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Michael Snow: Wavelength

ByElizabeth Legge

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1966) is a masterful study of perception: the camera slowly zooms from one end of a loft space to its far wall, accompanied by the sound of a rising sine wave. Elizabeth Legge here analyses the film and the intellectual dramas to which it has played host.

ISBN (paperback)

9781846380563

Content

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 a 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.


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