Michael Snow: Wavelength (Afterall Books / One Work)

An illustrated study of Michael Snow's "zoom film," which has become a touchstone for art and film studies. In this illustrated study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of virtuosically managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and color, and recession into perspectival depth. At the same time, she points out, it is also austere : the loft space where the action unfolds could be the last clerical outpost of a defunct business. The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events" : a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead.").--Résumé de l'éditeur In 1966 Michael Snow made the film Wavelength , a masterful exploration of the nature of perception. Throughout the film's forty-five minutes, the camera slowly zooms from one end of a New York City loft space to its far wall, accompanied by the sound of a rising sine wave. In this critical study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of expertly managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and colour and recession into perspectival depth. Wavelength was crucial to critics' efforts to establish a vocabulary for the experimental film movement emerging at the time, and has functioned ever since as a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played.