Michael Sicinski
This is a slightly revised version of an essay published in Qui Parle vol. 11 no. 2. My intent is to use the website to make semi-regular revisions on this piece, as time permits.
Michael Snow's Wavelength
and the Space of Dwelling
In 1967, Michael Snow presented Wavelength, his
fifth film, for the first time. Jonas
Mekas has recalled this initial screening of the the first completed lab print,
for a private gathering of Snow's friends in New York City, saying, "I had
no doubt we had just witnessed a landmark event in cinema" (Mekas, in
Shedden 1995, 85). The history of
experimental film has borne out Mekas's belief, and while a viewing of Wavelength
today remains unlike any other cinematic experience imaginable, Michael Snow
remains an artist commonly admired from afar, respected in the United States
but not exactly well-known, and afforded inconsistent attention by recent
academic cinema studies. In the brief
essay cited above, Mekas compares Snow to Andy Warhol, and laments the fact
that Snow has not attained the same degree of notoriety (ibid). The comparison is instructive. While it would be reductive and inaccurate
to call Snow "the Canadian Warhol," he is without a doubt the most
important Canadian visual artist of the twentieth century. Like Warhol, as well as Marcel Duchamp and
Yoko Ono (another of the century's major artists, equally ignored but for very
different reasons), Snow has built a body of work astonishing in its range of
media, encompassing major contributions in painting, sculpture, photography,
and jazz, as well as cinema.[1]
Mekas goes on with the comparison, conjecturing that
part of the widespread preference for Warhol over Snow has to do with identity
politics.[2] This might be partially correct, but the
emergence of queer Warhol studies has been a recent development, one dedicated
to correcting a long-standing elision of issues of sexuality in Warhol scholarship.[3]
It is tempting, and not altogether inaccurate, to further attribute the
relative eclipse of Snow to chauvinism on the part of the New York-based
artworld. While Snow lived in New York
for a brief time, during which he made Wavelength among other key
pieces, R. Bruce Elder has argued that Snow is a quintessentially Canadian
artist[4],
just as Warhol was in many ways fundamentally "American" (especially
in his embrasure of capitalism as an epistemological position) and virtually
synonymous with the New York scene of the 1960s and 70s. In contrast with Warhol's experiments in the
radical levelling power of the media, Elder argues that Snow's interest in the
dialectical interaction between subjective and objective experience, neither
erradicating the other but achieving a higher order, reflects a concern common
to many Canadian art and film practitioners (Elder 1989, 200).
But all in all, the key difference between Michael
Snow and Andy Warhol is to be found in the work itself, and in the source
materials upon which it draws. Warhol
is in many ways the easier artist.
Although Warhol's work is in most cases just as complex as Snow's, his
work on popular cultural icons, as well as his willingness to engage directly
with the visual language of advertising, envelopes his conceptual strategies
within a veneer of populist accessibility.
Snow's work has always been harder-nosed, even in his popular public
sculptural works such as those installed in Toronto's Eaton Centre shopping
mall and Skydome Stadium.[5] While Warhol's camp sensibility often allows
a point of entry into work which is in many ways austere and serialist,
conversely the dry wit and sensuous character of Snow's work is often missed by
viewers unable to engage with its surface minimalism. Warhol's most aggressively experimental work, especially the
extended cinema pieces like Empire and Sleep, are more often
discussed that seen; in many ways this has been the fate of much of Snow's
oeuvre in the United States.
Wavelength
is something of an exception; in fact it is the work by which Snow is known
best in this country. This is not to
say, however, that its fundamental strangeness and aesthetic radicality have
been completely embraced. In fact,
among those who have written critically about Wavelength, there are
assumptions which impede the full appreciation of the materialist insights the
film offers. Snow's film, whose primary
action is the gradual zoom across a loft space by decreasing the camera lens's
focal length, has consistently been described as a "narrative" film,
albeit one which breaks most of the rules of that mode of discourse. Even while allowing that Wavelength
is a metacommentary on the filmic process, critics have continued to see this
process as primarily a temporal one.
Such temporalization has largely been thought strictly within the
framework of film narrative, "narrative" and "temporality"
essentially conflated (as is so often the case when dealing with the film
medium). Such premises ensnare Snow's
film within a regime of cinematic thought which the film should be understood
to demolish. The drive to co-opt Wavelength
on behalf of narrative cinema is isomorphic with the action which narrative
cinema itself exacts on cinematic space.
Both bespeak a desire to bend their respective objects into accordance
with pre-given, schematic demands.
Enabling my attempt to reconsider Wavelength
are the works of two theorists, both of whom recognize rationalization and
domination as the key dangers of modernity.
The first is Martin Heidegger, who locates a waning of our powers of
apprehension in a desire to "apprehend," through a seizing which
determines in advance what the beings in question will (be allowed to) be.
Representing is no longer the apprehending of that which presences, within
whose
unconcealedment apprehending itself belongs, belongs indeed as a unique
kind of
presencing toward that which presences that is unconcealed. Representing is no
longer a self-unconcealing for . . . , but is a laying hold and
grasping of . . . What
presences does not hold sway, but rather assault rules (Heidegger 1938,
149).
It
is certainly impossible to come to a film or any other cultural artifact with
no preconceptions whatsoever, but this is not what Heidegger is calling for in
this passage. Rather, he asks if in
engaging in representation (in this case, critical representations of Wavelength),
we might resist an instrumental urge to simply "lay hold," an urge
which precludes a transformative encounter with the (art) object
represented. For the object will not
self-disclose in the absence of an attentive viewer who
"co-discloses" through his or her encounter with the object.
But Heidegger's thought shall help us to rethink more
than just the prevalent critical interpretations of Wavelength and the
services into which they have been pressed.
Particularly in some of his late essays, Heidegger offers us a partial
vocabulary for describing the coming-to-presence of space and spatial
relations, in ways which need not be understood as primarily narrative. This is admittedly a reading of Heidegger
which runs counter to some major themes in his work. Questions of temporality and historicity, of returning to
philosophical origins and retracing paths through tradition, are certainly
related to narrative. Heidegger's
contribution to the hermeneutical tradition, as Richard Palmer has noted, is
the articulation of historical with ontological time. Our understanding of Dasein "is not a fixed
understanding but historically formed, accumulated in the very experience of
encountering phenomena" (1969, 128).
Paul Ricoeur has taken the Heideggerian philosophy of temporality in an
explicitly narratological direction.
Ricoeur argues that the category of "care" in Being and
Time is that projective mode through which we understand our own
"within-time-ness," intersects with a narrative experience of
history. The experience of
"plot," he claims, constitutes the ways in which we are able to
reflect upon the historicity of our Being.
The gap between Heidegger's concept of historicality and our own
concept of narrative
time would be unbridgeable if
Heidegger did not provide us with a mediating concept
and if our analysis of narrative time could not be raised above the
level of within-time-
ness. As concerns Heidegger,
the stroke of genius is to have ascribed to what he calls
Wiederholen
("repetition" or "recollection") the fundamental structure
thanks to which
historicality is brought back to its origin in the originary structure
of temporality. Through
repetition, the character of time as stretching-along is rooted in the
deep unity of time as
future, past, and present . . . (Ricoeur 1980, 178).
In some of
Heidegger's later work, however, a related but different tendency can be
observed. A new concern for spatiality,
and the coming-to-presence of spaces, offers the possibility for thinking with
Heidegger about Being as an irreducibly spatial, materialist process. Such a reading is in large part facilitated
by placing the later Heidegger alongside a second major theorist of modernity,
Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre's 1974 book The
Production of Space provides a materialist framework for understanding the
relationship of spatiality and the built environment to social relations, and,
in so doing, can provide an analysis complementary to that of Heidegger for
estimating the consequences of Wavelength's rupture of traditional
cinematic language.
Lefebvre's book intends to serve as a corrective to
what he identified as a recurrent trope within Western metaphysics: the privileging
of time over space, and, within spatial analysis itself, the privileging of
"space" as an abstract concept, denigrating or ignoring altogether
social space as collective, material praxis.
Near the beginning of the book, Lefebvre traces the lineage of this
problem in Western thought, identifying Nietzsche as the sole figure
attributing adequate importance to space (Lefebvre 1974, 22). In fact, taking Lefebvre to the letter on
this point would cast aspersion on the project of this essay, since he
identifies Heidegger himself as yet another philosopher whose principle concern
is with time, space serving only as the location for a temporalized
conception of Dasein.And yet space -- the woods, the track -- is nothing more and nothing
other than 'being-
there', than beings, than Dasein. And, even if Heidegger asks
questions about its origin,
even if he poses 'historical' questions in this connection, there can
be no doubt about the
main thrust of his thinking here: time counts for more than space; Being
has a history, and
history is nothing but the History of Being (Lefebvre 1971, 121).
While
it is true that this criticism is ultimately borne out in Heidegger's
consideration of spatiality in Being and Time[6],
I identify many related concerns between Lefebvre's text and Heidegger's later
essays on dwelling, technology, and the "world picture." Although their emphases differ, both authors
are mobilizing their respective critical apparatuses against a cold abstraction
of the lived world, the domination embodied in a form of modern rationality
which is insufficiently attentive to lived human experience, Lefebvre's philosophy demonstrates the
extent to which our position within the physical dispensation of social space
serves to condition our human potential and perceptions. Conversely, Heidegger's ruminations on
dwelling as a coming-to-presence seem to hinge on recognition of our spatial
"thrownness." From these instants
derive both the material reality of spaces, and their subsequent temporal
dimension, in terms of a reconfigured past and reimagined future.
The dialectical terms of Heidegger's concept of
spatial copresencing are almost photographic in their play of revealing and
concealing. By contrast, Lefebvre's
descriptions of spatial representations emphasize their almost sculptural
solidity. Wavelength provides an
ideal pivot point between these modes of thought. As I hope to show, Michael Snow's film is also concerned with
investigating the relationship between spatiality and dwelling, in particular
by interrogating cinema's specific role within this constellation. First, I plan to reexamine some of the most
influential critical responses to the film, with an eye to the way in which
they continually reinscribe the film within a temporal framework, perceiving
spatiality as a mere facilitator for Wavelength's temporal unfolding.[7] Furthermore, I will detail the manner in
which, even for the most astute critics of avant-garde cinema,
"temporality" in film remains irrevocably inscribed within narrative. The consequences of this
"narrativizing" of Wavelength serve not only to domesticate
the film's radical break with conventional film language, but also to seal over
those fault lines which jeopardize narrative's ideological primacy, cracks in a
massive edifice through which the piercing light of Wavelength aggressively shines. Following from a shift of emphasis away from narrative time to
non-narrative space, the aforementioned theories of Heidegger and Lefebvre will
hopefully offer a critical lens more adequate to the work performed by Snow's
film.[8]
I. Narrative as Enframing
In her seminal essay "Towards Snow," Annette
Michelson describes the effect generated by Wavelength as that of
a bringing-to-self-consciousness of the process of consciousness itself. The film, she argues, provides a metaphor
for the process of seeing, a "literal" metaphor redoubled by both the
camera / loft and the eye / screen relationships. Wavelength, as one of a number of cinematic works which
"present themselves as analogues of consciousness" (Michelson 1971,
172), is seen by Michelson as a real-time (if slowed) analogue for the process
of perception, of which the film itself might be seen as a
"document." Borrowing from
phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, Michelson understands the perceptual processes
of consciousness to be entirely temporal. She quotes Gurwitsch as follows: "In modern terminology one
could compare consciousness with a perpetual succession of kinematographic
pictures . . . a unidimensional sphere of being, whose fundamental structure
consists only and exclusively in temporality" (quoted in Michelson 1971,
172).
Just prior to this portion of Gurwitsch's quoted text
is a recapitulation of an analogy by David Hume, who called consciousness
"a theatre without a stage" (ibid). So, for Gurwitsch and by extension for Michelson, Wavelength
is not only primarily concerned with temporality, but temporality as theater. This is only the clearest example of a
desire which seems to emerge with great regularity when spectators are
confronted with Wavelength: a narrative urge. Michelson uses language such as "threshold of tension,"
"horizon of expectation," phrases which seem to re-enfold Snow's film
within a tradition of narrative film grammar in which, he has noted, he was
never especially interested (MacDonald 1993).[9] This model of conscious as solely temporal,
and the consideration of Wavelength as a paragon illustration of this
model, reduces space to a secondary "place," that place in which time
(as consciousness) passes as a set of narrative perceptions. In fact, Michelson claims that Wavelength
effects an "emptying" of space.
We are proceeding from uncertainty to certainty, as our camera narrows
its field, arousing
and then resolving our tension of puzzlement as to its ultimate
destination, describing, in
the splendid purity of its one, slow movement, the notion of the
"horizon" characteristic
of every subjective process and fundamental as a trait of
intentionality. . . And it is as if
by emptying the space of his film (dramatically, through extreme
distancing, visually by
presenting it as mere volume, the "scene" of pure movement in
time), Snow has re-defined
filmic space as that of action (Michelson 1971, 174-175).
Our
perception happens in time -- this is true. But the emphasis on the concatenation
intentionality-temporality-action provides a merely idealist model of sense
perception, which is also, of course, a material process. The concept "intentionality" here
seems to center the perceiving subject, placing her or him within a sensual
framework of which she or he is the master.
The sensual world described by Michelson unfolds for the
perceiver. "Action," here, I
take to be the film's analogic doubled experience -- the "action" of
the zoom and the "action" of the spectator's consciousness toward the
filmic information on screen.
Michelson, perhaps in anticipation of a critical condemnation of Wavelength
as "illegible," situates the film within a field of narrativized
"action."
. . . for someone . . . deeply and exclusively committed to the film of
tight narrative structure,
Wavelength could,
above all other films from the American [sic] avant-garde, present some-
thing both new and familiar, welcome, in any case -- if one
understands the continuity of the
zoom action to stand as a kind of quintessential instance of that
spatio-temporal continuity
subtending the narrative integrity of those comedies, westerns,
gangster films which formed the
substance of the Hollywood tradition . . . (ibid)
To some extent this characterization of Snow's film
stands to reason. To the hypothetical
viewer accustomed to films which adhere to a traditional narrative grammar, the
temporal protraction of Wavelength is likely to be its most
disconcerting aspect. In fact, at moments
the film is so still that it appears not to move, and Michelson's description
reminds us that Wavelength remains true to cinema's fundamental status
as a time art. Michelson's analysis,
however, tends toward the homeopathic. Wavelength
treats traditional "film time" with visual
"thought-time." That is, we
shift from time to metatime. Like
enframes like.
By placing Wavelength within the narrative
tradition, albeit as a metacommentary on that tradition (a film whose
"story" is the purely temporal cognitive process of watching
films), Michelson locates Wavelength
within a temporal humanism, implying that the film proposes a spectatorship
which posits "humanity" (or more precisely, a specific, historically
determined notion of what being human means) as both centered subject and
represented object of any filmic experience.
This is a reasonable interpretation to infer from the film, especially
given the role of temporality in the phenomenological thought prevalent in both
Snow's and Michelson's thinking at this time.
However, this view does not fully account for Snow's deconstructive
move, one much more radical than mere metacommentary. Rather than recenter the viewing subject in time, Wavelength
dislodges the bourgeois humanism of both film narrative and the cinematic
apparatus itself, precisely by charging right through them, following them
through to their dialectical conclusions.
The movie camera inherits Quattrocento perspective
from easel painting. This mode of
perception, which posits a monocular subject for whom a coherent visual world
unfolds, is of course wholly conventional and, in fact, distorts its subject,
erring however on the side of apparent clarity.[10] Jean-Louis Baudry has analyzed the cinematic
apparatus and elaborated its embodiment of the Renaissance perspectival
ideal. The world as visioned by the
camera is captured, framed, and distanced in accordance with a subject position
safely outside that which is filmed, a spectacle laid out before a mastering
eye.
The world is no longer only an "open and indeterminate
horizon." Limited by the framing,
lined up, put at the proper distance, the world offers up an object
endowed with meaning,
an intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the
"subject" which sights it
(Baudry 1970, 537).
Like
Michelson, Baudry identifies in the filmic spectacle an implied action of
consciousness, performed by a subject, with intention toward the object under
scrutiny. However, this drama of
visuality is not benign, an abstract temporality concretized in the profilmic
event. Baudry recognizes that the look
enforced by the "window on the world" is the look of bourgeois
ideology. Idealist humanism is literally
inscribed upon the object so seen.
. . . [I]f the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the
laws of matter and
time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement --
conditions fulfilled by
the possibilities of shooting and of film -- the world will not only be
constituted by this
eye but for it. The movability
of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions
for the manifestation of the "transcendental subject" (Baudry
1970, 537).
The
narrative of consciousness which Wavelength allegedly dramatizes is
"the story of the eye," an organ which is conceived here not so much
as part of the body, but as Leo Steinberg put it, "a part of the
mind." According to the
perceptualist, "theatre of consciousness" model, then, Wavelength
is indeed an axiomatic film. It could
be understood in this light to dramatize the disembodied eye of the
transcendental subject, the zoom across the loft dramatizing the apprehension
of that spectacle which was created precisely for such a subject, whom it in
turn confirms. And in so doing, it would be temporality as lived time --
the time spent absorbing the film itself -- which is the concrete activity of
the narrative, because this Albertian apparatus effects an abstract
levelling of space ("emptying the space"). This abstraction and nullification of the
materiality of space is a precondition of filmic narrative.
Stephen Heath has explored this imperative in his
essay "Narrative Space." In
it, he retraces the history of the abstraction of space in Western
representation, starting from the Renaissance and culminating in the cinematic
apparatus (1976, 391). He extends this
line of inquiry into the ideological effects of cinema through an examination
of the concomitance of narrative clarity and the visual mastery of the
perspectival model. Space, Heath
argues, has the potential to be in excess of the narrative demands of a
story-film; its materiality poses a threat to the singular meaning necessary to
insure the so-called universal legibility of linear narrative. The first step in the process of
"domesticating" space for narrativity is, as previously argued,
implicit in the optical system of the apparatus itself. The Albertian model takes the eye outside of
the spectacle, insuring that it is, as Heath writes, "no longer englobed in
the area of the painting" (ibid).
In so doing, space becomes an object from which the eye is set apart,
putting its insistent materiality at a manageable distance. But the semiotic hold of a specifically narrative
film experience requires a second-order hypostatization of space in order to
assure its dominance.
The filmmaker, like the painter, must make decisions
about the frame, in accordance with the film apparatus's historical
inheritance of the bounded visual field of easel painting (Heath 1976, 390)[11]. The frame, as a boundary which not only
excises a specific, limited "window" from the visual field, but
ascribes to it an artificial geometrical order, has evolved in mainstream film
production into a primarily temporal circumscription. Heath elaborates:
Frame space . . . is constructed as narrative space. It is narrative significance that at any
moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and "read,"
and that determines the
development of the filmic cues in their contributions to the definition
of space in frame . . .
Narrative contains the mobility that could threaten the clarity of
vision in a constant
renewal of perspective; space becomes place -- narrative as the taking
place of film -- in
a movement which is no more than the fulfillment of the Renaissance
impetus . . . (Heath
1976, 392).
Thus,
in a narrative film, space serves as a container for a predetermined set of
actions, as "place" or locale.
Space's material existence is disarticulated as narrative space becomes
"background" to the elaboration of figures on / in a stage, usually
the "center stage" of the Albertian vanishing point. "The vision of the image is its
narrative clarity and that clarity hangs on the negation of space for place,
the constant realization of center in function of narrative purpose, narrative
movement . . ." (Heath 1976, 394).
In the traditional narrative film, space is both
container (or action / temporality) and contained (by the frame, which in turn
"bounds" only narrative action).
In either case, the aggressive assertion of space as a palpable entity
serves to derail primary narrative clarity.[12] In this respect, the abstraction of human
sense perception which characterizes readerly narrative discourse finds itself
bolstered by a visual analogue. Just
as, in conventional realism, no detail appears which is without some function,
even if that function is only to serve as a "nothing," an
authenticating triviality which attests to the "reality" of the
scene, the narrative space of traditional film-frame space is present to be "acted
through," as one plays through a golf course. The space of the green is
just so much noise surrounding each hole along the narrative. And as such, narrative space is presented in
order to ratify that which transpires within it.[13] Spaces such as this, of course, do not merely
appear in the world. Like the
technological development they are, they are productions. However, rather than displaying their
producedness, asking spectators to assess them as produced spaces which
could have been produced in other, perhaps more sensitive ways, narrative
spaces work to efface the evidence of their having been produced. They tend to be presented as
inevitabilities, which, given that they are cut to the measure of narrative
demand, is not really inaccurate.
The need is to cut up and then join together in a kind of spatial Aufhebung
that
decides a superior unity, the binding of the spectator in the space of
the film, the
space it realizes. . . . the space constructed in film is exactly a
filmic construction
(Heath 1976, 394-395).
Narrative space, then, might best be understood as a
form of technology in the sense criticized by Heidegger in his essay "The
Question Concerning Technology," as a means of mastery which
"challenges forth." The
profound arrogance of a humanism which, in Heidegger's view, has tragically
lost its way, is evidenced by the predictability, standardization, and
encapsulation which traditional narrative inflicts upon filmic space.
What kind of unconcealment is it, then, that is particular to that
which comes to stand
forth through this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to
stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that
it may be on call
for a further ordering.
Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We
call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. . . . Whatever stands by
in the sense of standing-
reserve no longer stands over against us as object (Heidegger 1955,
17).
It seems not at all coincidental to a discussion of
Heidegger's critique of instrumentality that the optical domination of space
within cinema, which remains primarily a temporally deployed medium, begins
with the imposition of the frame. For
with the frame comes a physical boundary which forces that which exists within
its perimeter to submit to an external demand to be something discrete and
completely knowable. Heidegger
identifies "enframing" as the modern technological mode, a means-end
rationalization of the world in which difference is leveled in order to provide
a predictable standing-reserve, able to be brought to bear for the confirmation
of that worldview which flatters the human subject with a false
omnipotence. In such arrogance
Heidegger recognizes the danger of technological thinking.
This danger attests to us in two ways.
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer
concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as
standing-reserve,
and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of
the standing-
reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that
is, he comes to
the point where he himself will have to be taken as
standing-reserve. Meanwhile
man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture
of lord of the
earth. In this way the
impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters
exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final
delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only
himself
(Heidegger 1955, 27).
This
complex passage requires some explication.
For Heidegger, the process of unconcealment is the mode of the
revelation of truth, and this process relies on a series of interlocking
injunctions. The act of unconcealment
is an ongoing entering-into-presence of something which can occur in two
modes. One is physis, which
Heidegger likens to the flower coming to bloom of its own accord, a natural
process (which must nonetheless be witnessed or attended to). The creative act, however, is for Heidegger
poiesis,
the bringing-forth of truth by revealing it, as the builder brings his or her
craft into being through a becoming-responsible to the medium. This material act is a co-presencing,
whereby the artisan is "starting something on its way into arrival"
(1955, 9). In the act of fashioning not
just a mere object but a work of human expression from the "raw"
material, the artisan can be understood to reveal the medium, bringing forth
from it something new which in some way was latent within it, concealed. The creative act, in a sense, allows the
material to "presence," to be seen and exist in a new way.
Of course, this craftsperson has a choice, one which
is not entirely free but must take into consideration those social pressures
placed upon him. Shall they fashion a
work which exhibits his or her vision of good, socially-minded design, or build
cheaply and satisfy the whims of a fickle marketplace? And, if the latter is chosen, what are the
consequences? As Heidegger states in
the passage quoted above, in cutting the world to its own measure, humankind
drives itself to the brink of its own objectification. In ascribing to the material world, and to
other people, only those characteristics which one requires for the
reinscription of one's own sense of identity, one clearly makes a world in
which all one could expect for oneself is to be so dominated in turn. This is the irony of the moment of modern
technological thinking: humankind's placement at the center of its own universe
creates the conditions for its own self-domination.
Enframing, then, is that bounded mode of apprehension
in which there is a place for everything, and that which falls outside
that specific place of designated action (in the narrative frame or the
quotidian visual field) is simply not seen. How do we truly consider the space which the camera will not
see, which is in excess of the technology of narrative temporality? As we have seen, within the logic of
enframing which asserts the priority of narrative time, those material spaces
of Wavelength are simply recuperated, brought within the time-frame of
our own "perceptual" histories.
Or, arguing within another popular register, one can englobe the world
within a different narrative and, rather than grafting it onto the film, decry
Snow as an apolitical bourgeois who refuses out of stubbornness to tell the correct
story. The synthetic category
"structural film" is too commonly dismissed as telling
"non-narrativity" as the story of its own presumed privilege. Films like Wavelength are then made
to stand in for a cold, institutionally-sanctioned elitism which
"effaces" history, "history" understood only in terms of
narrativity. Such a master narrative of
an allegedly stable referent -- "politics" -- allows David James to
write the following.
Relinquishing the populist ambitions of the underground and the
revolutionary ones
of contemporary political filmmakers, structural film became Art, high
culture distinct
from and opposed to the mass media in general and the film industry and
even other
independent film in particular.
But in thus repressing its social milieu, it deprived
itself of anything to represent.
Its anathemazation of narrative was as much a social
inevitability as a formal choice.
Precluded from engaging or even recognizing its own
social situation, it had no story to tell (James 1989, 275).
Within
this story, it seems, the properly "political" film, we can assume,
is not the stageless "theater" of consciousness, but consists of
those acts contained within the social theater, the "theater" of history. We begin to act in the theater of politics
from that "place" in which we find ourselves. But Wavelength asks after the
philosophical consequences of this very thrownness. As Jonathan Rosenbaum succinctly puts it, "at the moment
when perception itself becomes a political question, Snow's work functions
politically" (Rosenbaum 1983, 187).
II.
The Materiality of Dwelling
Wavelength
could be understood, as I suggested earlier, as a submission to the constraints
of the cinematic apparatus. This specifically
means that the successive images of the loft space which are created by the
film unfold visually for the viewer's eye, in accordance with those geometric
rules which governed the invention of an illusionistic, perspectival cinema. Not coincidentally, the space of the film is
that most easily rendered of geometric abstractions, the cube. The high angle of the camera suggests, for
the first third of the film, a cube described from the upper right hand corner,
at a slight tilt, so as to subtly emphasize the illusion of depth proffered by
the camera. The scene is spatially
bounded by the rear wall and windows, which through much of this portion of the
film tend to flatten the cityscape outside the windows. The scene thus inscribed, then, is a paradigmatic
geometric abstraction, which the camera centers on screen for the centered
viewer, sitting still, at the designated angle of vision.
The film, however, inscribes the subject of mastery at
the apex of the inverted pyramid of perfect vision precisely in order to
emphasize that subject's subsequent objectification in accordance with
the very visual abstraction which purports to deliver the world. Human activities occur within the space to
the camera's utter indifference. But
more importantly, the insistent tightening of the space rendered by the
apparatus could be seen to thrust the spectator into an unwelcome vision of the
perfect world promised by abstract illusionism. This is a world evacuated of subjectivity, given over to an
enframing mastery out of control. Upon
first viewing Wavelength it is difficult not to feel as though one is
being physically held in place, information inundating the windshield of the
world's slowest vehicle. As Heidegger
promised, that system of domination whereby one enframes the world boomerangs
dialectically, dominating the master in turn.
By following the consequences of the cinematic apparatus through to
their logical conclusion, Snow brings apparatus theory full-circle. The promise of the fully present humanist subject
of conventional cinema becomes radically dehumanized, starkly
erased. The subject is
"decentered" by hewing unswervingly to the central axis.
If this were all that Snow had accomplished with Wavelength,
this would be radical enough. This
commonly held view of the way Wavelength decenters both author and
spectator is certainly crucial for the history of North American alternative
cinema, shifting the stakes away from an heroic subjectivism which achieves its
creative zenith in the cinema of Stan Brakhage, toward a concern with
structure, in all its meanings, as dialectically determining and determined by
human agency. While some commentators
observed this structural turn as both hermetically elitist and socially
incapacitating, the concern with cinematic and other forms of language, as well
as a new-found understanding of "identity" as a constrained fiction
which should be regarded as a meaning-effect rather than a pre-given certainty,
must be seen as necessary historical precursors to the complex explorations of
identity-generation and its relationship to representation, which one finds in
the films of Chantal Akerman, Su Friedrich, Yvonne Rainer, and the
collaborations between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, to name only the most
obvious successors.
I contend that Wavelength goes further than
this, taking this apparent "anti-humanism" to its limits,
opening up a viewing experience which provides the beginnings of a new sense of
human subjectivity as materially and spatially "present." This is certainly not the humanist
presence of the classical model of film space, which affirms us by sealing over
our lack. Rather, by inviting (some
might say "forcing") a recognition of our materiality, our presence
in space, Snow's film dethrones the human subject, placing her or him in the
position of an object among others, but one which has the ability and the responsibility
to attend to the presence of that which is around us, not as its master, but as
its co-discloser.
Near the beginning of the film, some people bring a
bookshelf into the loft space. This has
been cited as the first of several "narrative" events within the
film, although I think it is more accurate to identify this as one of Snow's
provocative puns: there are people "moving in" to the loft, and we,
the viewers, are "moving in" via the zoom lens. But beneath this wordplay lay one of the
most intriguing issues broached by Wavelength. The film, I think, metaphorically asks us what it means to
"move in," to truly occupy space.
This is precisely the question posed by Heidegger in his essay
"Building Dwelling Thinking."
In it, Heidegger inquires after the origin of dwelling, an occupation of
space which does not seek to dominate, in the sense of a military occupation,
but which may in turn occupy us. This process begins with a new understanding
of "boundary," not as an enframing, but as the location from which an
active being of space begins.
A space is something that has been made room for, something that is
cleared and
free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which
something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that
from which
something begins its presencing. . . . Space is in essence that
for which room
has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made
is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of
a location,
that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their
being from locations and not from "space" (Heidegger 1951, 154).
Heidegger
understands the space of dwelling as the opposite of rationalized, abstract
space, forcibly marked out on the map.
Rather, the space of dwelling is profoundly dialectical; by attending to
a space, one recognizes that the space exists as a space by differing from
other spaces around it. We create the
space, in effect, by focusing on it, allowing it to presence. But this process is not only subjective. The presencing of the space involves an
assertion of its material presence, and our role as beholders and dwellers
within that space is one also of being held within or shaped by that space.
In Wavelength, this process of activating the
dialectical presencing of the loft space is accomplished through Snow's
techniques which emphasize the irreducible materiality of space. Shortly before the sine wave begins on the
audio track, Snow manipulates the images with filters, creating a flash between
clear images of the loft with a generalized light coming in from the windows,
and a darkening of the loft space, with an attendant clarity of the street
scene outside the space. The interplay
between interior and exterior is just one example of how Snow, like Heidegger,
recognizes that once we attend to spaces, such boundaries are understood to be
artificial impositions, but also human interventions which help those spaces to
presence in the first place. This is
explicit in Heidegger's discussion of the function of the bridge.
Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the
stream that can
be occupied by something. One
of them proves to be a location, and does so
because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a
location to stand
in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the
bridge (Heidegger
1951, 150).
In
this respect it seems apposite that Snow conceives of the zoom as a kind of
optical bridge, which can be put to uses different from those it commonly
serves within narrative grammar.
I knew I wanted to expand something -- a zoom -- that normally happens
fast, and allow
myself or the spectator to be sort of inside it for a long period. You'd get to know this
device which normally just gets you from one space to another (Snow, in
MacDonald
1993, 63).
Snow
places the zoom-bridge in Wavelength in the service of ontological
inquiry. The space of dwelling is
produced precisely by slowing down the quotidian, in order to allow an
attention to the space usually occluded by simply moving "from one space
to another."
In this respect, the space of dwelling is a product of
human attention, but one which, unlike the idealist model of the apparatus,
does not efface our materiality in the process. For co-disclosure of the loft space requires that we too be
in that space; the ongoing act of dwelling requires a recognition that our
bodily presence within the dwelling is only a co-presence, that we in turn are
continually produced and re-produced by the space around us. This Heidegger calls our "stay"
within and among things.
Spaces, and with them space as such -- "space" -- are always
provided for already
within the stay of mortals.
Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the
dwelling of man. To say that
mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist
through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations
(Heidegger 1951,
157).
Snow's
film aggressively materializes -- as opposed to "dramatizes," which
implies both the distance of narrativity and the safety of "mere"
representation -- what it means to stay within the space of dwelling. We must allow ourselves to submit to its
demands, in a process of self-disclosure, while simultaneously attending to
that space as it comes to presence at the moment of our presence within it --
two coextensive moments within the undisclosure of the materiality of the
encounter.
Wavelength
accomplishes all this, in large part, by emphasizing the human activity behind
the camera's look. Discussions of the
anti-humanist stance of Wavelength often ignore or disfigure this human
presence, since the history of the dominant idealist cinema equates humanity
with humanism. Michael Snow performs
work on the film, which in turn performs work on the space of the represented
loft, continually asserting the human production which enables this space's
coming to presence.[14]
In the first third of the film, one
sees the flapping corner of hand-held gels which transform the space into
sumptuous, deep monochromes. The
penetrating eye of the invincible camera is repeatedly humanized by Snow after
the first fifteen minutes, after which black leader pops into the filmstrip,
making the camera "blink."
With each split-second blackout, the view is changed either slightly
(focal-length position as well as change in film stocks) or substantially
(local-color views giving way to hot pinks and diffused whites). This is, on a
literal level, the same space. But
unlike the shifting views of narrative space, Snow's material dislocations ape
the surface logic of continuity editing in order to underscore the Heraclitan
axiom that no space is simply "there." Human activity produces space, while at the same time that
creativity is bounded, or begins from, the demands of the space itself. Henri Lefebvre has discussed this dual,
pivotal quality of the productive interaction of human beings and spaces. On the one hand, he understands human agency
as being hemmed in by the more burdensome structural demands of spaces of
domination:
Activity in space is restricted by that space; space 'decides' what
activity may occur,
but even this 'decision' has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it
implies a certain order -- and hence also a certain disorder (just as
what may be seen
defines what is obscene).
Interpretation comes later, almost as an afterthought. Space
commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and
distances to be covered
(Lefebvre 1974, 143).
But
at the same time Lefebvre recognizes that in the spatial field of power, the
repressed may always return. Abstract
space may, through human intervention, be metamorphosed dialectically into the
space of potential revolution.
Homogeneous in appearance (and appearance is its strength), abstract
space is by no
means simple. In the first
place, there are its constitutive dualities.
For it is both a
result and a container, both produced and productive -- on the one hand
a representation
of space (geometric homogeneity) and on the other a representational
space (the phallic).
The supposed congruence of the formants of this duality serves,
however, to mask its
duplicity. For, while abstract space remains an arena
of practical action, it is also
an ensemble of images, signs and symbols. It is unlimited, because it is empty, yet at
the same time it is full of juxtapositions, of proximities
('proxemics'), of emotional
distances and limits. It is
thus at once lived and represented, at once the expression and
the foundation of a practice (Lefebvre 1974, 288).
As I
have stated above, it is precisely the quandaries of abstract space,
exemplified by the technologies which are Snow's historical inheritance, which
Wavelength
elaborates.[15] But more than this, in accordance with
Lefebvre's injunction to comprehend space as an ongoing series of material
dispensations, Snow foregrounds the activity of seemingly "passive"
space. Snow's materialism is almost
scientific in its stance, but clearly this is not a technological enframing, in
which the world is firmly apprehended in order to be bent to the measure of
human will. Snow's physical materialism
seems more of a piece with Heisenberg.
In observing the shifting visual pulsations of the spaces produced by Wavelength,
one becomes aware that "spaces," and the "things" within
them, are not solid but rather in a constant state of flux. The yellow chair which features prominently
in the film is altered along with its context.
It pops into deep greens only to burst into a white flare of light. Often, the film's return to the local color
of the loft is presented in a grainy film stock, live with swirling
particles. The materiality of the film
in the projector is indeed emphasized by these incursions of
anti-illusionism. But this assertion of
materiality is part of a total destabilizing of the depicted world of the loft
space. Shifts in film grain, along with
the oscillating sine wave which comprises the majority of the soundtrack[16],
demonstrate the most basic material level of sensual experience. Sight and sound are nothing more than
reactions to light and air, material subatomic particles in motion. In Wavelength, it's not that everything
is "alive," in some sort of fantastic realm in which the pathetic
fallacy ceases to be fallacious; it's that everything is active and in
motion, including the viewer him/herself.
Our heightened awareness of the motion of the motion picture, then, does
refer to the thingness of the celluloid strip -- on a fourth viewing I began to
notice that the film visibly vibrated in the projector gate, another aspect of
the material substrate of film which "narrative space" must stabilize
-- but it also refers to those spaces outsside the film as well. After all, the
space of the viewing situation is itself only created as a space as it enfolds
both the projected film, and our spectatorship. The theater is a place we are in the habit of touristically
visiting, but perhaps Wavelength asks us to make this a space of
dwelling as well.
III.
Picture versus Motion
As I have tried to show, this process must be a material
dwelling. That is, we must
simultaneously allow spaces to come to presence without deforming them into
places of expedience, and recognize this thrownness as a concrete social
situation, a spatio-historical formation.
While Heidegger provides a crucial ethical model for allowing the world
to change us, this studied attention to what is becomes most transformative
when articulated with a program for intervention into the material world. Thinking Lefebvre along with Heidegger
reminds us that part of our responsibility to the world is to bring it into
being with an ethical, affirmative praxis.
Lefebvre, it must be remembered, is writing from the
position of a materialism which saw itself assailed by the "linguistic
turn," rather than broadened by it.
Shortly after the passage quoted above, Lefebvre stipulates, "We
are not concerned here with mental or literary 'places', nor with philosophical
topoi, but with places of a purely political and social kind" (ibid
288-289). As evidenced by The
Production of Space's thoroughgoing critique of the material effects of the
philosophical and geometrical abstraction of space, this distinction is
certainly not absolute for Lefebvre.
However there is a sense that representation is not in itself material
or embodied enough for Lefebvre. By way of criticizing Roland Barthes's semiotics,
Lefebvre writes
It is pure illusion to suppose that thought can reach, grasp or define
what is in space
on the basis of propositions about space and general concepts
such as message, code
and readability. This illusion,
which reduces both matter and space to a representation,
is in fact simply a version of spiritualism or idealism -- a version
which is surely common
to all those who put political power, and hence state power, in
brackets, and so see nothing
but things (Lefebvre 1974, 162).
It
is certainly true that simply describing relations of space and power could
well redouble the violence of abstraction which gave rise to those
relationships in the first place. But,
to return to an earlier point, the rupture which is strong enough to provoke a
radical reimagination of spatiality may well be an idealist one. However, lest we succumb to crude dualisms,
we must understand, as Lefebvre cautiously acknowledges, that ideality and
materiality are moments within a simultaneous, dialectical process. Their dual conditioning and sparring are the
conditions of subjectivity, and it is only with the perception of jarring
dislocations between and within these two moments that fissures in the edifice
of the sovereign subject can begin to erupt.
Then, as we have suspected, much more is at stake in
the realm of so-called "representation" than crude materialism has
heretofore allowed. Lefebvre, exemplary
in this respect, recognized the subject within representation as being
crucially contested, material terrain.
But his placement within intellectual history provoked this skepticism
towards representation; he perceived the shifting fortunes of French leftist
politics as bringing about an undialectical politics of image and sign. Film work, presumably always primarily an
inquiry into representations, would have to find an expression of the
materiality of space, of space as primary effect, to be able to come into
dialogue with Lefebvre's theory of space.
Wavelength, as I have argued, does indeed provide a
representation of space, but it also is an active production of the
space it depicts. Snow's film does not
subordinate material space to the needs of synthetic narrative or bourgeois
reassurance. By recognizing the dialectical
character of disclosure and undisclosure, Snow makes cinematic space real. Each lurch forward of the zoom throws more
and more of the loft space out of sight --
a quality of Wavelength observed by those critics who have
emphasized the film's "narrativity."
But more significantly, each disclosure is the creation of a new space,
all the more palpably material due to the compression established by the zoom.[17]
As the film reaches its conclusion, the space created
becomes increasingly flat. Following
Taubin's exit from the frame, the windows begin to flank a slight strip of wall
containing what are now visible as photographs. A brief monochromatic outburst begins, flashing in deep yellows
and blues, a kind of short history of modernist flatness. Dust becomes visible in the edges of the
windows on the left. The image of
waves, which the spectator by this point realizes to be the final space of the
film, suddenly appears doubled atop itself.
A "lost" space from the past returns in a ghostly flashback to
"enframe" the more solid interior image of the same. Our memories of previous spaces will
condition our perception of spaces to come -- this is the temporality of
consciousness. But more than this, Snow
seems to imply that our experience of having seen dwelling enframed might
allow his viewers to dwell in space(s) to come, inside as well as outside the
frame. This is the point at which a new
kind of enframing of space may point the way to a disenframing. Heidegger writes
On the one hand, Enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of
ordering that
blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically
endangers
the relation to the essence of truth.
On the other hand, Enframing comes to pass
for its part in the granting that lets man endure -- as yet
unexperienced, but perhaps
more experienced in the future -- that he may be the one who is needed
and used
for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of truth. Thus does the arising of the
saving power appear (Heidegger 1955, 33).
In the final minutes of the film, the ghost frame
flickers out, the double enframing giving way to the image of the ocean, still,
in black and white, for several minutes.
We are in the space of "mere" representation, presumably the
only space the cinema can offer for our dwelling. However, the conclusion of Wavelength, I contend, forces
us as spectators to confront a spatial reality beyond that depicted in the
film. Following 44 minutes of forward
compression, and the subsequent creation of a succession of filmic spaces, Snow
pulls us back, out of the photographic image, by pulling his lens out of
focus. This action is legible in the
film as both the elimination of imagery -- the photograph of waves becomes a
black blur and then gives way to pure white light -- and a reverse trajectory,
which moves us away from the film image.
As we pull back, the image dissolves into the flat materiality of light
particles on the screen, in front of which we sit.
This filmic act, like the spaces of dwelling described
by Heidegger, must be understood dialectically. A theory of "structuralist film" which places Wavelength
into a Greenbergian lineage of modernism, wherein the assertion of the flatness
of the movie screen is an axiomatic end in itself, will miss the performative
character of this reversal of spatial movement. In this respect I refer to Michael Fried's analysis of minimalist
(or "literalist") sculpture and its radical difference from
Greenbergian modernism. He writes, "Whereas in previous art 'what is to be
had from the work is located strictly within [it],' the experience of literalist
art is of an object in a situation -- one that, virtually by definition,
includes the beholder . . ." (Fried 1967, 219). Fried has called this situation one of
"theatre," wherein an art object's raison d'être is to force
us to interact with it in a play of multivalent spatial production. Instead of the pure temporality of a
"theatre of consciousness," in which an artwork radiates its total
shape across time, work such as that of Donald Judd, Robert Morris and, indeed,
Michael Snow, dramatizes our bodily location in space, and in fact continually
readjusts it, provoking, one might say, a "consciousness of theatre."
In Wavelength, we are not suddenly confronted
with flatness, but physically moved back into flatness. In the last few seconds of Wavelength,
we are distanced from the representational space of the film, at the same
moment that the lighted white field illuminates our spatial location within the
theatre, a location rendered perceptible as space by the dialectical
operation of the film. Just as, in
Heidegger's formulation, a space along a river becomes a location only in
relation to its enbridgement, Snow's film literally brings to light our spatial
existence within the theatre, our emplotment within space. Considering the role of filmic
entertainments within the current phase of capital, it seems fair to say that
the movie theatre is typically a decidely unphilosophical place. Wavelength, however, asks us to
physically dwell within those exhibition spaces in which it occurs. Fried claimed that minimalist sculpture, due to its
performative, spatial character, was "(to say the worst) corrupted or
perverted by theatre" (Fried 1967, 227).
Michael Snow takes this gesture one step further, "perverting"
theatre with philosophy.
For invaluable
assistance with this essay, I would very much like to thank Fred Dolan, Michael
Chaiken, Bill Selman, David Sherman at Canyon Cinema, and especially Kaja
Silverman, who will certainly see many concepts which she first introduced
reflected here.
Works cited
Jean-Louis
Baudry. "Ideological Effects of
the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus."
Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and
Methods
Volume II. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986 [essay written 1970].
R. Bruce Elder. Image and Identity: Reflections on
Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University
Press, 1989.
Michael Fried. "Art and Objecthood." Morris Philipson and Paul J. Gudel,
eds. Aesthetics Today. New York: New American Library, 1980
[essay originally published 1967].
Stephen Heath. "Narrative Space." Philip Rosen, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 [essay originally published 1976].
Martin
Heidegger. "The Age of the World
Picture." William Lovitt,
trans. The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977 [essay
written 1938].
Martin
Heidegger. "Building Dwelling
Thinking." Albert Hofstadter,
trans. Poetry, Language, Thought. New
York: Harper and Row, 1971 [essay written 1951].
Martin
Heidegger. "The Question
Concerning Technology." William
Lovitt, trans. The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977 [essay
written 1955].
David James. Allegories of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [written
1974].
Scott
MacDonald. A Critical Cinema 2:
Interviews with Independent Filmmakers.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Scott
MacDonald. Avant Garde Film: Motion
Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Jonas Mekas. "Michael Snow: Achievement vs. Money
and Fame." Jim Shedden, ed. Presence and Absence: The Films
of Michael Snow 1956-1991. Toronto:
Art Gallery of Ontario / Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995.
Annette
Michelson. "Toward
Snow." P. Adams Sitney, ed. The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory
and Criticism. New York:
New York University Press, 1978 [essay originally published 1971].
Richard E. Palmer. Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1969.
Paul Ricoeur. "Narrative Time." W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Jonathan
Rosenbaum. Film: The Front Line --
1983. Denver: Arden Press, 1983.
Bart Testa. "An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow's
Films." Jim Shedden, ed. Presence and Absence: The Films of Michael Snow 1956-1991. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario / Alfred A.
Knopf Canada, 1995.
[1] A series of four
books, collectively called "The Michael Snow Project," together give
as complete a picture as possible of Michael Snow's multimedia oeuvre. In addition to Presence and Absence,
the volume dealing with Snow's cinema, there are three other volumes, one each
on Snow's music, his non-film visual art, and his collected writings.
[2] Mekas's
statement on this matter argues that "maybe it's time to return to the auteur
theory in art. I won't exaggerate at all by saying that auteurs are
being hated today by the ethnic/sexual/social/health activists, funders and
promoters. So, while Andy's work sells in millions, Michael's work still
remains in the kingdom of art, not people . . . " Some readers may find
this statement offensive and conservative.
I, however, think that while Mekas is not going out of his way not
to offend, his claim has a significant basis in reality -- some artists and
critics have indeed perceived Snow,
Mekas and others as a cinematic "old guard" whose
"formalist" endeavors are politically and socially irrelevant. Such
claims are untenable in their generality, of course, as well as being
historically short-sighted. Mekas's involvement in the legal defense of Jack
Smith's Flaming Creatures should in itself belie any claims about Mekas's "conservatism."
[3] For example, see
Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out:
Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Richard Meyer,
"Warhol's Clones," Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 1 (Spring
1994); and Douglas Crimp, "Getting the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies
and Queer Culture" (unpublished lecture presented at the University of
Rochester Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies, June 1988).
[4] See Elder's
magisterial Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture
(Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1989).
[5] On the former,
see Peter Gibian, "The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and
Spectacles," Tabloid #4 (part one) and #5 (part two), 1980. On the latter, see MacDonald 1992.
[6] In section 70 of Being and Time, "The
Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein," Heidegger
writes, "Temporality is the meaning of the Being of care. Dasein's constitution and its ways to be are
possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality, regardless of whether
this entity occurs 'in time' or not.
Hence Dasein's spatiality must be grounded in temporality" (New
York: Harper, 1962 [originally published 1927], 418). He continues by explaining the ineluctably temporal Dasein
"makes space" for itself.
"It determines its own location in such a manner that it comes back
from the space it has made room for to the 'place' which it has reserved"
(ibid, 419). I contend, however,
that it is an open question to what extent Heidegger's prioritizing of time
over space precludes a fruitful application of Heidegger's work in this
area. Lefebvre, demonstrably on the
more humanist side of 20th century French thought, would certainly agree that
abstract "space" in itself is not his preferred object of analysis,
and that, like Heidegger, he finds space compelling only in its lived,
existential reality.
[7] In this respect,
I am in agreement with Bart Testa, who finds in Snow's film a radical reversal
of the terms on which we usually conceive of cinema as a "time
art." He writes,
By
toppling the hierarchy of narrative cinema, in which time is usually bent,
elided
and
distended to suit dramatic exigencies, Wavelength takes duration and
narrative
as
pure correlations of space itself. Or, as
Snow himself succinctly remarks, "Events
take
time. Events take place" (Testa
1995, 38).
[8] I should mention
here that an emphasis on the production of filmic space in Wavelength is
not without precedent. One of the
original commentators on Snow's work, P. Adams Sitney, identified Wavelength's
central problematic as a spatial
one. "This is the story of
the diminishing area of pure potentiality," he writes. "The insight of space, and, implicitly,
cinema as potential, is an axiom of structural film." More specifically, Sitney writes, "The
overt principle of . . . Michael Snow's Wavelength . . . is that the
action or event is a function of the
given space" See Sitney, ed. Film Culture Reader (New York: NYU Press, 1970, 331-332).
[9] As the rest of
this essay will make clear, I have no intention of making Snow's authorial
consciousness, his relative familiarity or lack thereof with film narrative,
the crux of my argument, or even a significant lever with which to prise the
issue open. I mention it nonetheless,
because 1) I believe that dismissing authorial statements tout court commits
a dialectical error, attributing undue weight to them by their scrupulous
absence; 2) the distrust of academic analysis which I find all too common in
the experimental film community stems, in part, from, in Scott MacDonald's
words, "a tendency in academe to see filmmakers as laboratory animals who
don't really know what they're doing" (1992, 75). This of course raises the question of to
what degree anyone really knows what they're doing -- as Snow put it in
his MacDonald interview, "exactly how "independent" anyone can
be is a question we'd better not try to get into now" --, but authors
should not be singled out as a special case (ibid).
[10] For the
canonical text on Albertan perspective, its visual distortions, and those
competing models it beat out for historical dominance, see Erwin Panofsky, Perspective
as Symbolic Form (Boston: 1993, written 1925).
[11] Heath also makes explicit the economic imperative of
the development of easel painting.
Practices which were dominant at earlier points in history, such as
fresco or stained glass, were tied to specific spatial installations, whereas
the infinite portability of the easel painting set the image free to circulate,
enabling the art cartel whose last gasps we continue to witness. While the cinematic apparatus might seem
imbricated with this historical trajectory only metaphorically, one need only
consider the corporate-capitalist imperatives of the designation of 35mm as
"standard gauge," or the various industrial conferences declaring
"universal standardizations" for film equipment, to understand the
continued interest in the film reel and the film projector as interchangeable
parts. The guarantee that this week's
blockbuster can be sent to "a theater near you" is a modern
replication of the easel painting system, although ironically there is today
more likely to be variation in the shape and form of paintings than in the
cinematic exhibition apparatus.
[12] This can be seen in those works by ostensibly
narrative filmmakers which allow the material quality of space to determine
their films, most notably Robert Bresson and Jean-Marie Straub / Daniéle
Huillet. I would argue that this approach
to space also characterizes the best work of Peter Greenaway, such as Vertical
Features Remake. The material
treatment of space in narrative films by these filmmakers serves to decenter
the actions of characters within the films, by emphasizing the boundedness and
outer determination of human activity, an adoption of a specifically
anti-humanist stance.
[13] As Roland Barthes puts it, describing the classic
"readerly" text in the introduction to S/Z, the reader
"is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the
text: reading is nothing more than a referendum" (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1974 [Original published 1970], 4).
[14] Among the many
critical disfigurements of Wavelength, and Snow's cinema generally, has
been a refusal to engage with its sensuous, luminous qualities. This critical
tendency has been well documented, and attentively refuted, by William Wees,
who writes, "The critical consensus grown up around Snow's work has tended
to emphasize 'analysis' at the expense of 'ecstasy' and to concentrate on the
conceptual aspects of Snow's films without giving comparable attention to the
perceptual experience they produce." See Wees's Light Moving in Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
[15] Snow's ongoing investigation of the properties of the
film medium led him, in subsequent work, to make changes in the material
apparatus itself. His film La Région
Centrale is perhaps most notable in this respect. Snow created a device which turned the movie camera in any and
all directions, 360 degrees around, up and down, all by remote control. In this respect, the element of chance
combined with a non-mastering de-humanized gaze produces a film which forcibly
demands that its viewers submit to a cinematic space outside of human control.
[16] . . . most prominently that majority of the film in
which no human beings occupy the screen.
Shortly after one of the women near the beginning of the film switches
off "Strawberry Fields," the wave begins and they exit. The entrance of Hollis Frampton signals a
return of synch sound, which terminates upon the character's death. The sine wave begins again. It continues through the phone call placed
by Amy Taubin and does not stop until the ambulance or police sirens overtake
it. Indeed, Amy's character is
"frightened," since she has not only discovered a dead body in her
flat; she has stumbled in upon the secret world of objects in and of space,
coming to life in her absence. The
mundane process of living or occupying cannot, Snow seems to say, really
coexist with the codisclosure of dwelling, performed by Snow and his camera.
[17] Again, Snow would in subsequent films take this
spatial compression even further. In Breakfast,
a still life is flattened against a wall by a sheet of plexiglass affixed to
the front of the camera lens. In Presents,
the camera "penetrates" the space with a physical encroachment
forward, crashing into the set. Both
examples seem to deconstruct the acquisitive character of the all-perceiving
voyeur implied by the camera's forward drive.