Page 35 - Studio International - November December 1975

in conflict with existentialism, it can be thought of as a

development from it, making extreme subjectivity
compatible with order by removing from the notion of
structure either an a priori or authoritarian implication
(the main bases of existential rejection of order). Order is
no longer seen as a fixed, immutable condition of the
world, but the consequence of changing and developing
acts of ordering. Whilst there is a recognition that no
fixed structure for experience exists, there is also a
recognition that there can be no neutral state of
unconditioned experience. The development of
experience depends on developments of structuring.
I see the movement from Cezanne to Analytical Cubism
as the historical basis of visual structural art.
Structuralism in art would seem to imply a broadly
representational, or more accurately, homological,
condition. This 'homology' is defined by Levi-Strauss as
an analogy of functions rather than of substance. In The
Structuralist Activity,3 Roland Barthes talks of a process
whereby the structuralist decomposes the real and then
recomposes it. The reconstructed 'object', which I take to
imply mainly the structuralist art object, is described as a
simulacrum of the 'natural object' and is seen as
'intellect added to object'. He stresses that 'between the
two objects, or two tenses, of structuralist activity, there
occurs something new . . .' (Barthes' italics).
Structuralist art can be thought of as the material
formation of experience through the explicit incursion
into the thing (event) observed by the mode of
observation. In this sense, structuralist art does not
express experience derived from the world . . it forms
experience in the trace of a dialectic between perceiver
and perceived. It is perhaps this concentration on
structure as process or activity which most recommends
the project to the time-based film medium at the present
time. However inadequate it might be later, I would like
for now to confine the use of the term structuralism in film
to situations where the space/time relations of a filmed 3/60-Bäume im Herbst 1 960
situation are reformed or transformed through a definable
structuring strategy into a new 'experiential' (as opposed separate 'shots' (significantly different in kind to
to didactically conceptual) homology. In this notion of montage relations through editing) which determine it
structuralism, whilst the shape or wholist element of as a structural homologue. In a sense, what is represented
Snow's films, most evident in Wavelength, would not in these films is neither the trees nor the head (as Strauss's
constitute a structuralist problem, the transformation (or 'substance'), but instead, the space/time relations of the
fusion) of time/space in the experience of his < > and film viewing and shooting process (as 'functions').
Central Region would. In both cases, the space/time Objects are seen as an amalgam with their space and
experience can be thought of as an homology brought especially with their time as the process of their
about by the consistent application of a camera strategy. accessibility through acts of perception. So again, what is
Kren's first structuralist film then is 3/60-Bäume im 'represented' in the films is not a tree or a head but a
Herbst (Trees in Autumn, incidentally the first film in filmic act of perception. It is also not represented in the
general I would call structuralist). Its structuralism is a sense that the film becomes a description, expression or
result of the application of system, not to subsequent even model for the generalized act of perception
montage of material already filmed with an unconstrained existing prior to the 'representation.' The films are acts of
subjectivity, but to the act and event of filming itself. This perception taking place under particular constraints of
limitation, by narrowing the space and time range of the procedure and medium . . acts of film-perception. The
shot material, gives rise to a greater integrity in the film as result of this activity is a genuinely new 'object' (the film
homologue. In Bäume im Herbst the new space/time being Barthes' second tense of structuralist activity)
fusion of the experience of branches shot against the sky wherein certain 'postulates' of time/space procedure
IS the plasticity of the shooting system become the have been added to the 'natural object' (Barthes' first
relations of the objects — shots, and their space/time tense of structuralist activity).
observational relations are inseparable. Structural That film structuralism, structuralism in literature or
process becomes object. This prefigures Snow's< . . and anthropology, differ, relates to the specificity of the
echoes the plasticity of time/space relations in a
Giacometti painting. Though similar conditions occur in a
number of Kren films, particularly the window sections in
5/62-Fenstergucker, Abfall etc. and 17/62-Grün-Rot, it
is most perfectly illustrated in 28/73-Zeitaufnahme(n), a
film which has a striking relationship to a Giacometti
portrait (I would cite Giacometti as the clearest example
of a contemporary structuralist painter).
Kren's preparatory drawings for the shooting of this
'portrait head' film, show how he sees filmic space as a
result of the interaction between various focal lengths of
lens, the minimally changing camera position and the
rates of change of both. Sections of the film have
successions of single frame shots made with small
changes of viewpoint, and other sections superimpose
viewpoints on each other. In the film, the transparent,
vibrating head defines its space/time image as a function
of the filming procedure. As in Bäume im Herbst, it is the
nature of the relations established between the
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