through 17 November 2012
Much as been said about the experiments in structural filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps one way to summarize the work of artists such as Joyce Wieland, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Anthony McCall, or Tony Con- rad is that they took film down to its most basic elements: light + material + motion + time. Instead of focusing on how to use film to narrate a story, these artists addressed its phenomenological properties and the ways film could engage the perception of material and light, over time. These filmmakers broke film—they performed an act of physical and ontological violence that took apart basic as- sumptions about the nature of film. But in many ways, their intentions were cerebral and academic, and their meth- ods borderline clinical. Amy Granat, working forty years later, gives these formal experiments some heart and soul.
