Structural film was an American experimental film movement.

The term was coined by P. Adams Sitney who noted that film artists such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow,Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Owen Land, Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, and Peter Kubelka had moved away from the complex and condensed forms of cinema practiced by such artists as Sidney Peterson and Stan Brakhage

"Structural film" artists pursued instead a more simplified, sometimes even predetermined art. The shape of the film was crucial, the content peripheral.

Bibliography

• P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film. The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, Second Edition, Oxford University Press 1979