Seventies Structures

In his landmark 1974 publication Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney identified a nascent American “cinema of structure, wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.” In discerning common characteristics among these avant-garde filmmakers’ styles (such as a fixed camera position, flicker effects, repetition, loop printing, or rephotography), Sitney illuminated a cohort of cineastes—termed “structuralists”—whose minimalist, even mathematical work emphasized form over content and stasis over rhythm. Structural film soon emerged as the dominant trend in ’70s American avant-garde cinema, and the works of its key practitioners were quickly canonized. At the same time, some filmmakers critiqued the label. Once, when asked about his reputation as a structural filmmaker, Ernie Gehr remarked, “I don’t know what that word really means. [Labels] stop people from actually seeing, actually experiencing the work.” The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop likewise helped filmmakers create and disseminate work that both adhered to and subverted the movement’s tropes. In that spirit, this program aims to explore and explode the (predominantly patriarchal) structuralist film paradigm of ’70s American avant-garde cinema. It surveys the structuralist tendencies of women filmmakers from that decade whose work is usually contextualized within an abstract, poetic, or lyrical tradition, while illuminating the poetry and lyricism often overlooked in the major works of the men who became the poster children of ’70s Structural film. Blues. 1970. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. 16mm. Silent. 8 min. Breakfast. 1976. USA. Directed by Michael Snow. 16mm. Silent. 15 min. Table. 1976. USA. Directed by Ernie Gehr. 16mm. Silent. 15 min. Line. 1976. USA. Directed by Alan Berliner. 16mm. Silent. 7 min. I-94. 1974. USA. Directed by Bette Gordon, James Benning. 16mm. 3 min. Bertha’s Children. 1976. USA. Directed by Roberta Friedman, Grahame Weinbren. 16mm. 7 min. X-Tracts. 1972. USA. Directed by Leslie Thornton, Desmond Horsfield. 16mm. 9 min. Dirt. 1971. USA. Directed by Amy Greenfield. 16mm. 3 min. Water Motor. 1978. USA. Directed by Babette Mangolte. 16mm. 7 min. Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes. 1975. USA. Directed by Coleen Fitzgibbon. Digital. 10 min. Program approx. 84 min.