Psyché Tropes Episode 12
11pm, 24 April 2023 on Resonance 104.4FM


Psyché Tropes Episode 12 presented by Steven McInereny, features soundtracks and interviews taken from the structuralist film movement. A term coined in the late 1970's by Film theorist P. Adams Stitney for a style of experimentation exploring film's material aspects including elements of repetition, recurrence, opposition and rhythm dealing with the passage of time, duration and processes of memory.

Identifiable characteristics of structural film include a fixed camera position, the flicker effect, re-photography and loop printing. Even though  emphasis is placed on form and structure over narrative, quite often these films are portrayed as deeply personal and poetic.

Razer Blades by Paul Sharits from 1968 consists of two 1,000 ft reels of 16mm film projected side-by-side with the projectors’ detachable speakers placed directly on either side of the audience creating A dual screen barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli.


In William Rabin’s Broadwalk (1972), the camera was positioned on a busy pathway in Regent’s Park, and recorded three frames a minute. The shutter was held open for the twenty-second duration between exposures, so that on projection, individual frames merge together making the patterned flows of human movement clearly perceptible. The original time-lapse was then expanded by various processes of re-filming to reveal the frame-by-frame structure of the original.

Following on is the Soundtrack to John Smith's Associations from 1972. A film that sets language against itself as Image and word work against each other to destroy/create meaning taken from word associations and linguistic theory by Herbert. H Clark.

An excerpt from a 1970 interview with Peter Kubelka followed by the soundtrack to his 1958 experimental film Schveshater is proceded by an extract from Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma from 1970.

Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, the 1967 film Wavelength by Canadian-American experimental filmmaker Michael Snow, was filmed in one room over one week in December 1966. Playing out Episode 12 is the 1966 film The Flicker by Tony Conrad.


Back