Reading Response 5: Due Oct. 27 @ 5 p.m.

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?

The avant garde of Deren, Brakhage, and Anger was a more complex and dense form of avant garde. The structural film is a cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified.

Avant-garde according to Sitney is the representation of the human mind in all its depth, especially the minds of the artists, whose powers of imagination and vision enable them to see the conflicts raging within themselves and between them and society.

Structural film is seen as a development out of the formal film. Structural film develops from lyrical film, like lyrical film developed from the trance film. The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of structural film:

Fixed camera position

The Flicker effect

Loop printing

Rephotography off the screen

If avant garde film is the reproduction of the human mind, then the structural film approaches the condition of meditation and evokes a state of consciousness without mediation; that is, with the sole mediation of the camera.

What is meant by “apperceptive strategies”?

the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience. In Brakhage’s art, perception is a special condition of vision, most often represented as an interruption of the retinal continuitu. However in structural cinema, apperceptive strategies come is the cinema of the mind rather than the eyes.

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.

The central metaphor would be the human mind and consciousness for structural film. If avant garde lyrical, myth, and trance is displaying human tendencies, the structural is about the mind.

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

When Warhol was making films, he was indifferent to direction, photography and lighting. He could turn the camera on and walked away. He entered the film world with total commitment. He took the knowledge he studied from Brakhage, Anger, and Smith, and built upon the simplicity of expressions of the mind. Warhol’s Empire uses 3 out of the 4 characteristics of 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:

Warhol made his films simple using static camera, loop printing, and rephotography (frozen frame) but the what the film was trying to convey as a structural film is of the mind. Simple – in Sleep he records for hours a man sleeping. Complex – why was he recording this man? What is this man dreaming about? Is this what I look like when I’m sleeping?

a. Why does Sitney call Warhol anti-Romantic?

Warhol advertised his indifference to direction, photography and lighting. It is anitormantic since it locates the world of art’s richness not in Bauldelaire’s “Elsewhere” but in the here and now. I could expand on the “here and now” statement, thinking about Vinyl and wanting the cast to read cue cards, messing up the actors on purpose, and keeping a lot of the “mistakes”. Warhol wants to be transformed into an object himself.

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

Warhol as a pop artist is spiritually the opposite from the structural film-makers. Warhol eventually abandoned the fixed camera for a type of in-the-camera-editing. For Snow and Gehr, the camera is fixed in a mystical comtemplation of a portion of space, which Warhol broke away from.

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?

I feel like it means there are so many ways to view the experience that Warhol provides. The reflexive qualities of something as simple as Haircut or staring at the Empire building for 8 hours. This relates back to Structural film in the human nature of getting a haircut or touring a city and looking up at the building, or even going to a museum and staring at a picture. Structural is film is about the human mind and engaging with it, which Warhol busted wide open, even with his Screen Tests.

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?

Warhol’s film relate to the avant-garde trance/myth/lyrical through his creativity and challenging the mind while focusing on human tendencies but take it a step further with the long takes and close interactions with what is being filmed. He is focused on individual items. He was the first filmmaker to try to make films which would outlast a viewer’s initial state of perception. His films challenged the viewer’s ability to endure emptiness or sameness.

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?

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).

The films of the minimal strain apparently violate the principle of optimal relevance.

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

The critic interprets the film as presenting itself to the direct perception of the viewer, developed by Annette Michelson.

For Michelson, Snow’s work is the paradigm case of the link between cinema and consciousness.

Snow’s One Second in Montreal is thought of by Michelson as “the flow of time is somehow inscribed in the filmic image, immediately given, perceptible in our experience of it”.

Also, Wavelength, it is suggested that the film represents consciousness as well as directly presenting it (zooming?, slow motion) The action of the camera is the action of the consciousness.

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

Derived from the aesthetics of composer and teacher John Cage. Cage advocated blurring the lines between “art” and “life”. The art-process schema, the production of an innovative film is seen as a demonstration of the rigidity of the conventional process of filmmaking.

With such examples as Brakhage Mothlight, the viewer can recognize the dual nature of cinema as simultaneously an artifact and performance. One would have to visually look at the film strip for further research. There are four potential causes that direct the attention away from the screen and to the physical object in the projector:

· A high rate of information change on the screen

· Poor legibility

· Cognizance of the film’s facture

· An intuition that a look at the film strip would help to explain the other three features.

The viewer watches the film, then wonders how the filmmaker did it.

The strategy of including a wide range of materials rests on two aesthetic principles:

· Most material in our everyday world has aesthetic value

· Removing the aesthetic from the object produced and affixing it to the process that produces it (wondering how the filmmaker did it)

This leads to the nature of the film process, they want the viewer to be less susceptible to the films that hide the processes of production.

Side note: “Formal” film – metaphorical association of the earlier avant-garde.

Mothlight considered a political act that resists authority.

For Arthur, the Structural film is an act of aesthetic and political resistance.

Sitney views avant-garde as apolitical and evolutionary.

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

Any film image with limited depth cues is interpreted as an assertion of inherent qualities of the film medium, derived from the work of Clement Greenberg. Any element that does not produce a three-dimensional space, is read as a demonstration of the inherent flatness. Painting is pigment on a flat surface, and according to Greenberg should only be this.