Abstract
The term ‘materialist’ in the expression ‘structural/materialist film’ used to characterize a certain development of work in avant-garde independent film-making1 has to be understood away from any simple reference to the physical materiality of film. ‘Materialist’ stresses process, a film in its process of production of images, sounds, times, meanings, the transformations effected on the basis of the specific properties of film in the relation of a viewing and listening situation. It is that situation which is, finally, the point of ‘structural/materialist film’, its fundamental operation, the experience of film, and the experience of film.
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Note
See Peter Gidal (ed.) Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976)
Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1977); unattributed quotations in the present text are either from those sources or from various unpublished pieces of writing by Gidal and are taken as representative of emphases constantly made. ‘Structural/materialist film’ is an indication of a certain practice and a rough grouping accordingly, not ‘a movement’; it would include works by the following (amongst others): Gidal, Le Grice, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, William Raban, Gill Eatherley, David Crosswaite, Fred Drummond.
Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973) p. 43; translation, The Pleasure of the Text (London: Cape, 1976) p. 26.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire livre XI (Paris: Seuil, 1973) p. 60; translation, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) p. 61.
Christian Metz, ‘Le signifiant imaginaire’, Communications no. 23 (1975) pp. 34–5; translation, ‘The imaginary signifier’, Screen vol. 16 no. 2 (Summer 1975) pp. 51–2.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) p. 840.
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© 1981 Stephen Heath
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Heath, S. (1981). Repetition Time. In: Questions of Cinema. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16579-7_7
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