Art Review - February Issue - (Page 86)

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NEIL ND IS IT ABOUT TO BECOME THE BIG CONCERN FOR A NEW GENERATION OF FILMMAKERS? as to the importance of so-called structural ﬁlms for new generations of ﬁlmmakers and artists, a ﬁlm scholar friend of mine explained to me, with no little note of ﬁnality, that “structural ﬁlm is far more popular with modernist art historians than with practising artists or academics in other ﬁelds… The lyrical ﬁlm, the trance ﬁlm and certain modes of ﬁlm performance have had much more of an impact in the experimental ﬁlm world today.” I let the dig of “modernist art historians” slide, even though I knew it was meant to write o the concerns of a small group of us who still ﬁnd the fate of and debates surrounding modernism crucial to understanding the current state of the arts, but the dismissal that it entailed, the notion that we ‘modernist’ critics and historians are the only ones interested in this kind and moment of ﬁlmmaking, largely a product of the US in the late 1960s and early 70s, seemed misguided. For, over the past couple of years or so, I had come into contact with a number of works in ﬁlm and video that, whether acknowledged by their makers or not, were, to my mind, undeniably structural in character, but structural in a way that at once extends and exceeds the historical and aesthetic label that this term has come to serve. That label, ‘structural ﬁlm’, was ﬁrst put into critical play by P. Adams Sitney in two articles of the same name published in Film Culture in 1969 and 1970, which then became the penultimate chapter of his indispensable book, Visionary Film 1974 – an expansive history of American avant-garde ﬁlm from the ﬁnal years of the Second World War to the present. By describing avant-garde ﬁlm forms in terms such as the lyric, the mythopoeic and the picaresque, Sitney’s narrative armed itself with interpretive models from the history of literature, but the history of art, and the arsenal of modern art in particular, was never far from reach. The achievements of a Stan Brakhage found their logical counterpart in Jackson Pollock’s, and almost by ﬁat, the work of the next generation of ﬁlmmakers – ﬁgures such as Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs and Hollis Frampton – came to be seen in the light of modernist painting’s logical end: the blank canvas and its vicissitudes, namely the colour-ﬁeld painting and minimalist sculpture of artists such as Frank Stella, Robert Morris and Donald Judd. The correlation remains to this day. The renowned scholar of avant-garde ﬁlm Annette Michelson wrote as recently as 1998 that the work of these ﬁlmmakers indicated ‘a growing trend toward systematicity, in an era when a notion of structure is seen to predominate over the projection of subjectivity. This followed upon the advent of minimalism in painting and sculpture, and shares with them the deployment of monochrome, of patterns of repetition, and IN RESPONSE TO A QUESTION the concern with coherence of the compositional gestalt.’ Yet Sitney’s original criteria – of which there were four: loop printing, a ﬁxed frame, the ﬂicker e ect and rephotography o the screen – remain ﬁxed in the minds of artists who identify with the moment when it appeared that the concerns of painting, sculpture, photography and ﬁlm aligned under the general banner of ‘structure’. Stan Douglas routinely mentions how the loop, in works such as his newest, Klatsassin 2006 , is central to his practice of renovating cinematic temporality; and Sharon Lockhart has equated her use of ﬁxed frame, single takes in works such as Teatro Amazonas 1999 and, more recently, Pine Flat 2005 , with the inﬂuence of structural ﬁlm and its focus on, in Lockhart’s words, ‘the basic elements of ﬁlmmaking’. It is this last equation, the perception that these earlier ﬁlmmakers’ animation of ‘structure’ in their work was bound up with a search for the essence of ﬁlm itself, its ontology or, to use a more practised terminology, its ‘medium speciﬁcity’, that has hitched structural ﬁlm to the star of modernism. Paradoxically, these investigations into the fundamental nature of the ﬁlmic medium, their attempt, it seemed, to pin down exactly what ﬁlm was, ran headﬁrst into the fact that ﬁlm’s aggregate character, its condition of being an amalgam of di erent devices and disciplines, a product of diverse and divergent material histories, meant that any such attempt to ﬁnd something speciﬁc to ﬁlm, something inherent to its enterprise, was doomed from the beginning. If it could be said to have one, ‘structural ﬁlm’ would have to carry out its modernist project in vain, ‘speciﬁc’ being exactly what the medium of ﬁlm was not. Douglas and Lockhart do not engage this paradox, however. For them, ‘structural ﬁlm’ serves up a set of techniques whose historical appearance alone o ers justiﬁcation for their use as contemporary aesthetic strategies. For example, the ﬁxed-frame loops of Lockhart’s cinematic portraits from Pine Flat — eg Reader, Sleeper, Searcher — are less purely formal reductions or strategies of simpliﬁcation than means to amplify our attentiveness to the details and subtle movements of her chosen subjects. From this perspective, her decision to shoot 16mm ﬁlm and, for the works’ exhibition, to install projectors out in the open for the audience to see and hear, appears wholly arbitrary, if not opportunistic: ‘baring the device’ in this way may be meant to reveal the mediated nature of all photographic representation, and thus to call into question Lockhart’s own documentary aesthetic, but that seems like an old lesson to teach in 2006, and one that was of little concern to the ﬁlmmakers associated with that moment when, as Michelson noted, ‘structure is seen to predominate’. Yet there are other ﬁlmmakers and artists whose work does respond to the concerns evident in so-called structural ﬁlms without simply taking their formal techniques as signals of historical precedence. Their work begins the structural ﬁlmmakers’ researches anew, takes it in directions that few have thought to explore and consequently allows us to rethink ﬁlmic form, structure and material in new and productive ways. Bill Morrison’s Outerborough 2005 is one such ﬁlm, and its A ARTREVIEW p 86-89 Special Focus AR Feb07.i86 86 8/1/07 17:17:21 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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