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Structural Film: Ten Years Later

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2022

Extract

Is it a: 1) critical method, 2) an artistic process, 3) neither or 4) both?

We can in fact presume that there exist certain writers, painters, musicians in whose eyes a certain exercise of structure (and no longer merely its thought) represents a distinctive experience, and that both analysts and creators must be placed under the common sign of what we might call structural man, defined not by his ideas or his languages, but by his imagination—in other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure.

…we recompose the object in order to make certain functions appear…this is why we must speak of the structuralist activity rather than the structuralist work.

(Roland Barthes “The Structuralist Activity” 1963)

The correct answer to the original question is—structuralism is both, as Barthes so succinctly states. But what of the phenomenon referred to as “structural film“? Is “structural film” “structuralist film” in disguise?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 The Drama Review

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