Structural-Materialist Film

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Very often experimental film puts our standard communicational expectations to test (it suffices to remember Stan Brakhage’s visions, Mihovil Pansini’s coincidences or the abstract dance of shapes and colours of Len Lye) and explores perceptional potentials of a viewer who has to cope with the break from standard relations. However, this does not mean that our understanding of experimental film is different from our understanding of any other type of film or other genres. The cognitive approach understands that everything must be based on our cognitive capacities. In the cognitive film theory the basis is the perception of the film so, on the example of experimental film, I will try to define some cognitive problems which are dealt with by way of specific standardized film procedures. I will also try and clarify the specific perceptive purpose to be achieved by way of these procedures. As an example, I will use the films by Ivan Martinac (Rondo, 1962), fixation films from 1960s (term coined by Dušan Stojanović) such as Tomislav Gotovac’ The Straight Line (1964), structural film (Larry Gottheim’s Four Shadows, 1978) and materialistic films (Vladimir Petek’s Encounters, 1963; Peter Gidal’s Clouds, 1969).

Hanna B. Hölling looks at the relationships between blackness, mediality and intermediality, as well as at materiality and physicality and claims that the work ‘teleport[s] us into a realm in which black wanders between media, and perform an aesthetic of change’.

『인문예술잡지 F』 제9호. 2013년 봄호
"일반적으로
게이트는 ‘공간으로 진입하기 위한 통로’이다. 영사기 속 게이트는 필름 스트립(film strip)의 연속된 프레임이 한 프레임씩 안정적으로 넘어가도록 고정시켜주고, 프레임의 경계를 형성한다. 스크린에 영사되는 이미지의 경계, 다시 말해 이미지의 범위와 비율이 게이트에 의해 결정된다. 영사기 속 게이트에 이상이 있거나 혹은 게이트를 제거할 때 발생하는 기계적 오류를 우리는 “필름이 흐른다.”라고 한다. 영사기 게이트는 극장에서 영화 공간으로 관객의 의식이 진입하는 통로 역할을 하며, 우리가 볼 수 있는 것과 없는 것, 또는 보아야 할 것과 보지 말아야 할 것을 규정한다. 호르헤 로렌소의 말처럼 ‹필름 누아르›에서 프레임의 경계는 결국 관객에 의해 결정되는 것이다."

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Anglo-American experimental cinema pursued a shift of artistic strategies marked by an increased foregrounding of filmic materials, a minimization of referential content, and more stripped-down structures. In the dominant narratives concerning these movements—variously known as Structural Film, New Formal Film, or Structuralist/Materialist Film—critics and scholars have argued that these minimalist film practices were virtually absolute in their eschewal of expressive or personal content. However, this article contests the formalist reductionism of this prevailing interpretation by arguing that many key films of the period, including canonical works by Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, and Malcolm Le Grice, retain potent traces of autobiography, affect, and diaristic recollection.

Viennese Actionists and film makers presented radical movies and actions in Munich. Here the performers FLATZ and Alexeij Sagerer reacted to the Viennese actions with their own forms of action theater, f.e. with their own kinds to use carcasses. URL: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/discuss/lisforen/dreheraktion.html

This research will look at four of Sharits films, Ray Gun Virus (1966), Piece Mandala/End War (1966), T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) and N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968).  A phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework will be applied in order to argue that Sharits’ films reveal and make manifest an invisible aspect of cinema that is common to the entirety of film but very rarely seen.  It will be argued how this invisible aspect of cinema is a constituent of all film experiences, revealed by Sharits’ deconstruction of dominant, narrative traditions.  A further argument will be how the revelation of this invisible aspect of cinema exposes new modes of meaning and therefore new articulations within film.

The possibility to reflect time in the photographic medium has certain aesthetic constrains derived from a technical necessity; the opening and closing of the shutter. This temporary guillotine is responsible for selecting the fragment of time that we want to capture, in a way that the actions that occurred during this period will obtain a graphical representation. This article intends to reflect on these representations and link them with the figure of the sample and the loop. It attempts to link the possibility of representing time, associated to movement through photography, with the idea of temporal repetition of the loop, element which was specially developed by the Structural Cinema movement during the 60's. To find an answer, photographic and cinematographic examples that analyzed the issue of temporary representation will be studied and will be related with written documents about the subject.

“What is Zen for Film?,” I was asked on the occasion of a preparatory meeting for Revisions, an exhibition to feature Zen for Film (1962–64), Nam June Paik’s “blank” film projection. Despite the many discussions that preceded the meeting, when it came to the question of what the main—and the only—artwork of this exhibition was, we felt as if we’d been left in the dark. Is Zen for Film an idea, a concept— or rather, an event, a performance, or a process? In its original form, Revisions: Zen for Film combined a research project, pedagogy, an exhibition, and an exhibition catalogue. Revised again in the following pages, Revisions is an exercise in slow looking. It questions the ambition of constructing the work with a fixed identity, a product that moves seamlessly from the studio to the world of dissemination, distribution, and display. Instead, Zen for Film will appear once again as an assemblage of people, things, and events, a vibrant materiality destined for a changeable future.

Sztuka w procesie / Proces w sztuce: Ku nowej filozofii ochrony dziedzictwa kultury, edited by Iwona Szmelter, 50-61. Warszawa: Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Warszawie.

Czy możliwa jest konceptualizacja dzieł sztuki jako zdarzeń i procesów, to znaczy pod względem ich czasowości, ich transformacyjnej materialności? Przedstawiając tezy dotyczące względnego czasu trwania dzieł sztuki, niniejszy artykuł stwarza okazję do przemyślenia tradycyjnych paradygmatów teorii sztuki i ochrony dzieł. Zwłaszcza teoria ochrony odnosiła się przez długi czas do dzieł sztuki jako stałych, statycznych obiektów. Starano się je „zatrzymywać” w czasie, a dokonywane w nich zmiany były często konotowane negatywnie. W niniejszym tekście proponuję korektę tych wizji i próbę ujęcia dzieł sztuki w kontekście ich zmienności – nie tylko jako stwierdzenie faktu, ale jako warunek ich przetrwania.

In the field of communication, the path that information takes from the author’s mind to the retinas of their audience is known as “flow”. For filmmakers, flow is most effectively achieved by using a particular language - cinema.  Conventional cinematic wisdom describes the moving image as something without substance; a weightless vision, a dream, a memory. Originating in the avant-garde film world of the 1970’s, a method of materialism flew in the face of convention by shining a spotlight on the elements of film that cinematic convention seeks to keep shrouded. A vant-garde filmmaker Peter Gidal and others criticize cinematic language for reinforcing a passive viewership, a dynamic between creator and audience that only allows for a one-sided conversation.
In present times, Ed Halter has argued that a genre of video art, known as “glitch” continues in this tradition1. Most recently, an artistic movement known as Zombie Media c a n a l s o b e s e e n a s c o n t i n u a t i o n o f t h i s t r a d i t i o n . I  n t h e f a c e o f m e d i a s a t u r a t i o n , i t i s increasingly important to disrupt the dominant informational flows- to remove the viewer from a space of manufactured meaning, into a void of meaning, caused by the disruption of flow. A void of meaning is often perceived as disastrous, threatening or even chaotic. It may seem logical to conclude that the emptiness of the void signals entropy or destruction. However, what it presents is the space for the viewer to bring their own interpretations, logic and experiences, rendering it possible to unearth revelations, even serendipity. As I create discordant spaces, I invite my viewer to embrace a little chaos and peer into the void.

In his famous essay Art and Objecthood(1967), Michael Fried dismisses Minimal art, considered as a threat to authentic Modernist art. Furthermore, in one crucial, albeit somewhat obscure, part of the same essay he also dismisses film. In 1968, Morgan Fisher started making films that can be seen as a reaction to this double dismissal. The aim of this essay is precisely to point out the means through which Fisher managed to articulate a theoretical counteroffensive to Fried's thought. In particular, we will focus on two major aspects of Fisher's work (in both film and visual art), that is to say the will to avoid composition and the valorization of the “marginal” characteristics of film (what Derrida called, in his reading of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, the parergonof the work of art).

As the conclusion to a 2016 independent study at Watkins College of Art over the Structural/Materialist film movement of the later 20th century, Lochamire addresses the notions developed by the artists working within the movement, as well as filmmakers inspired by structural/materialist concepts. The films are considered in a contemporary mode of understanding materiality as being digital and structure as being integral to the constitution of the psychoanalytic subject.

Presentation for the conference "The Shifting Ecologies of Photochemical Film in the Digital Era"
Online, hosted by Aberystwyth University
Organized by Kim Knowles, Marcy Saude and Christo Wallers
7-11 June 2021

Abstract: Christian Lebrat, the french experimental filmmaker and theorist, writes in his book Cinéma Radical (2008) that the difference between an “artist” and a “technician” resides in their respective attitudes towards “noise” (bruit). The technician, says Lebrat, seeks to repress and camouflage noise, defined in information theory as that which “perturbs the transmission of information”. The artist seeks instead to integrate noise, to use it as the starting point for the creation of works “in which the richness, the diversity of sensations and the heterogeneity of discontinuous information open us up to a new perceptual horizon” . The history of experimental and avant-garde cinema can thus be seen as a history of noise in this sense, a history of how artists and filmmakers grapple with those material specificities of the cinematic dispositif that can perturb dominant, homogenized discourses and aesthetic practices.
This idea perhaps can be restated in terms that allow us to think of the political implications of the integration of noise. Jacques Rancière, indeed, talks of the political as moments of redistribution of the sensible in which what was once considered simply noise – “phonos” – is suddenly recognized as speech – “Logos”. Thinking of the history of experimental film practice in this way – as a making visible, in althusserian terms, of the excess noise which is usually invisible in dominant aesthetic practice – aligns quite well with classic structural-materialist film theory as proposed by theorists such as Peter Gidal. It seems however that contemporary photochemical film practice proposes a new relationship to “noise”, one that potentially allows more eco-political and neo-materialist readings. In the context of the marginal position that the medium of film now occupies, the question seems less to be about re-integrating noise into Logos, but rather about the ways in which on the one hand Logos can be decentred by noise in order to become “something else”, to paraphrase Elizabeth Povinelli, and on the other hand, how cinematic noise is thus able to reveal and come into contact with other types of broader, environmental noise.
Using David Gatten’s film What the Water Said, Nos. 1-3 (1998) as a case study, we propose to explore this potentially new relationship to “noise” in contemporary photochemical film practice, through the discussion of the concept as it is found in political and information theory, as well as in new materialist philosophy (especially the work of Elizabeth Povinelli on Charles S. Peirce).

In this essay + film I present some of the key theoretical arguments generated through making 3xShapes of Home (2020). The text and the film is derived from a larger study on Essay Film as Topography, and develops what I call  topographical thinking through the moving image, drawing on the philosophical topography of Jeff Malpas and the discourse on Essay Film. The full text and film is available online.

While almost everyone has seen avant-garde paintings by Picasso and Pollock, few have ever had the opportunity to see an avant-garde film by Buñuel or Brakhage. This post features short descriptions of ten key experimental films for those who are interested in exploring this cinematic terrain.

In 2020 my film experiment 3xShapes of Home (2020) won the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, in the category of Visual Arts. This is a short text about the motivations behind this research-driven film. Open access for the first 50 reads.

Winner for Text: Suzannah V. Evans (Durham University)
Winner for Sound: Demian Rudel Rey (Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon)
Winner for Visual Arts: Elisabeth Brun (University of Oslo)

Communication dans le cadre du colloque "Critique du cinéma : cinéma et marxisme – pensées, formes, engagements".
LASLAR et IRCAV, Université de Caen et IMEC, organisé par Valérie Vignaux et Sébastien Layerle.
5 avril 2022.

En 1978, Peter Gidal, le cinéaste et théoricien du cinéma « structurel/matérialiste » et Jean-Louis Comolli ont participé à un débat, avec Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey et Maureen Turim, sur le thème du « dispositif cinématographique [Cinematic Apparatus] à l’université de Wisconsin-Milwaukee . Le ton se crispe entre ces deux théoriciens du matérialisme cinématographique vers la fin de la discussion, quand Comolli présente une analyse du cinéma expérimental et plus particulièrement de "Condition of Illusion" de Gidal (1975). Aux réflexions élaborées par Comolli, Gidal répond systématiquement de manière brusque : il accuse d’abord Comolli d’être aveugle ; puis il compare son discours à celui de Karl Radek au premier Congrès des écrivains soviétiques en 1934, où ce dernier fustigeait Proust et Joyce au nom du réalisme socialiste ; et enfin il rétorque à son interlocuteur français – qui avait défini les films de l’anglais comme « films de docteurs » – que « les docteurs enlèvent les sutures [doctors also take out sutures] ».
Se joue dans cet échange entre deux représentants illustres des deux « avant-gardes », décrits par Peter Wollen dans son célèbre article « The Two Avant-Gardes » , un conflit idéologique sur la manière dont on peut faire un cinéma « matérialiste », dans le sens que Louis Althusser donne à ce mot. En effet, si Wollen décrit les différences entre les deux avant-gardes des années 1970 – l’un « européen » et l’autre gravitant autour du London Filmmaker’s Co-op en Angleterre – surtout par rapport à la fois à leurs origines historiques et économiques et leurs attitudes envers la représentation et la narration, il nous semble que cette discussion montre qu’il y a un conflit un peu plus profonde entre les deux camps, qui concerne plutôt les manières dont ils se placent par rapport à un héritage althussérien qu’ils partagent.
Nous proposons que ce qui différencie ces « deux avant-gardes », tous deux marxistes et althussériens, concerne beaucoup moins le rapport à la représentation (rapport chez Gidal que Wollen a tendance à ontologiser, malgré les protestations de Gidal lui-même), que la manière dont ils répondent à un problème propre à la théorisation althussérienne de l’art : comment un film, de fait œuvre de représentation et donc de l’Idéologie, peut-elle aussi être du côté de la théorie (ou de la symbolique, en termes lacano-althussériens) ? Utilisant cette discussion entre Gidal et Comolli comme base, nous montrerons que les deux réponses différentes que formulent les deux camps permet de les départager en brechtiens d’un côté, et beckettiens de l’autre. Surtout, cela nous permettra de montrer à quel point la dispute autour du « matérialisme » au cinéma à cette époque concerne avant tout la question de la formation du sujet : quel sujet est créé, ou pas, à travers l’expérience cinématographique ?

Two academics, the Doctor and Pete, meet in a cafe and discuss the relationship between Avant-Garde film and the occult. As the discussion develops the fabric of the film decomposes and explores the form of the encounter. Eventually the Doctor gives Pete a roll of Super 8 film which he takes home and projects on a wall. As the film plays both Pete and the audience are liberated from bourgeois hegemony.

No presente artigo analisa-se o filme "Serene Velocity" (1970), de Ernie Gehr, objetivando-se compreender os modos como apropria e reinventa um conjunto de determinados parâmetros das artes plásticas inusuais no cinema, em uma singular aproximação com o modernismo autorreflexivo das artes visuais e o minimalismo. Propomos assim uma análise formal comparativa do filme com obras e conceitos da escultura minimalista e da pintura modernista de Frank Stella. Entre os principais pontos de contato entre essas tendências artísticas contemporâneas e "Serene Velocity" encontra-se não somente aqueles mais evidentes, como a simplicidade e proeminência das formas, e a busca pela unidade e regularidade espacial, como também o modo de composição não relacional e serial, a construção autorreflexiva e anti ilusionista, e o deslocamento da ênfase nos significados advindos de um espaço psicológico interior para a própria atividade do espectador no desdobramento perceptivo e de sua compreensão dos elementos convencionados.

ABSTRACT: The present article analyzes Ernie Gehr’s film Serene Velocity (1970), taking into account the ways in which it appropriates and reinvents a set of certain parameters from visual arts, which had been absent in cinema until then, in a singular approach with self-reflexive modernism of the visual arts and minimalism. For that, we propose a formal comparative analysis of the film with works and concepts of minimalist sculptures and modernist paintings by Frank Stella. Among the main points of contact between these contemporary artistic tendencies and Serene Velocity we not only find those which are more evident, such as simplicity and prominence of shapes, and the interest in spatial unity and regularity, but also non-relational and serial composition, self-reflexive and anti-illusionist construction, and the displacement of emphasis on meanings derived from an inner psychological space in favor of the spectator’s own activity in perceptual unfolding and understanding of the conventional elements.

A look at the early LFMC through the lens of writing and publication. This paper focuses on two distinct publishing context: the co-op's early magazine Cinim and the later discourse surrounding Structural-Materialist film as manifest in magazines like Studio International, Afterimage and Artforum as well as Peter Gidal's Structural Film Anthology. It was published in Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-makers' Co-operative, ed. Mark Webber (LUX: 2016)