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Film Comment (1972) - Aspects of cinematic consciousness

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Abstract

In an exploratory treatment of structural film, P. Adams Sitney referred to four characteristics: "a fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer's perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing (the immediate repetition of shots, exactly and without variation), and re-photography off of a screen." Crossing the eighty-foot room on a paradoxical course of progressively flattening perspective but deepening perceptual truth, vitiating one illusionistic element or dimension after another, the camera ends up on the sea-wave still, and then, with both visual and aural crescendo (an electronic sine wave that goes from 50 cycles-per-second to 12,000 cycles-per-second during forty minutes of the film, but which takes its greatest leap at the point of superimposition of extreme close-up of the seawave shot on top of itself as the zoom moves into its frame), enters the sea-wave photo, filling the entire film frame on screen, forfeiting the "truth" of its discreteness as a single frame, absorbing and assimilating its illusionistic depth as its own.

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