The Structural Film

Let us consider the film practice that immediately preceded the late 1970s in an attempt to understand the type of work against which the returned image and narrative were posed. And so, let us look at the practice that still saw itself in clear binary terms as the avant-garde film. Envision the pulsating screen of black-and-white frames in Kubelka's film Arnulf Rainer (1958–1960), or perhaps Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity (1970) with its violent jolts between depth and flatness, or even the mechanical repetitions of Michael Snow's ↔ (1969). In the last film (the verbal translation of its title being Back and Forth), the camera slowly pans across a classroom space, first to the right, and then with a mechanical click, it swings to the left. The camera obsessively repeats this action, accelerating with each successive movement. The informational system of ↔ is thus reduced to its apparatus: the tripod, the camera, and the film whirring through it. The repetitive movement of the camera, aided by the film's lack of narrative, serves to reduce the meaning in the image, drawing attention instead to its two-dimensional flatness and to the duration of its screening time. These avant-garde film viewings, of course, are meant to be difficult, taxing for even the specialized viewer, and engendering a high art experience that Barthes termed jouissance, as opposed to the more lowbrow, and easy, plaisir.