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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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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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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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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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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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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Metalogue
Described as a cross between a "speech" and a "fireworks display." A magician-like figure delivers a peculiar speech that is embedded in extravagant arrays of time-delayed images that reflect and refract ideas about memory, time and language. By embedding his gestures in a spectacular diachronic...Watch Movie
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Studies in Transfalumination
Modified flashlights and stripped down video projectors explore the visual complexities of the ordinary world: a tunnel, a clump of grass, a discarded table, the underside of a bridge, fog, a piece of rock and a tree. All the images were shot in real time, there is no...Watch Movie
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Pressures of the Text
Integrating direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language and simultaneous translation, PRESSURES OF THE TEXT investigates the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational...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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The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough
A film that uses literary, structural, autobiographical and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of...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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Secondary Currents
A film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a...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
