Structural
see all genres ›The structural film dares its viewers to think literally. Standing at the far end of Hollywood illusionism, these rigorously executed experiments bring cinema's basic building blocks (duration, flicker, zooms, pans) into mesmerizing focus.
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Genres / Avant-garde / Structural
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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,
"If you take the facts of the retina, the flicker mechanism of film projection," Paul Sharits wrote, "then you can make films without logic of language." T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G assaults language rather more directly with its single-word soundtrack ("Destroy") and the image of poet...Watch Movie
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Ballet Mechanique
A seminal work of abstract cinema still hell-bent on speed, BALLET MECANIQUE remains a touchstone for modernist preoccupations with industry, mass culture, repetition and montage. The true hero of Fernand Leger's only film is the lowly film splice. With its capacity for...Watch Movie
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Manakamana
Produced by the directors of SWEETGRASS and LEVIATHAN, MANAKAMANA is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind documentary experience. Filmed entirely inside the narrow confines of a cable car that transports villagers to an ancient mountaintop temple, high above a jungle in Nepal, the documentary is an...Watch Movie
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Iterations
Gregg Biermann slices Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW into nineteen vertical columns, each slightly out of phase with the next, reverberating out from a solitary instant in the temporal center of the work where the entire frame coalesces. The result dissects, illuminates and obscures different...Watch Movie
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Happy Again
The signature scene from the Hollywood musical SINGIN' IN THE RAIN is split into seven layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible equally in superimposition. At the temporally central point all visual and audio elements coalesce in a single frame. The result uncovers a new...Watch Movie
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Letters, Notes
Conceptually, Stephanie Barber's short film LETTERS, NOTES is simplicity itself: found photographs hold the screen as animated texts transcribe brief notes and letters unmoored from context. And yet the elusive poignancy that emerges of this exquisite corpse structure is richly suggestive of the...Watch Movie
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Crop Duster Octet
One of the most iconic sequences in the history of Hollywood cinema (from Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST) is deconstructed and reassembled to illuminate the patterns, rhythms and choreography of the original so as to break through and make for an eight banded kinetic...Watch Movie
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N:O:T:H:I:N:G
In the mid-1960s, Paul Sharits developed an abstract cinema in radical opposition to the pictorial tradition. His works taken together propose a reflection on the very nature of cinema and its component parts: the film strip, single frames, the flow of film through the projector, sprocket holes,...Watch Movie
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Labyrinthine
Forty-one separate shots that have been appropriated and excised from the Hitchcock classic VERTIGO are repeated and transformed into a composite sequence of concentric rectangles. Each rectangle appears over the last and grows larger over time. The narrative of the original is all but lost and...Watch Movie
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High Noon Reflections
In HIGH NOON REFLECTIONS, simple patterns intervene and the original material (an iconic passage from the classic film HIGH NOON) is transformed. Each shot from the original material is repeated five times and this sequence is broken up into a four-part split screen, with each...Watch Movie
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Another Picture
ANOTHER PICTURE is a digital age motion study inspired by the "chronophotographic" work of Etienne-Jules Marey. The finale from the Hollywood classic SUNSET BOULEVARD is split into 16 superimposed layers. Each duplicate of the scene dissolves in and out such that it is slightly offset in time...Watch Movie
