Repetition time

pp. 165-175

in: Stephen Heath, Questions of cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

The term "materialist" in the expression 'structural/materialist film" used to characterize a certain development of work in avant-garde independent film-making¹ has to be understood away from any simple reference to the physical materiality of film. "Materialist" stresses process, a film in its process of production of images, sounds, times, meanings, the transformations effected on the basis of the specific properties of film in the relation of a viewing and listening situation. It is that situation which is, finally, the point of 'structural/materialist film", its fundamental operation, the experience of film, and the experience of film.