Structural Film - Overview

Overview

The term was coined by P. Adams Sitney who noted that film artists such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (aka Owen Land), Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka had moved away from the complex and condensed forms of cinema practiced by such artists as Sidney Peterson and Stan Brakhage. "Structural film" artists pursued instead a more simplified, sometimes even predetermined art. The shape of the film was crucial, the content peripheral. This term should not be confused with the literary and philosophical term structuralism.