural film is not simply an outgrowth of the lyric. It is an attempt to answer Warhol's attack by converting his tactics into the tropes of the response. To the catalogue of the spatial strategies of the structural film must be added the temporal gift from Warhol — duration. He was the first film-maker to try to make films which would outlast a viewer's initial state of perception. By sheer dint of waiting, the persistent viewer would alter his experience before the sameness of the cinematic image. Brakhage had made a very long film in The Art of Vision, but he was apologetic about its four hours; it had to be that long and not a minute longer, he would claim, to say what it had to say. Ken Jacobs had been bolder or more honest in describing the endless and perpetually disintegrating experience of his projected Star Spangled to Death. But that too would have been a perversely orchestrated experience from beginning to end. Warhol broke the most severe theoretical taboo when he made films that challenged the viewer's ability to endure emptiness or sameness. He even insisted that each silent film be shown at 16 frames per second although it was shot at 24. The duration of his films was one of slightly slowed motion. The great challenge, then, of the structural film became 352. VISIONARY FILM how to orchestrate duration; how to permit the wandering attention that triggered ontological awareness while watching Warhol films and at the same time guide that awareness to a goal. Not all of the structural films respond to the severe challenges of their form. Those instances of structural cinema in the filmgraphies of men who had worked successfully in other modes tend to use the frozen camera, loop printing, the flicker effect, and rephotography to open up new dimensions within the range of concerns that they pre-established in their earlier works. Just why, at approximately the same time, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Bruce Baillie, and Ken Jacobs began to extend their art in this direction is difficult to determine. Warhol's sudden shock-blow to the aesthetics of the avant-garde film was a factor, just as it was to film-makers like Michael Snow, Paul Sharks, George Landow and Hollis Frampton whose work largely lies within the domain of the structural film. Michael Snow, the dean of structural film-makers, utilizes the tension of the fixed frame and some of the flexibility of the fixed tripod in Wavelength. Actually it is a forward zoom for forty-five minutes, halting occasionally, and fixed during several different times so that day changes to night within the motion. A persistent polarity shapes the film. Throughout there is an exploration of the room, a long studio, as a field of space, subject to the arbitrary events of the outside world so long as the zoom is recessive enough to see the windows and thereby the street. The room gradually closes up its space (during the day, at night, on different film stocks for color tone, with filters, and even occasionally in negative) as the zoom nears the back wall and the final image of a photograph upon it — a photograph of waves. This is the story of the diminishing area of pure potentiality. The insight that space, and cinema by implication, is potential is an axiom of the structural film. In a note for the fourth International Experimental Film Competition where it won first prize, Snow described the film: Wavelength was shot in one week Dec. '66 preceded by a year of notes, thots, 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). The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot STRUCTURAL FILM 353 with a fixed camera from one end of an 80 foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street. This, the setting, and the action which takes place there are cosmically equivalent. The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by 4 human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine wave, which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per second) note to its highest (12000 c.p.s.) in 40 minutes. It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to offer. 5 He simplified the essential ambiguity in the film by describing one of the events as a death. The order of the actions is progressive and interrelated: a woman supervises the moving in of a bookcase; later she returns with another woman; they listen to the radio (a few phrases from "Strawberry Fields," pop culture's version of ontological skepticism) without talking; so far we are early in the film, the action appears random; midway through, a man breaks glass (heard offscreen) to get in an unseen door and climb the stairs (so we hear); he enters the studio and collapses on the floor, but the lens has already crossed half the room, and he is only glimpsed; the image passes over him. Late in the film, a woman returns, goes to the telephone, which, being at the far wall, is in full view, and in a dramatic moment which brings the previous events of the film into a narrative nexus, calls a man, "Richard," to tell him there is a dead body in the room. She insists that the man does not look drunk, but dead, and she says she will wait downstairs. She leaves. Had the film ended at that point, the image of death would have satisfied all the potential energy and anticipation built up through the film. But Snow prefers a deeper vision. We see a visual echo, a ghost image in black-and-white superimposition of discontinuous flashes of the woman entering, turning toward the body, telephoning, and leaving. Then the zoom continues, as the sound grows shriller, into the final image of the static sea pinned to the wall, a cumulative metaphor for the whole experience of the dimensional illusion in open space. The events of Wavelength occur first as discrete actions or irreducible performances. But the pivotal telephone call bridges the space between their self-enclosure and the narrative. Snow exposes his cinematic materials in Wavelength (even more so in his later film, whose title is the mark ) as momentary states within the work. The splice marks, flares of light, filters, different film stocks, and the focal interests of the room (the yellow chair against the far wall especially) create a calculus of mental and physical states, as distinguished from human events, which are as much a part of the body of the film as the actions I have dwelt upon. Things happen in the room of Wavelength, and things happen to the film of the room. 354 VISIONARY FILM Three strips from Michael Snow's Wavelength. The convergence of the two kinds of happening and their subsequent metamorphosis create for the viewer a continually changing experience of cinematic illusion and anti-illusion. Annette Michelson finds this film a metaphor for consciousness itself. Her eloquent paraphrase reveals its relation to phenomenology: We are proceeding from uncertainly to certainty, as our camera narrows its field, arousing and then resolving our tension of puzzlement as to its ultimate destination, describing in the splendid purity of its one, slow movement, the notion of the "horizon" characteristic of every subjective process and fundamental as a trait of intentionality. That steady movement forward, with its superimposition, its events passing into the field from behind the camera and back again beyond it, figures the view that "to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentially of recollections that can be awakened; and to every recollection there belongs as an horizon, the continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualized STRUCTURAL FILM 355 on my initiative, actively up to the actual Now of perception." [Husserl, Cartesian Meditations] And as the camera continues to move steadily forward, building a tension that grows in direct ratio to the reduction of the field, we recognize, with some surprise, those horizons as defining the contours of narrative, of the narrative form animated by distended temporality, turning upon cognition towards revelation. 6 The very unsteadiness of the forward movement and its perceptible tiny jolts forward confirm Michelson's analysis. One of Snow's most interesting tactics is the superimposition of the forthcoming, slightly forward position on the one we are looking at, giving us for the length of that superimposition a static image of the temporal process. Its most effective employment is at the very end of the film when, after a long-held wide shot, the photograph of the waves, surrounded by a border of the wall to which it is pinned, suddenly shares its screen space with a view within the photograph. We anticipate, and when the older layer dissolves we experience, the illusory depth of the receding line of sight extending over the static sea. The structural film — and Wavelength may be the supreme achievement of the form — has the same relationship to the earlier forms of the avantgarde film that Symbolism had to its source, Romanticism. The rhetoric of inspiration has changed to the language of aesthetics; Promethean heroism collapses into a consciousness of the self in which its very representation becomes problematic; the quest for a redeemed innocence becomes a search for the purity of images and the trapping of time. All this is as true of structural cinema as it is of Symbolism. For Snow, making a film is a matter of "stating the issues about film." In an interview he said: I thought that maybe the issues hadn't really been stated clearly about film in the same sort of way — now this is presumptuous, but to say — in the way Cezanne, say, made a balance between the colored goo that he used, which is what you see if you look at it that way, and the forms that you see in illusionary space. ... I was trying to do something very pure and about the kinds of realities involved. 7 And in a letter following up the interview he added: I mentioned Cezanne in a comment about the illusion/reality balance in art in painting. Tho many other painters have worked out their own beautiful solutions to this "problem," I think his was the greatest and is relevant because his work is representational. The complicated involvement of his perception of exterior reality, his creation of a work which both represents 35 6 VISIONARY FILM and is something, thus his balance of mind and matter, his respect for a lot of levels are exemplary to me. My work is representational. It is not very Cezannesque tho. Wavelength and are much more Vermeer (I hope). 8 Snow's direct confrontation with aesthetic endurance was One Second in Montreal (1969), where more than thirty still photographs of snowcovered parks are held on the screen for very long periods. The shape of the film is a crescendo-diminuendo of duration — although the first shot is held very long, the second stays even longer, and so on into the middle of the film, after which the measures begin to shorten. One Second in Montreal is one of several structural films that encroach upon the domain of the graphic cinema. It can be said that Wavelength bridges the distance between the subjective and the graphic poles by zooming the depth of the loft into the flatwork of the photograph. In One Second in Montreal Snow inverted the micro-rhythmic preoccupations of Kubelka and Breer by organizing his film around temporal differences that are barely perceptible because the attention of the viewer is permitted to wander and to change during the long holds. In (1969) and The Central Region (1971) the film-maker elaborated on the metaphor of the moving camera as an imitation of consciousness. The central fact of is velocity. The camera perpetually moving, leftright, right-left, passes a number of "events" which becomes metaphors in the flesh for the back-and-forth inflection of the camera. Each activity is a rhythmic unit, self-enclosed, and joined to the subsequent activity only by the fact that they occur in the same space. They provide a living scale for the speeds of camera movement, and they provide solid forms in the field of energy that the panning makes out of space. The overt rhythm of depends upon the speed at which the camera scans from side to side or up and down. Likewise, the overt drama of Wavelength derives from the closing-in of space, the action of the zoom lens. The specific content of both films is empty space or rooms. It is the nature and structure of the events within the rooms which differentiate the modes of the films. In the letter quoted earlier, Snow described , which he was completing at the time: As a move from the implications of Wavelength
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Running head: ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURE FILM

STRUCTURE FILM ANALYSIS

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STRUCTURE FILM ANALYSIS

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Film Analysis

The article tries to give a perspective on the development of films and gives a comparison
on some of the most influential people in the development of these film styles. There is the
crediting of the lyrical and structural film to figures such as Warhol. It tries to give an
understanding of how these filmmakers could have been influential and how some of the content
that they developed was vital to an understanding of the...


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