Sitney, “Structural Film”
Visionary Film, Chapter 12

You may find it helpful to read the first few pages of the other assigned reading for this week (James Peterson, “Rounding Up the Usual Suspects”) before tackling this chapter, focusing particularly on p. 72-76. Read that overview, which will review key concepts from the first half of this class, then tackle this chapter and answer the following questions.

1. How is structural film different from the tradition of Deren/Brakhage/Anger, and what are its four typical characteristics? What is meant by “apperceptive strategies”?

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apperceptive

Sitney writes that structural film 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 importance of the shape takes full reign, and it's actual content is fairly minimalistic. The four typical characteristics are as follows:

1. Fixed Camera Position

2. The Flicker Effect

3. Loop Printing

4. Rephotography Off-Screen

Like the lyrical film, there is a shift away from any on-screen protagonist and instead the focus is on the camera. Sitney even cites Brakhage's creation of the lyrical film as a necessary building block for structural film to have emerged, though structural film has less to do with representing the personal vision of the filmmaker and more to do with representing the mind of the filmmaker. That is what is meant by apperceptive strategies, it's about the subsequent images attaining a representative quality to the consciousness of the filmmaker.

2. If Brakhage’s cinema emphasized metaphors of perception, vision, and body movement, what is the central metaphor of structural film? Hint: It fits into Sitney’s central argument about the American avant-garde that we have discussed previously in class.

Well, I think I touched on it briefly with my previous answer, but I believe it's essentially the idea of the structural film as a metaphor for how we think and feel (note: our own stream of consciousness) instead of how we see see. They are both linked with perception, but structural film is more internalized; it's "mental perception" as the dictionary link cites for the term apperceptive.

3. Why does Sitney argue that Andy Warhol is the major precursor to the structural film?

He seems to using Warhol as a stand-in for the catalyst of this movement because of Warhol's "genius for parody and reduction" which he levels against Avant-Garde film, destroying the "myth of compression and the myth of the filmmaker". He stood as a counter point to the modernism of Avant-Garde filmmakers up to that point, stripping the film down to its most essential elements. For instance, the fixed camera and the minimalism of Warhol's early films can be easily linked to the aesthetics of the structural film.

4. The trickiest part of Sitney’s chapter is to understand the similarities and differences between Warhol and the structural filmmakers. He argues that Warhol in a sense is anti-Romantic and stands in opposition to the visionary tradition represented by psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical films. But for Sitney’s central argument to make sense, he needs to place structural film within the tradition of psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical films. Trace the steps in this argument by following the following questions:

a. Why does Sitney call Warhol anti-Romantic?

Warhol's post-modernist repudiation of the concept of "art" and "the artist" put him in direct contention with the abstract expressionism movement (ie the importance of the artist, the process of art, etc) which is essentially a "Romantic school" of thought.

b. Why does Sitney argue that spiritually the distance between Warhol and structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow or Ernie Gehr cannot be reconciled?

The content of Warhol's films became more important than the form, leading to in-the-camera editing. With Snow and Gehr, the camera remains fixed, and the film focuses instead on a meditation on a "portion of space".

c. What is meant by the phrase “conscious ontology of the viewing experience”? How does this relate to Warhol’s films? How does this relate to structural films?

The phrase is used to call attention to how films make the audience aware of the actual process of existence or the nature of "being" that they/we experience. With Warhol's films, Sitney argues that this process is passive, but Warhol manages to tap into this feeling through the length of his film, specifically through the length of a gaze where we become aware of the pure nature of "gazing" as an essential element to how we exist. With structural films, they take this idea of how the audiences perception changes through duration and runs with it, though they add several other techniques such as freeze frames and rephotography to extend and alter the meditation of an image, leading to these ontological revelations.

d. Why does Sitney argue that structural film is related to the psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical tradition, and in fact responds to Warhol’s attack on that tradition by using Warhol’s own tactics?

Essentially, as I understand it from my reading, it taps into the ideas provoked by Warhol and attempts to resolve them through the form of filmmaking. Sitney sees structural film as an extension of lyrical film, where the ontological awareness provoked by Warhol's films is used within structural film to lend itself to a more realized "goal", an orchestration to some artistic end rather than a parodic statement of filmmaking itself.

5. On p. 352 Sitney begins an analysis of the Wavelength rooted in conveying the experience of watching it; this style of analysis is admittedly hard to read without having seen the film (we’ll discuss this style of analysis in class). Try your best so that you can answer the following question related to p. 354: What metaphor is crucial to Sitney’s and Annette Michelson’s interpretation of Michael Snow’s Wavelength?

The metaphor is consciousness itself, specifically how perceive things and those perceptions are linked to our recollections, a vast "horizon" of potential associations that can be linked anything. We piece these elements together cognitively until we are brought to a conclusion or "revelation". I'm not sure what the book means by the "view within the photograph" but as I understand the passage, it seems to be saying that the process of the room changing by both its seemingly separate events that culminate into one narrative and the way that we see the room itself shapes how we perceive our external world and come to specific thoughtful conclusions. It's of our cognitive process going down many dark and winding corridors, often unsteadily as the camera itself conveys, before we arrive at the epiphany of understanding.

For the rest of the chapter, focus on the discussions of the following films:

Paul Sharits: T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

George Landow: Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.

James Peterson, “Rounding Up the Usual Suspects”
[Found in "Kreul Articles" folder on your flash drives]

The following questions ask about three reading strategies for the minimal strain of the avant-garde. They are all previewed on p. 77. Your answers should incorporate details from the subsequent discussions of them (see page numbers in the parentheses).

6. What is the reading strategy associated with the “phenomenological schema” (include details and examples from 77-80)?

You read the film as a presentation to the "direct perception of the viewer" or as "the embodiment of some fundamental feature of consciousness".

Michealson, who was the chief proponent of this schema, analyzed Snow's work as a move to "explore the nature of consciousness", where he specifically is interested in how we see, remember, record, compose, and so on. She also cites Brakhage's films as trying to "present itself perceptually, all at once, to resist observation and cognition". There are three components that are part of this schema put to practice. First, if the passage is much longer than it takes the audience to understand what is on screen, and it "does not manipulate the temporal dimension of the action" than it is to be read as the passage of time (ex: One Second in Montreal). Second, aspects of the film are meant to be read as a metaphor for some contingent of how the mind works (ex: Wavelengths). Third, "aspects of the film are interpreted as metaphorical representations of cinema itself".

7. What is the reading strategy associated with the “art-process schema” (include details and examples from 80-85)?

You read the film as a "demonstration of the rigidity of the conventional process of filmmaking".

Paul Arthur uses Mothlight as an example of how a new viewer is engaging with film as an inspection of the process of the artistry as well as the final result. This is attained by four causes:

1. High rate of information change on screen

2. Poor legibility

3. Cognizance of film's fracture

4. An intuition that a look at the film strip would explain first three features

In this way, the film attempts to "destroy the illusionism of art" by examining the formal process, the individual aspects of the film itself.

8. What is the reading strategy associated with the “anti-illusion schema” (include details and examples from 85-90)?

You read the film where if it has "limited depth cues" and is "purging itself of all qualities not essential to the medium", than it is "intepreted as an assertion of the inherent qualities of the film medium".

Hanhardt essentially speaks of a particular brand of reasoning where the illusionary depth of film is seen as having negative connotations which the flatness of the image invoked by many Avant-Garde artists aspire to avoid or even call attention to by juxtaposing the two against each other.