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which is a statement of theme, followed by a number of variations (I'm oversimplifying). That was the basis of a lot of my work, like
The Walking Woman
. I wanted to make this film a unified unfolding of a number of variations with the zoom as the container for the variations. The process had to have a certain length of time. It could be fifty minutes and it could be thirty minutesmaybe thirty would be too shortbut that's how I thought about it. I did want to make a temporal place "to stay in," as you've properly put it.
I'd noticed something like this happening in another way, in
Eye and Ear Control
. Sometimes when the music is at its most passionate or frenetic, there's a feeling of being in a space that's made by the continu-ity of the music and the picture. Other people might not feel this, but it gave me my first taste of a kind of temporal control I was able to elaborate in
Wavelength
.
MacDonald:
Another thing that's very important in
Wavelength
is the way it deals with narrative. It sets up its direction, and what would be considered the conventional narrative moves in and out from the edges. Hollis Frampton comes in and falls dead and the camera just continues on its way. One is tempted to say, "There's no plot," and yet there is a "plot," in a number of senses, including the mathematical: you plot straight ahead on an axis toward the far side of the loft. At any rate,
Wavelength
comments on conventional narrative, especially on mystery and suspense.
Snow:
Yeah, but you know, I had no background in that at all. I just wanted to set up a temporal container of different kinds of events. In the sections where you don't see anybody in the space, it becomes much more a two-dimensional picture. When it's peopled, it's a whole other thing. And the memory of the space seen one way affects our other views of it. The space and duration of the film allow for all kinds and classes of events. There is a life-and-death story, but on another level, the whole thing is sexual. And there are a lot of other considerations, like making a reference outside with the phone, having something come in from outside through the radio. There are all these different symbolic implications of the room. It can be the head, with the windows as eyes, and the senses feeding into the consciousness . . .
MacDonald:
Or a camera with the windows as apertures . . .
Snow:
All those things. I was aware of a lot of them, and there are things I can see now that I didn't know about then, that's for sure. But a lot of it
was
conscious. A lot of the color effects weren't preconceived because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Actually, Ken Jacobs was very, very helpful. He lent me the camera and he gave me some old rolls of stock. I used this stuff and didn't know what it would look like.