Notes After Long Silence: Austrian and American Structural Film

Notes after Long Silence. On Austrian and American Structural Film.

In the early 1960ies, a number of filmmakers emerged in the United States and Europe to produce remarkable

films that challenged any previous formal tendency in avant-garde filmmaking. The Structuralist filmmakers—

including Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Kurt Kren––arranged their shots according to

mathematical principles, attempting to produce non-narrative and non-illusionist films to oppose the cinematic

apparatus. Similar to the advent of Minimalism in painting and sculpture, structural films insisted on shape, and