StructureFilm
Annotation of structural materialist film 1. Definition The term was coined by P. Adams Sotney. Filmmakers : Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (aka Owen Land), Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka had moved away from complex and condensed form of cinema practiced. The shape of the film was crucial the content peripheral. Characteristics: Fixed camera position (an apparently fixed framing) Flicker effect (strobing due to the intermittent of film) Loop printing Rephotography (off the screen JK machine)
Attempts to be non-illusionist. An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. the shape, take the place of the 'story' in narrative film. Then one would merely be substituting one hierarchy for another within the same system, a formalism for what is traditionally called content. This is an absolutely crucial point.'
Each film is a record (not a representation, not a reproduction) of its own making. Problematic of production versus reproduction Suffice it to say here that it is the core of meaning which differentiates illusionist from anti-illusionist film. Such film mitigates against dominant (narrative) cinema.
2. Devices The fimic device used to attemot to decipher both film’s material and film’s construct and each cinematic techniques produces. Attempt is primary to specific shape. Otherwise the discovery of shape (fetishizing shaoe or system) may become the theme or the narrative of the film. 3. production 4. represented content
The Structural/ Materialist film must minimise the content in its overpowering, imagistically seductive sense, in an attempt to get through this miasmic area of 'experience' and proceed with film as film.
5. film as material 6. the viewer
The mental activation of the viewer is necessary for the procedure of the film's existence. Each film is not only structural but also structuring. This is extremely important as each moment of film reality is not an atomistic, separate entity but rather a moment in a relativistic generative system in which one can't simply break down the experience into elements. The viewer is forming an equal and possibly more or less opposite 'film' in her/his head, constantly anticipating, correcting, re-correcting - constantly intervening in the arena of confrontation with the given reality, i.e. the isolated chosen area of each film's work, of each film's production.
7. dominant cinema In dominant cinema, a film sets up characters (however superficially deep their melodramas) and through identification and various reversals, climaxes, complications (usually in the same order) one aligns oneself unconsciously with one or more characters. These internal connections between viewer and viewed are based on systems of identification which demand primarily a passive audience, a passive viewer, one who is involved in the meaning that word has taken on within film-journalese, i.e. to be not involved, to get swept along through persuasive emotive devices employed by the film director. This system of cinematic functioning categorically rules out any dialectic. It is a cinematic functioning, it should be added, analogous on the part of the film director to that of the viewer, not to mention the producer, who is not a producer, who has no little investment in the staking out of the economics of such repression. What some of the more self-defined 'left-wing' directors would rationalise in terms of dialectic are merely cover-ups for identification, selling the same old wares, vi: Antonioni and the much less talented Bertolucci, Pasolini, Losey, not to mention committed right-wing directors. Thus, if a character is somewhat more complex, or if the acting is of a higher order, or if the lighting cameraman does most of the work, then the director rationalises the work which would seem to imply that he is as taken in by the phantasy as the viewer. Whether he is or not (there are few she's in such a position) is in fact irrelevant. The ideological position is the same.
8. dialectic 9. identification
Narrative is an illusionistic procedure, manipulatory, mystificatory, repressive. The repression is that of space, the distance between the viewer and the object, a repression of real space in favour of the illusionist space. The repression is, equally importantly, of the in-film spaces, those perfectly constructed continuities. The repression is also that of time. The implied lengths of time suffer compressions formed by certain technical devices which operate in a codified manner, under specific laws, to repress (material) film time.
10. narrative and deconstruction A study is urgently needed on the theme of narrative versus non-narrative form and on the inadequacy of the mechanistic deconstruction approach which ends up illustrating rather than being, which ends up static, time denying, posited as exemplary rather than relative, contradictory, motored into filmic, durational transformation through dialectic procedures.
11. art movements
12. reading duration
13. distance
14. aspects of time
15. conclusion