The London Filmmakers Co-operative

Around 1971 the debates at the London Filmmakers Cooperative were against the mechanistic notion of structure adumbrated by P. Adams Sitney in his 1969 essay “Structural film,” in Film Culture. The London Filmmakers Co-op attempted dialectical notions of structure which had much more to do with a radically materialist structuralism, simultaneous with a post-structuralist critique of mechanistic systems including any dualistic dialectic itself (whether in social anthropology, semiotics, or film). It must be recalled that at the Co-op the term “structure” was used more to refer to films which inculcate in the viewer processes of “attempting to arrest,” attempting to decipher. Film “as manipulation attempt and awareness thereof” (Gidal, LFMC catalogue, 1969). And “the necessity for the term structuring” (Dunford, Ibid.). ²² “Structuralism can be thought of as a development from existentialism, ²³ making extreme subjectivity compatible with order by removing from the notion of structure either an a priori or an 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 Cézanne to Analytical Cubism as the historical basis of visual structural art. In The Structuralist Activity’ 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 ‘intellect added to object.’ He stresses that ‘between the two objects, or two tenses, of structuralist activity, there occurs something new …’ Structuralist art can be thought of as the material formation of experience through the explicit incursion into the thing or 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” (LeGrice, “Kren's films,” op.cit., written 1974).