While structural film was the dominant form within the avant-garde tradition at the dawn of the 1970s, animators used shape and structure in a variety of ways that differentiated their works. Paul Glabicki created incisive, analytical works that explored objects through image, language, form and movement, drafting stunningly complicated sequences by hand. Barry Spinello’s films are also hand-drawn but more impressionistic, with blobs of colour flashing by to the rhythm of a primitive, handmade optical soundtrack. With Saugus Series, Pat O’Neill created several chapters of complex, layered imagery that was ‘animated’ through physical processes of composition such as optical printing, hand-drawn shapes and composites. Bill Brand and Standish Lawder both focus on reprinting and analyzing images, while David Ehrlich’s Precious Metal Variations is a study of surface and edge, constantly inverting solid forms and negative space.

TEN SECOND FILM Bruce Conner, 1966, 10 sec., 16mm

Runaway Standish Lawder, 1969, 6m, 16mm

Object Conversation Paul Glabicki, 1985, 10m, 16mm

Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune Bill Brand, 1972, 6m,16mm

Colored Relations Barry Spinello, 1970, 5m, 16mm

Diagram Film Paul Glabicki, 1978, 14m, 16mm

Precious Metal Variations David Ehrlich, 1983, 4m, 16mm

Saugus Series Pat O’Neill, 1974, 18m, 16mm

Q&A with filmmaker Bill Brand