Page 36 - Studio International - November December 1975

medium. In the same way in which a Truffaut or Godard
film, illusionistically portraying an existentialist hero, is
because of its interior filmic relations not an
existentialist film, so a structuralist film is not defined
simply by the structuralist attitude of its maker. There
must be an integrity between the capacities and material
properties of the medium and the structural procedures
adopted. That these procedures are not confined to the
application of numerical system, but can be achieved
through other strategies, is evident through films like
Bedroom by Gidal or Snow's Central Region. However, I
have drawn the structural definition in this instance in a
very narrow way, including the provision that the work
should have an homologous relationship with a
particular observational situation, so that the two tenses
of structuralist activity may be appreciated within the film.
Some of the difficulties of maintaining this narrow
definition in the light of some recent conceptual and
reflexive works are also raised in Kren's 15/67-TV.
Although the filming situation is narrow in this film,
being confined to five short sequences all filmed from
within a dock-side café, the work does not aim to be a
homologue of the space-time relations intrinsic to the
situation and procedure of the filming itself. The filmed
sequences are largely separated from their
representational function, to become the subject of
subsequent systematization where their relationships
within the film-presentation are much more significant
than the procedural relationship with their origin. The
broad effect and historical significance of this film lies in
shifting the emphasis of structural activity away from the
film-maker's ordering of his filmic subject to that of the
spectator's structuring of the filmic presentation. The
film's viewer must engage in a speculative, reflexive
structuring of the film as it proceeds. There are of course a
number of other undeniable levels of content in the work.
These include the subjective choice of situation and
image by the film-maker, his attitude to the act of filming,
and the similarly subjective choice of mathematical
system end its application in the film. But by far the most
significant level of content in TV is the viewer's
awareness of his own behaviour in structuring the
experience of the film itself. This is not simply an attempt
to elucidate the film-maker's hidden system, but an
experience of the various phases, stages and strategies
which are encountered in the act of attempting to
structure the events of the film.
The five sequences (each appears twenty-one times in
all) are sufficiently similar to each other to ensure that the
initial problem faced is the discrimination of the shots
themselves. All the shots, which are about one and a half
seconds long, are separated from each other by periods 15167- TV 1967
when the screen is black. Again the viewer begins to
discriminate the differences in black duration, becoming
aware that there is a consistent pattern and that this forms In the same way in which I would quote Bäume im
a system of punctuation, first separating the shots, then Herbst as the first structural film, I would quote TV as the
longer gaps between the 'sentences' (groups of five first thoroughly realized work of reflexive cinema
shots) then even longer gaps marking the ends of the transferring the primary arena for structuralist activity to
'paragraphs' (which vary in length). At a certain stage of the viewing of the film itself.
discrimination and recognition of the shots and their
pattern of combination, the viewer begins to speculate,
attempting to predict the development; and this
prediction is subsequently confirmed or denied by the
film. Though the system is basically logical, it is not
ultimately consistent as a permutation or symmetrical
structure. In some more recent films like Bill Brand's
Moment and even Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, a
similar concept has tended to become a more
mechanistic puzzle, encouraging the viewer to identify
content with a specific solution to the 'scrambler.' The d
inconsistency in Kren's system eliminates any simple
goal for the viewer's reflexive, structural activity. In TV,
the viewer is drawn into a mode of behaviour by the
systemic aspect of the film, but not permitted to
identify 'content' with a systemic abstract of the work. 1 See Malcolm Le Grice's forthcoming book Abstract Film and Beyond,
The content, which continues to develop after repeated Studio Vista, listed for publication in April 1976.
viewings and even when fully aware of the system, lies in 2 Kren has recently released another Brus 'action' film, Silberaktion Brus
the experience of the stages of a structural activity from (Silver action), completed at the same time. At the present both films are
perceptual discrimination, to awareness of a rhythm of confusingly numbered 10165, though they are quite separate works.
repetition, to the conscious use of memory and 3 From Essais Critiques, 1964. Translation by Richard Howard in
prediction in conceptual patterning. Partisan Review, Winter 1967.
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