On the DVD which contains, "Castro Street," by Bruce Baille, there is a short, filmed introduction by  Stan Brakhage in which he contends the film is, "a case of a leap of the imagination of taking images from somewhere utterly else to make a metaphor of a quality of a street of San Francisco." The problem is that the film is about Castro Street in Richmond, California, a street that runs adjacent to the railroad yards of Richmond Ca. A leap of the imagination, indeed.

When Sitney published "Visionary Film" in 1974 I had been an admirer of A-G for several years. I peevishly resented it's attempt to define and codify the free-form expression of experimental film. Now I see that it was inevitable that someone would try to gain academic credentials on the back of A-G films. To me, Sitney wasn't merely describing what he was seeing and then categorizing the films, he was also creating new categories by mangling existing terms into his own, such as "mythopoeic" and "structural." I could see the vague relationship between mythopoeic and the described films, but the use of structural struck me as wrong-headed. I was thinking, at the time, that he was modifying Levi-Stauss' anthropological concept into a new, personal definition. When I looked at films described as Structural, I saw something totally unintended, just as Brakhage looked at "Castro Street" and saw something totally unintended. Now I suspect Sitney's use of the term was more simpleminded,and has no relationship to the societal concept. It merely refers to the structure, or shape of the film, as it's predominant characteristic and philosophical foundation.

All films have a structure independent of their content. Actualities have a fixed camera position, one of Sitney's qualifying characteristics for identifying a film as "Structural." I suspect he would argue that in an actuality the content trumps the fixed camera position, and therefore excludes it from being a structural film. When N. Roeg intermixes the past and the present with short bursts of edited film, such as in, "Don't Look Now," or "Performance"  does that make the film structural? The structure attempts to mimic the thought process, and to my mind is the predominent characteristic. Or does the narrative content take precedence here also? There is certainly narrative content in Hollis Frampton's masterful (nostalgia), but admittedly the structure expands the narrative.   I guess I would prefer a more precise term of definition, though in thinking about it while writing this, I am beginning to come to an appreciation of the classification.  I do not find any similarity between a  Paul Sharits film and a  Frampton or a James Benning film,  but I, too, consider them structural filmmakers. Maybe it's simply a case of, "I'll know it when I see it." 

Sorry for droning on..