Page 48 - Studio International - June 1974

TIME & (Left)
Structural diagram for
Moment 1972
MOTION (Below)
Frames from
Moment 1972
(Opposite page)
STUDIES Frames from
Touch Tone Phone Film 1973

Bill Brand is a young Chicago-based film-maker
whose work was first seen in this country at the
1973 Festival of Independent Avant-Garde
Film.1 He showed a programme of four new
films, all completed within the previous
eighteen months, and if these did not command
immediate attention amid the hectic festival
schedule, they emerge in retrospect as perhaps
the most significant indications of what
`structural cinema' is currently about and where
it's heading. For Brand is effectively a second-
generation structuralist (though he would
probably describe himself as fourth or fifth
generation American independent), having
studied with Paul Sharits, one of the founding
structuralists. Brand's own work therefore
starts from a position squarely within the new
paradigm; and rather than speak of the
dominant influence of Sharits, we should regard
him as an heir to the radically new conception
of cinema that Sharits and others of his
generation have defined.
`I would like you to regard your art as
research; research in contemporary
communication and "meaning" systems.''-' In a
strategy reminiscent of C. S. Peirce's
redefinition of his philosophical system as
`pragmaticism', to distinguish it from
William James's enthusiastic popularization of
`pragmaticism', Paul Sharits suggested to his
students that 'the vague term cinema should be
abandoned' in favour of 'the less fashionable
term cinematics . . . as a base for our new
systems.'3 The call was not for arbitrary
aesthetic experiment, but rather a systematic
investigation of the still largely unexplored
territory that separates the modernist
achievements of painting, sculpture and music
from the exhausted canons of 'cinema'.
Sharits's stance is as polemical as it is
pragmatic. Like Godard, in a somewhat
different context, he recognizes that cinema
cannot begin in the present; it must first come
to terms with the accumulated definitions that
limit both film-maker and audience. And in his
preoccupation with the 'intensification of
materiality' can be read a concern equally with
the emancipation of the film apparatus and the
viewer from their inherited prejudices. From
the seemingly random (or intuitive) flicker
pattern of Ray Gun Virus (1966), and the
ambiguity of scratches and splices as both
image and 'accident' in S:TREAM:
S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED
(1968-7o), right through to his recent studies in
`emulsion grain imagery', Axiomatic Granularity
(1972-3), Sharits has made stringent demands
on his audiences, requiring them to adjust to a
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