Revisiting Michael Snow’s Wavelength, after Deleuze’s Time-Image

• Authors: Jacob Potempski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is one of the most written about avant-garde films. It has served as “a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played out,” as Elizabeth Legge put it in a book-length study of the film, whose recent publication testifies to the continuing relevance of the film (Legge 2009). This paper takes Annette Michelson’s article, Toward Snow, one of the first and most often cited encounters with Snow’s cinema, as its point of departure (Michelson 1978). Michelson sees the film as a reflection which reveals the cinema as a temporal narrative medium. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness, she argues that this reflection on the medium is at the same time a reflection on the structures of consciousness. However, the paper also draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose two-volume study of the cinema has opened up new possibilities for thinking about time and the cinema (Deleuze 1983, 1985). The paper is not an interpretation of Deleuze. It appropriates and puts to work his idea that the cinema is not essentially a narrative medium; but a medium that disrupts linear time, making visible a non-chronological dimension of time, which fragments the subject and exposes it to liminal situations. Wavelength, I argue, reverses the flow of time, to make visible an abyss at the heart of time, which shatters the unity of the subject

Keywords

EN

Deleuze’s time-image; Michael Snow’s Wavelength; avant-garde; non-chronological dimension of time; narrative versus non-narrative

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 7-17

Dates

published

2013-08-01

online

2014-06-04

Contributors

author

Jacob Potempski

• Trent University, Peterborough (Canada)

References

• Baross, Zsuzsa. 2011. Posthumously, for Jacques Derrida. Sussex Academic Press.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. University of Minnesota Press.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. University of Minnesota Press.
• Elder, Bruce. 1977. Michael Snow’s Wavelength. In Canadian Film Reader, eds. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson, 308-323. Toronto: Peter Martin Heidegger, Martin. 1996 [1927]. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Heidegger, Martin. 1976 [1954]. What is Called Thinking? Perennial, Harper Collins Publishers.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1960 [1931]. Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Legge, Elizabeth. 2009. Michael Snow, Wavelength. London: Afterall Books.
• Michelson, Annette. 1978. Toward Snow. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 172-183. New York: Anthology Film Archives.
• Snow, Michael. 1994. The Collected Writings of Michael Snow. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ausfm-2014-0001