WEEK 6 History of Experimental Cinema: Post-War North American

History of Experimental Cinema: Post-War North American



The Structural Film

Emblematic of Algorithmic filmmaking: the capture or editing of material to a schema, plan or equation

  • Decide upon a plan or an equation in advance to creative decisions and those creative decisions conform to the preconceived plan

  • Eg. the filmmaker decides in advance to use every odd frame from one sequence of film and every even frame from another sequence of film to assemble a new film which alternates between the odd and even frames

    • Alternation between even and odd is the algorithm the film follows

  • “movement towards increased cinematic complexity” but away from the thematic complexity of the lyrical film” typified by Brakahage


Categorized by its shape and concept; five basic characteristics include:


  1. A fixed camera position

  2. The flicker effect

  • Recognition of the nature of the film projector has that flicker quality

  1. Loop printing

  • Idea that we can use optical printers so filmmakers can print material in duplicates so they can splice together footage and use loops of footage 

  1. Re-photography off the screen

  • Project material onto a wall and manipulate the surface that they’re projected on. Eg. Play with coloured gels, playing with texture

  • Shoot the material of the screen and make a dupe, play with colour gels, manipulate the surface of the projection plane

  1. Duration

  • You have to sit with the film for as long as the filmmaker intends for the audience to watch it

SCREENING: The Flicker (1966) - Tony Conrad

  • The first structural film

  • Consists of alternating black and white film images following a warning and a title card

  • Light and dark sequences alternate to changing rhythms and produce stroboscopic and flickering effects; while viewing these, they cause optic impressions which simulate colors and forms

  • Plays with the optical nerves of our eyes to create optical illusions like colour

  • Example of cameraless cinema, dealing with only leaders


Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

  • Widely accepted as the world’s most famous “pop” artist through the 1960s and 70s, Warhol spent much of the 1960s pursuing filmmaking

    • With the help of collaborators, he made over 50 films in the mid-Sixties before shifting his focus elsewhere

  • Becomes enamoured with the camera as a medium, has an interpretation with time that painting does not

    • Uses the camera as a way to explain time, can you make a film that lasts longer than the ability of the audience to perceive it

  • Working primarily with 16mm black-and-white film, Warhol developed a passive approach to filmmaking that was completely at-odds with his peers and slowly migrated from experimental / nonfiction approaches to narrative filmmaking (with the assistance of Paul Morrissey)

  • Significantly, his interest in the mechanical aspects of motion picture photography gave rise to his exploration of time and duration as features of cinematic experience and prompted further experiments that largely fall under the category of structural filmmaking — can you make a film that lasts longer than the viewer’s perception?


SCREENING: Empire (1965) - Andy Warhol

  • 8hr footage of the empire state building

  • Only 1hr of the film is digitized

  • Example of structural cinema



Michael Snow (1928-2023)

Trained at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Snow is a painter, sculptor and filmmaker

  • Living in New York City for much of the 1960s with his partner and fellow artist and filmmaker, Joyce Weiland, his films from this period are now widely recognizes as foundational examples of the structural form


SCREENING: Wavelength (1967) - Michael Snow

  • Understood to be one of the great works of the cinematic avant-garde and perhaps the defining work of the structural film movement

  • The film focuses on the technical apparatus of the zoom but, in combination with off-screen sound and sequences of superimposition, reveals itself to be preoccupied with space and time

    • Annette Michelson describes the film as proceeding from “uncertainty to certainty”

  • In structuring the entire film on zoom, some important aspects of the film include:

    • sound and the soundtrack, moments of sync sound

    • superimposition, 

    • re-photography, 

    • experimenting with different film stocks (different colour and tonality), 

    • accepting stocks that are expired

    • Distance that the film travels is about 80ft

    • Shot out of sequence, had to execute a mathematical plan to make it seem like a continuous zoom throughout the film 

  • A body of work conforming to this structural approach

    • Lyrical is distinct from structural



Leslie Thorton (b. 1951)

  • trained as a painter and visual artist at both Tufts University and SUNY Buffalo

    • earned an MFA in painting before studying film at graduate school (MIT)

  • studied under the supervision of experimental film luminaries Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, and Stan Brakhage, among others

  • her first film, X-TRACTS, was completed in Buffalo while she was still primarily a painter and is considered a key work bridging two successive waves of the experimental tradition

    • an experiment in autobiography

    • the film is a complex work integrating images and a soundtrack structured upon a mathematical schema which cuts-up Thornton reading from her high school diary


SCREENING: X-TRACTS (1975)