Structural Film at the Turn of the Century | Underground Film Series

In 1969, film historian P. Adam Sitney identified a trend within the avant-garde he called “structural film.” Eschewing narrative cohesion for foregrounded form, structural films call attention to the processes behind their own creation. Structural film can involve a play with the conventional continuity structure of mainstream cinema, an invitation for the spectator to re-examine the taken-for-granted illusions of coherence the medium often presents. The height of the structuralist film movement was the 1960s-1970s, but many thought-provoking structural films have been produced since. This program offers three prime examples.

Window Work (2000) | Dir. Lynne Sachs | USA

As a woman performs banal tasks—washing a window, reading a newspaper—small frames within the frame play home movies. Window Work blends film and video, motion and stillness, present quiet and dislocated sound, all within a static window frame. [9 min; experimental; English]

*Corpus Callosum (2002) | Dir. Michael Snow | Canada

An office comedy? A domestic sitcom? Not like any you’ve seen before. Michael Snow’s feature-length experiment with artificiality and digital effects is a surreal depiction of in-between spaces that are created and manipulated by camera and computer. [90 min; experimental; English]

Passage à l'acte (1993) | Dir. Martin Arnold | Austria

Passage à l’acte manipulates time within a Hollywood depiction of the nuclear family. By stretching a 10-second clip from To Kill a Mockingbird (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1962) to nearly 12 minutes, the harmonious continuity structure of the classical narrative film is compromised, rendering a disjuncture, a picture of an unsettled postwar America. [12 min; experimental; English]

Any film screened at IU Cinema may contain content that viewers find sensitive or upsetting. Visit our Audience Advisories page to learn more.