Structural Sixties
"Structural film was an experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Sitney identified four formal characteristics common in Structural films, but all four characteristics are not usually present in any single film:
It has been noted by George Maciunas that these characteristics are also present in Fluxus films." - Wikipedia
"What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black. Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine. – Jonas Mekas. MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter's struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being." – Ken Kelman. Brussels International; Film Festival, 1964 Spoleto Film Festival, 1966
"Paul Sharits was one of the primary innovators of Structural/avant-garde cinema beginning with his Fluxus-affiliated film pieces of the early 1960s and continuing through color "flicker" films and larger multi-projection installations, radically pioneering the shift of film works into gallery and museum spaces." - ubu.com
"Paul Sharits was one of the primary innovators of Structural/avant-garde cinema beginning with his Fluxus-affiliated film pieces of the early 1960s and continuing through color "flicker" films and larger multi-projection installations, radically pioneering the shift of film works into gallery and museum spaces. " - ubu.com
"The «imperfections» of filmmaking, which are normally suppressed, are at the core of a work that uses a brief loop made from a Kodak colour test. «The dirtiest film ever made,» is one of the earliest examples of the film material dictating the film content. It may seem minimal, but keep looking – there's so much going on." - ubu.com
"The Flicker is a 1966 experimental film by Tony
Conrad. The film consists of only 5 different frames: a warning frame, two title
frames, a black frame, and a white frame. It changes the rate at which it
switches between black and white frames to produce stroboscopic effects.
Conrad spent several months designing the film before shooting it in a matter of
days. He produced and distributed The Flicker with the help of Jonas Mekas. The
film is now recognized as a key work of structural filmmaking." - ubu.com
"Wavelength is a 45 minute film by Canadian experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow, known for building his reputation upon publicity of the film. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema,[1] it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967,[2] and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film",[3] calling Snow "the dean of structural filmmakers."[4]
Wavelength is often listed as one of the greatest underground, art house and Canadian films ever made. It was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century.[5] The film has been designated and preserved as a masterwork by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.[6] In a 1969 review of the film published in Artforum, Manny Farber describes Wavelength as "a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become The Birth of a Nation in Underground films, is a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt. For all of the film's sophistication (and it is overpowering for its time-space-sound inventions) it is a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor... it is probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence." - Wikipedia
