A Moving Which Is Not a Moving: Michael Snow’s Wavelength

January 7, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 2, January 2020

E. L. McCallum (bio)

Abstract

Michael Snow’s canonical experimental film Wavelength is commonly understood to model cinematic apparatus theory. This essay reads Wavelength through a different apparatus, one used in physics’ well-known double-slit experiment to demonstrate the wave theory of light. Reading the film via this quantum apparatus orients us to a different mode of spectatorship than cinema’s apparatus theory—a mode of fascination. Reading Wavelength through fascination decenters the human subject, questions the tacit humanism of even materialist interpretations of the film, and opens up a new vantage on both the animacy in the film and its critical readings.

“He sat and stared at the sea, which appeared all surface and twinkle, far shallower than the spirit of man. It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.”—Henry James, “The Middle Years” (335)

Michael Snow’s film Wavelength may be best misremembered as the story of a 45-minute zoom shot across a New York City loft to a photograph of waves that fills the screen. Except that it’s not a continual zoom but a montage of reframed space, and it’s not a story but a flattening, a Steinian geography of layers. While it has also commonly been taken as a staging of cinematic apparatus theory,1 Wavelength is arguably fascinated with another apparatus that toys with waves and particles. This essay reads Wavelength through the light-conducting apparatus that is used in physics’ well-known double-slit experiment to demonstrate the wave theory of light.2 This apparatus has subsequently been developed to confirm a range of queer phenomena at the quantum level, from Louis de Broglie’s discovery of the quantum duality of particle and wave to the curious problem of entanglement. This essay builds on the implications of such experiments for rethinking being and knowing, subject and object elicited by Karen Barad’s queer feminist quantum theory. Moreover, reading the film through/as this quantum apparatus orients us to a different mode of spectatorship than cinema’s apparatus theory—a mode of fascination. For a range of reasons, but hinging primarily on the relation of the object and subject, this fascinated spectatorship’s distinction from apparatus theory has been obscured by the very fascination of film theorists with Wavelength.

The zoom-story impression of Wavelength is likely due to Annette Michelson’s influential reading of the film, which explicitly links it to narrative:

as the camera continues to move steadily forward, building a tension that grows in direct ratio to the reduction of the field, we recognize, with some surprise, those horizons as defining the contours of narrative, of that narrative form animated by distended temporality, turning upon cognition, towards revelation. (“Toward” 175)

This sense of “revelation” seems to undergird the way the film captures story; that is, the turn towards revelation makes it narrative, though the narrative features Michelson calls out emphasize not only temporal transformation but the experience of it. There’s a phenomenological component to the story in this movement from cognition to revelation. Yet I’m also struck by the way Michelson evokes perspective, as the horizons defining narrative’s contours. In a different essay, she doubles down on both narrative and perspective, positing that “Snow made of the slow and steady optical tracking shot or zoom the axis of a displacement whose perceptual solicitations and formal resonance are those of narrative action” (“About” 113). If Wavelength is a story of a zoom, it’s a story of our experience of film, a recognizably apparatus theory account that emphasizes the perceptual engagement—and disengagement—of the spectator.

In other words, Michelson’s account is based on the perspectival or apparatus theory reading of the film as much as on the narrative lens; the two are imbricated in a way that reinforces their collusion to produce a discrete, individualist subject. Contextualizing the zeitgeist of the film’s making, Michelson observes: “Not narrative form, but the space in which it takes place, was the object of radical assault. For the gaze of fascination, the filmmakers of the late 1960s were to begin substituting analytic inspection” (“About” 116). Michelson’s sense of Wavelength‘s formal return to narrative thus charts a turn away from fascination and towards analysis. Wavelength‘s own analysis, however, consists of its particular cutting together of space to create an experience that seems narrative but isn’t, while the narrative effect of the film reinscribes it in a familiar paradigm of centered spectatorship, articulated through apparatus theory’s contemporaneous discussion of monocular perspectival space.3 But while it reinscribes that centered spectator, it also displaces her. For just as the narrativity of the film is a fiction, an imposition of a familiar framework, so too is its appeal to a centered and discrete subject. As Michael Sicinski observes,

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. (67)

Michaelson’s reading of Wavelength, then, not only glosses the film with narrative, but situates it as the model for cinematic apparatus theory, which surged into critical discourse between the film’s 1967 creation and Michaelson’s 1978 discussion. While apparatus theory underscores the ideological power of cinema, relying on a largely Marxist understanding of ideology, its reliance on a tacit humanism has been less fully appreciated.

As one of the most insightful critical analyses to shift us away from that humanism to emphasize the materiality of the film, Sicinski’s argument attends to the way the film produces space, as “each disclosure is the creation of a new space, all the more palpably material due to the compression established by the zoom” (82). In that shift from time to space, Sicinski leverages us away from a narrative reading and into an ontological one. This ontological turn invites further consideration of the materiality of the space and of the question whether and how that materiality could represent itself. The turn to space also directs us away from a human-centered focus or a centering of the human. Yet at the same time, Sicinski’s focus on “dwelling” in the Heideggerian sense loses the aspect of the visual, and of fascination in particular.4 Because fascination holds important implications for subject/object relations (not unlike Heidegger’s reconfiguration of subject/object relations through dwelling and bridging), I aim to build on the ontological understanding laid down by Sicinski and bring it to bear on a new understanding of fascination. I suggest that the “gaze of fascination” is not so easily shaken from Wavelength, even as narrative falls short of accounting for the film’s analytic inspection not only of the loft space, but of the cinematic apparatus itself. However, when read through an apparatus other than the cinematic, that “gaze of fascination” can be understood differently. As the contestations of Michelson’s readings make clear, the imbrication of the human and the nonhuman, the problem of narrative, and the place of fascination lie at the heart of critical engagement with Snow’s film.

I. From cinematic to quantum apparatus theory through the animacy of space

Apparatus theory appears to account for both the uncommon experience that Wavelength presents its spectators and the persistence of phenomenological accounts of the film. Elizabeth Legge asked of Wavelength,

Does it restore a ‘transcendent subject’ with mastery over the perceptual field, both as author and as viewer, or does it block that suspect entity? Does it somehow enact consciousness by provoking an intensified phenomenological experience in the viewer or does it interfere with our sensory immersion by stimulating a disruptive undertow of self-awareness? (18)

The short answer—revealed by attending to the camera’s position in the loft space—is “yes, both.” And yet both are two sides of the same coin, for to block or disrupt “that suspect entity” is to constitute it, to affirm its being blocked and disrupted. What other subjects or modes of viewing might this film precipitate once we give up on its narrativity and perspectivism?

The film begins from a conventionally transcendental perspective, from a high angle up in what seems to be the loft’s back corner. As spectators we cathect to an impossible locus of vision, an angle that Snow “[d]iscovered … to have lyric God-like above-it-all quality” (Snow, “Letter” 5). As the film proceeds, the framing shifts not only horizontally across the loft and toward the windows at the far side, but downward until the camera is situated at human eye-level. It then leans into the fullness of the wave image posted on the wall, ultimately ending in a nonhuman vantage as the full shot of waves fills the screen, with no horizon in sight to orient us in space or scale. The instability of the human vantage over the arc of the film is notable. Or rather, the fleetingness of a human vantage over the arc of the film should be notable, but our identification with the camera is such that we may readily overlook it, absorbed in the conventions of the cinematic apparatus.5 The human interest in what happens with the people who come and go onscreen is relentlessly sidelined by the framing that focuses the zoom’s attention on the opposite wall, reinforcing our identification with the camera. We come to realize that the four human events in the film are not plot but distractions. Curiously, and at the same time, the materiality of the film itself, both visually and sonically, comes to the fore in a way that counters the primacy of the camera, thus posing its own challenges to narrativizing Wavelength‘s experiment.

One reading that quickly emerges from attending to the narrative decentering of the human in Wavelength—how Snow grants agency to the nonhuman aspects of the film—is the sense that the film produces meaning that seems to center on the mechanism of the camera as itself the action of the film. Indeed, as Martha Langford put it:

The camera, surely the main protagonist, is a presence sensed over the course of the film, as it sometimes stutters in its cinematic language while making its way to the conclusion, a journey ruled and intensified by the sound of a rising sine wave. The colours of light (achieved through the use of gels), the artisanal quality of Snow’s ghostly montage, and elements of pure chance, such as sound drifting up from the street, offer escape and consolation to the spectator who is inexorably drawn to the watery depths of the final scene. (“Wavelength 1966”)

Langford’s luscious description of the camera as protagonist and of film stocks, gels, and flashes as collaborators resonates with what Jean Baudry identifies as “the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the camera which constitutes and rules the objects in this ‘world'” (“Ideological” 45); here too the camera dominates the apparatus. Arguably then, Langford’s description—like Michelson’s—is still enframed in a narrative temporality that inscribes the familiar subject/object relation of linear perspective, because these ancillary collaborators serve to console the subject for the loss, presumably, of humancentered narrative, or possibly of conventional meaning in favor of a play of surfaces. Langford’s reading suggests that the real consolation offered by the gels and film stocks and ambient sound and sine wave is that they’re outside the camera—these are aspects of the film at odds with the dominance of the camera. On this view, the tension between the human/nonhuman becomes multiple, as a boundary between the subject-identifying convention of the camera and the non-objectifying sensory experiences of other materialities in film. These materialities are not producing a centered subject, a coherent identification, or a conventionally bounded sensory experience.

Why would we necessarily identify with the camera and not with the flashes of color and light or textures of film onscreen?6 This question presents us with another angle on the intransigent projection of the human onto this film, and raises the problem of how humans might identify with nonhuman others, even machinic elements that do not stand in for them.7 As Baudry tells us, identification works because “it is to the extent that the child can sustain the look of another in the presence of a third party that he can find the assurance of an identification with the image of his own body” (“Ideological” 45). The gels offer no body, even synecdochally, for the spectator; they, the exposures, or the stutter, and especially the superpositions instead offer, in what might be seen as a Lacanian regression, le corps morcelé. We—insofar as there is a “we” here—identify part with part rather than whole with whole, projecting an imaginary composite or multiplicity. The oscillation between identifying as the transcendental subject and as a located human gives rise to the mental appeal of the film: it seduces us to mastery via a conventional perspectival framing, even as it uses that perspective to quell identification with any characters.8 While not exactly fragmentation, this oscillation creates its own form of continuity to cross the gap it limns, rendering our subjectivity necessarily incomplete. As Baudry observes, “continuity is an attribute of the subject” (“Ideological” 44); the film challenges us to retain our centeredness within the linear progress of the zoom, which produces our oscillation between attachment and resistance to the film. In watching Wavelength, we are constantly called to the present moment of what is before us in a way that throws us on our own resources of memory, experience, and attention; we are absorbed and bored, focused and distracted simultaneously or serially. Watching Wavelength tests our patience, unless we can lapse into that hypnotic zone of inattentive attention that suspends our desire for narrative in favor of enthrallment with the changing image, a play of surfaces rather than depths.

Exacerbating this oscillation some two-thirds of the way through the film, however, is a series of superpositions of images, double exposures of what we have seen layered onto what we are seeing now.9 The linearity of narrative and spatial trajectory is disrupted by this superposition, as is the subject’s continuity: Where are we in time and space? What are we seeing? The superposition means that spectators oscillate between then/now and between being attentive and being diverted. The splitting in the image returns us to the surface of the image, resisting the referent. However, because this superposition is crucial for opening up the vector to consider the quantum apparatus in/for the film, the better question may be how are we seeing, and who is this we? The superposition goes beyond the earlier visual effects of the film—the gels, the exposure changes, the stutter—which can nonetheless be resolved into familiar perspectival relations. Baudry himself argues that the ideological efficacy of the cinematic apparatus relies on the exclusion of the instrumentation of cinema from the film; its incursion onto the screen disrupts our repression of its seaming us into ideological smoothness: “Both specular tranquillity and the assurance of one’s own identity collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism, that is of the inscription of the film-work” (“Ideological” 46). Such a collapse of identity is precisely what opens up the possibility for a spectatorial relation of fascination. If the superposition of images serves to reveal the mechanism of the apparatus, cinematic or otherwise, it also invites a collapse of the centered subject, which relies on an ideology of depth.

There is, no doubt, an apparatus displayed in Wavelength through its apparent use of perspective as the zoom crosses the loft space. But the cinematic apparatus is not the only one at work here. The problem of superposition not only troubles the spectator’s tranquility when it erupts onscreen in Wavelength, but also yields a connection to quantum physics, since superposition is a mode of being inherent to the quantum world, where a quantum object can be in two states at the same time. This view builds on Sicinksi’s ontological shift to reading the film, but changes the ontological stakes. To clarify those stakes, let us consider Barad’s quantum-physics-based notion of the apparatus. Barad uses the double-slit experiment not simply to illustrate the wave/particle indeterminacy, but to question humans’ separation from that observation. Discussing the intricacies of an experiment that sends atoms through a two-slit apparatus that registers them as waves (rather than as particles), Barad notes that the experiment reveals that “wave and particle are not inherent attributes of objects, but rather the atoms perform wave or particle in their intra-action with the apparatus. The apparatus is an inseparable part of the observed phenomenon” (“Diffracting” 180). Key for Barad is the experiment’s performative aspect and the apparatus’s role in producing that performance: there is no essential underlying mode of being (particle or wave). Instead, an atom is either a particle or a wave depending on how apparatus and atom interact. As physics experimenters essayed to understand why the diffraction pattern (indicating waves) resulted rather than a scatter pattern (indicating particles), they found that changing the apparatus affected the outcome. More curiously, even if the experimenter went back and erased any information that indicated which slit an atom would go through (and thus, whether it would be particle or wave), “the finding of this experiment indicates that it is possible to determine after the particle has already gone through the slits whether or not it will have gone through one slit or the other (as a proper particle will do) or both slits simultaneously (as waves will do)!” (Barad 180). Perhaps even weirder but more germane, Barad extrapolates from this example that “There is no ‘I’ that exists outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story” (181). Bringing Barad’s quantum apparatus into consideration troubles the human center of the cinematic apparatus, and invites us to consider how this queer quantum apparatus destabilizes ontology and subjectivity in ways relevant to a film called Wavelength.

That relevance hinges on the linearity of time, the animacy of the object under investigation, and the separability the spectators from—or rather, their implication in relation to—the object observed in Wavelength. This turns us to two interrelated questions: 1) Must we buy the depth model of the film’s action, whether in terms of the geometry of perspective or perspective’s precipitation of the (phenomenal) subject? 2) How does Wavelength then reconfigure the subject/object relation? I have suggested that the film unworks the transcendental subject of apparatus theory precisely through the unraveling of perspective, narrative, and phenomenology to induce fascination as a relation of superposition.10 To do so, it must unwork perspective. Snow says of Wavelength that “It’s all planes, no perspectival space” (“Letter” 5), and Legge corroborates his reading in observing that “the floorboards of the loft may seem to mark out a perspective-like linear recession into depth, but they are only a reference to perspective as content or subject matter, not as a structuring system, since the zoom compresses and flattens as it goes” (49). Perspective is a reference on a flattened surface, just as narrative is a metaphor or dynamic form. Let us take seriously for a moment Snow’s claim that perspective is not a subject of the film; what if Wavelength has no linear perspective?11 At best there is only the viewer’s belief in perspective, cued by the initial realism of the scene—an afterimage of depth persisting across an increasing flatness of the image. The zoom marks interrupted and arrested movement; the camera stays still as the image expands to fill the frame (in what is conventionally called mobile framing). The trajectory through the loft comes not as a dolly shot but from a repositioning of the camera, which was packed away at the end of each shooting. You could say this film is a series of repeated reframings through the zoom. In mobilizing the frame without moving the camera, Wavelength formalizes the tension between arrest and movement that is the essence of fascination.

If there is no perspective, what does that do to the subject who is the interlocutor for the horizon’s vanishing point (or he who contemplates the surface and twinkle of the sea)? Jacob Potempski argues that “the event that the film constitutes does not function as a mirror of experience; it effectuates a rupture with the world as it is experienced by a subject” (16). Potempski’s Deleuzian argument that the film’s time-image directness shatters the subject certainly diverts us away from a projection of wholeness in the image in favor of embracing the fragmentation that it displays. Yet he does not fully engage the fragmentation Wavelength presents when he argues that “the coherence of the subject, its identity across time is broken. … If there is a unity between consciousness and its object, the camera eye and the photograph, it lies in the continuity that the zoom establishes” (14). The zoom’s continuity is, on another view, a series of expanding, stretching fragments, cut together into a composite. The zoom’s “continuity” stitched together into a whole film marks not only the undoing of the subject, but the undoing of the object as well.

Or rather, it marks the freeing of the object to its animacy. What if we consider Wavelength as composing an animate space? This would be a lesson from Barad’s queer quantum view that sees matter as animate, even performative. Consider that the loft is not a static, inert object of the camera but an active participant in the filming. What if instead we see Wavelength as letting the space articulate itself—join itself together as well as express itself—as it moves in for its closeup? The animacy of the camera is clear enough in film theory’s negotiation of the intricacies of cinema’s imbrication of human and technological. The animacy of the filmed object is also a thread in film theory, ever since Louis Delluc’s introduction of photogénie—an indefinable, vital quality taken on by a filmed object—and Kracauer’s insistence on the indeterminacy of natural objects and their psychophysical correspondences. Supporting this view, Sicinski argues that “Snow foregrounds the activity of seemingly ‘passive’ space” and that “one becomes aware that ‘spaces,’ and the ‘things’ within them, are not solid but rather in a constant state of flux” (79). Sicinski singles out the yellow chair, which “pops into deep greens only to burst into a white flare of light” (79)—a description that casts this chromatic activity as the chair’s performance. Might the cuts, on this view, indicate moments when the light or the loft either completes its scene or even possibly somehow fails in its role? In short, might the cuts mark the limits of the space’s performance? Is this scene a dialogue between space and light? Consider how some of the cuts also limn the limit of the medium—the moment for change in stock or filter so as to alter the light, or the traces of the end of shooting for that day. If we see the filmmaker as responsive to the performance of the space in the light of the mise en scène rather than as master over that space, we come closer to the sense of Baradian apparatus theory, in which the observer and the entity observed co-constitute one another (to put it schematically, if reductively). Moreover, if the space of the loft is actively engaging the film, then the superpositions refract how that space may engage with itself over time, responding to itself or to others in the space. If this seems preposterous, consider Barad’s contention that matter is animate, always coming into being and engaging with itself: “in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of responses, of response-ability” (“Transmaterialities” 401). Indeed, Barad’s elaboration of superposition sheds new light on the distinctive turn Wavelength makes in its doubled exposures, notable because it happens as the camera height reaches the human scale. These moments perform the imaged objects’ response-ability to one another.

The fictionality of Snow’s 80-ft. zoom, moreover, underscores the film’s reliance on montage. As William Wees reminds us, nearly all zoom lenses are subject to side-drift, where a defect in the zoom lens “causes the image of an object in the center of the frame to gradually slip off-center during a zoom-in” (190n18). Wees elicits a different angle on the machinic aspects of Wavelength, positing that “the richest visual experience provided by Snow’s films comes from his manipulation of the ‘machine-ness’ of cinema” (154); indeed, Wavelength‘s “mechanical eye of the zoom lens creates a perceptual experience that cannot be duplicated by the human eye” (157). While the very nature of cinema is to produce perceptions that cannot be replicated by the human eye, this perceptual experience is unique in the way it animates the space. Because Snow was changing the camera position each day of shooting, and because shooting did not happen in sequence from long shot to closeup, he could recalibrate the center of the image. In my reading, Snow becomes the agent of the loft’s, chair’s, and photograph’s collaboration against the camera lens’ distortion. Wees observes that

By imposing its narrow angle of vision on the space of the room, the zoom makes the wall seem to approach the viewer, rather than the viewer approach the wall. The wall seems to come forward exactly as the buildings across the street seem to advance until they look like flat images pressed against the windows of the room. (157)

This flatness not only facilitates the layering of spaces; it also solicits fascination.

Attending to the animacy of the filmed space reveals that, insofar as the film does center a spectator—and it does produce the illusions of cinematic apparatus and of perspective—we are the object of the film’s fascination, created by the space’s pursuit of an audience. Or possibly, we are the object of the photograph’s fascination as it stretches out the edges of its film image to bring itself into the fullness of the screen. To display itself. This is a nuance on the illusion of humanity in my epigraph, which constructs a series of linked binaries: shallow vs. depth, the sea vs. human, the surface vs. abyss. While we might initially read “the abyss of human illusion” to refer to the illusions that humans hold, I suggest instead that it is a claim about the illusion of being human: that the illusion of humanness is also an illusion of depth. If we dismiss the animacy of the loft in its approach towards us, its transformation from room to sea, we seek to reassert the illusion of human mastery over space and objects within it, and thus the very illusion of depth, of staring into the abyss, limned by cinematic apparatus theory. Because Wavelength is invested and engaged in fascination rather than classical fiction film spectatorship, it precipitates a subject differently—a fascinated subject, if you can even call it a subject. To acknowledge the animacy of the filmed entities, to turn from classical cinematic apparatus to a Baradian apparatus, is to turn towards an understanding of fascination as a reconfiguration of the subject/object relation. As Iris van der Tuin remarks, “Barad comes up with an onto-epistemology according to which knower, known, and laboratory instrument act and come into being simultaneously, in their mutual entanglement” (31). Barad’s apparatus theory necessarily shifts our understanding from the apparatus as producing discrete entities—however bound together in a system of projection, image, and spectatorship—to an understanding of phenomena. For Barad, “We do not uncover preexisting facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about phenomena—about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming” (Meeting 90-91). She describes phenomena in terms of cutting-together apart. To think through how the spectator becomes fascinated with the animacy of the filmed space—that is, how the subject who will come to be the spectator encounters the object that is arguably the matter of the film in a relation that we will call fascination—let us turn to consider what fascination means.

II. fascination

To return to the epigraph: “He sat and stared at the sea, which appeared all surface and twinkle, far shallower than the spirit of man.” This describes the spectatorial experience of Wavelength, only we don’t know at the outset that we are staring at the sea. Or, for that matter, at the abyss of human illusion. We think we are staring at a New York loft, but in fact we are looking at a picture of the sea that we cannot yet see, and overlooking the space in which we dwell. Moreover, the photograph of waves on the far wall of the loft anchors the center of the image on screen across the film’s whole trajectory, and arguably its action clears out the rest of the loft so it can take center stage.12 The agency of the photograph, or the animacy of the mise en scène, bears on the question of fascination insofar as fascination posits an inversion of the conventional subject/object relation that privileges the human subject who subordinates an inert object world to his mastery (and it is a specifically gendered human subject). From the vantage of fascination, if this film has a centered subject, it is the photograph, not the cinematic apparatus-precipitated spectator.

Because of the way Wavelength displaces or decenters the human, recutting the subject/object relation across human/nonhuman distinction, it stages fascination rather than identification or any other dominant mode of spectatorship (e.g., fetishistic scopophilia). Noting “the strangely dehumanizing state of fascination” (86), Pansy Duncan argues that the form of this affect is triangulated: “I experience fascination when the glossy surface’s hermeneutic and thus emotional bounty magnetizes me with the promise of an other ostensibly possessed of the emotional immediacy I conceive myself as lacking” (100). In Duncan’s view, fascination becomes a relation for negotiating lack by substituting another’s fullness or plenitude. She derives this understanding in a discerning reading of David Cronenberg’s Crash, a film in which she would like us to “consider the image as an aesthetic surface rather than as a representation of a spatially and psychologically rounded world” (77). I find Duncan’s description quite hospitable to reading Wavelength. The film’s subject is not a room we enter but a series of surfaces we confront or encounter. This is why I have been at pains to lay out but also question the intransigent phenomenological and narrative readings of the film, which hinge on the human, and turn instead to the flatness, the surfaces, and the mechanical, objectal, and spatial agencies it offers. However, I am troubled by Duncan’s investment in an overly familiar paradigm of plenitude and lack, even as she allows a certain dynamism between the self and other in terms of who lacks and who possesses. Duncan’s view seems to rewrite fetishism’s substitution of lack with an other’s plenitude without the epistemic ambivalence. There is fetishism in Cronenberg’s film, to be sure, but on behalf of the characters, who are car-crash fetishists. Duncan argues that the film itself refuses identification through its relentless emphasis on flatness: “its flatness and depthlessness leaves Crash stubbornly impervious to identification and emotional engagement” (78). And yet, she suggests, this flatness produces a richness of texture that should not go unheeded: “its riot of texture equally precludes an interpretation that would reduce it to mere surface lack” (78). In emphasizing the fullness of the image via texture, Duncan’s reading renders surface and flatness as curiously sufficient, if not plenitudinous.

Fetishism has been identified as a classic mechanism for cinema: a bright surface with no depth or interiority, an absent presence, a signifier whose plenitude the spectator knows to be imaginary, but nonetheless accepts the world of the screen as full.13 Christian Metz has charted

a few of the many and successive twists, the ‘reversals’ (reduplications) that occur in the cinema to articulate together the imaginary, the symbolic and the real … in order to work, the film does not only require a splitting, but a whole series of stages of belief, imbricated together into a chain by a remarkable machinery. (71)

Metz incorporates Octave Mannoni’s discussion of knowledge and belief in theatrical fiction to say that “Any spectator will tell you that he ‘doesn’t believe in it,’ but everything happens as if there were nonetheless someone to be deceived, someone who really will ‘believe in it'” (72). Fascination operates through a similar splitting and oscillation, but on the axis between stillness and movement, fixity and animacy, which is also an organizing trope of cinema. Duncan remarks on “fascination’s strange synthesis of fixity and animation, stasis and excitement” (81). Fascination is similar to but not the same as fetishism. Both entail a transformation in conventional subject/object relations that subordinates a presumed-inert object to the subject’s control. But where the fetish privileges the object in order to negotiate a threatening absence,14 fascination submits the subject to the object without ambivalence. The subject’s experience of the object in fascination may be as a threatening presence that overwhelms the self, or even potentially affirms loss of self, but this does not pit belief against knowledge. Steven Shaviro, drawing on Blanchot,15 emphasizes the loss of a proper distance to the object and the radical passivity that cinematic fascination entails:

I do not have power over what I see, I do not even have, strictly speaking, the power to see; it is more that I am powerless not to see. The darkness of the movie theater isolates me from the rest of the audience, and cuts off any possibility of ‘normal’ perception. I cannot willfully focus my attention on this or on that. Instead, my gaze is arrested by the sole area of light, a flux of moving images. I am attentive to what happens on the screen only to the extent that I am continually distracted, and passively absorbed, by it. I no longer have the freedom to follow my own train of thought. (47)

For Shaviro, this dispossession leads to a counterparadigm for film spectatorship, “a radically different economy/regime/articulation of vision” that dispenses not only with film theory’s formulation of fetishism (as fetishistic scopophilia or as the imaginary signifier), but also with dominant models of spectatorship founded in voyeurism and identification in favor of masochism and fascination (49).

Where Shaviro sees fascination as a mode of being transformed, even energized, by involuntary participation in watching highly affective scenes like blatantly prurient and pornographic scenarios (49), Duncan picks up on fascination’s formation in postmodern theory (Jameson, Harvey) as emotionally lacking. Fascination is seen as an antiemotional experience, fake, inauthentic, or apparitional, from which Duncan argues that we should appreciate its function as an undiminished emotion, albeit one of stasis and narcolepsy rather than animation. Like Shaviro, Duncan underscores the stillness of the fascinated spectator: “Fascination, that is, may be an emotion in which we are moved, paradoxically, to stop moving” (87). What’s key for me in Duncan’s reading of fascination is its “oddly depthless object” (87). The depthlessness of the object and the stasis of the subject put the energy, movement, emphasis on the relation between the two, a relation mediated by an other, a projection who is equally entranced. Moreover, Duncan establishes a certain reversibility between the one who is fascinated and the one who fascinates: “the definition of fascination moves from denoting a generalized intransitive condition (‘the state of being fascinated’) to indexing a particular transitive power (‘the state of being fascinating’). What fascinates, it seems, is always fascination itself” (89). Both Duncan and Shaviro develop their theories of fascination from fairly mainstream narrative films (Crash, Blue Steel, A Clockwork Orange). While they risk reintroducing narrative, their readings avoid doing so by focusing on the perceptual experiences offered by the films rather than on the phenomenological ones.

How does this understanding of fascination apply to an experimental film like Wavelength? I argue it adapts well; read as a zoom-story or as the eruption of an abyss of time or as a photograph’s search for screentime, Wavelength is all about perceptual experience. Duncan’s and Shaviro’s specimen films afford a kind of limit test—as narrative fiction films, they could solicit identification, but both critics read them as working against this. Fascination is beyond identification and its depth model of subjectivity. The flatness that Duncan insists on in Crash‘s texture might be considered in light of Shaviro’s assertion that “the body is a flat surface of inscription and reflection, comprising all the image layers that are incised or overlaid upon it” (227). Although Shaviro is discussing drag queens here (Warhol’s filmed Superstars in particular), this view complements his insistence on the radical passivity of the fascinated spectator and the problem of emptiness, absence, lack, or loss in the subject’s experience of fascination. The loss of classical perspective and the subject precipitated by that quattrocento visual organization also entails the loss of the ideologies that subtend such perspective and its individualist paradigm. Fascination cannot be sustained under the template of individual experience; to individuate the fascinated subject is to take the viewer out of the relation to the object that is fascination. Similarly, because the fascinating object relies on being just close enough, if not a little too close, the looming proximity of the object can be reined in by putting it into proper perspective, reasserting distance and resolving the surface into a depiction of depth. In short, without the apparatus of linear (quattrocento) perspective, the outcome of Snow’s experiment is different, going beyond the centered subject/image relation of Baudry’s apparatus theory. The change in apparatus, from quattrocento to fascinated, also accounts for the persistence of a sense of “loss” or absence in the theorizations of the fascinated observer. Without perspective, or even with diminished or undone perspective, Snow’s film also challenges identification. Beyond the fact that we are constantly refused identification with humans in the film—they are, like the Walking Woman on the wall, only images—we are also refused identification with the camera. We may be deluded into thinking we identify with the camera moving through the loft’s space, or with the wholeness embodied in the artist’s intention, as in Michelson’s phenomenological reading. But the recentering of the image evokes the loft’s pressure and/or the photograph’s will to overcome the camera’s activity.

Shaviro’s and Duncan’s models for fascinated spectatorship help us better articulate what makes this film so moving. But bearing in mind Barad’s apparatus theory, we may come to the realization that how we watch the film—how we dispose ourselves in relation to it or cultivate our attention to the screen—materially affects the outcome. Fascination, in short, is the apparatus that affords observational stasis in the face of animacy of the nonhuman.16 With the loss of linear perspective, we can no longer dominate the image or objects onscreen. While a range of viewing positions exists for all kinds of films (especially experimental nonnarrative ones), the turn to fascination acknowledges the animacy of the filmed objects, opening up space for the active participation of the nonhuman element via the apparatus of observation. Whether consciously or inadvertently, we viewers set ourselves aside to be fascinated by this activity. This is also and necessarily different from the way in which narrative functions, if we understand narrative itself as an apparatus for observation that arrays before us—in relations that may not be human-dominant—an understanding of causality and ordering that is only one possible cutting-together apart of the events observed. In this sense, I’m not attempting to overturn Michaelson’s narrative and phenomenological reading so much as to diffract it through fascination. Fascination is one way to talk about Wavelength‘s relation between subjects and objects, inviting us to embrace its animacy of spaces and things (photograph, chair, loft). In lieu of identification and its subject/object configuration, fascination offers spectators an affective attachment to the object, an inhuman narcissism. Consider it a nonhuman self-finding, where our “self” or subjectness fades in the face of the object, creating space for another to occupy or act—to inscribe itself. Fascination’s diminishment of the subject in favor of attention to the object’s force allows us to acknowledge the agency of the loft, the yellow chair, the photograph, but more importantly, the animacy of the light that is the real subject of the film. The light facilitates our sense that we, unconsoled spectators bereft of character, narrator, and ostensible meaning, lack what Duncan calls the emotional bounty or immediacy promised by an other. We are held, transfixed in contemplation of the object, subject to it rather than over it, but that relation is sustained as light.

III. a quantum apparatus

To elaborate this other apparatus theory, let me focus on the queer animacy posited by Barad’s discussion of quantum mechanics, picking up on Wavelength‘s wave to bring in particles. This animacy necessarily challenges any notion of discrete, stable identity. Here I would like to superimpose the discussion above about superposition, in which an entity—say, a photon—can occupy two different states at the same time until a human measures it or its angle of polarization and determines it to be a particle or wave. As van der Tuin puts it in her diffraction of Barad and Bergson and feminist epistemology, Barad is asking scientists and philosophers to “account for the ‘cuts’ they enact in the world’s becoming” (8). Our way of studying things brings them into being in a particular mode, whether by creating a film or by formulating an interpretation of it.

To delve into the possibilities of a Baradian apparatus theory, let’s look again at the apparatus and experiment—the phenomenon—on which she builds her onto-epistemology. Here’s how Barad describes a two-slit experiment to determine waves from particles, an experiment at the heart of our understanding of quantum physics:

[E]lectrons passing through a diffraction apparatus fail to behave like proper particles. Rather they behave like waves. Indeed, it seems that each individual electron is somehow going through both slits at once. … To make matters worse, each individual electron arrives at one point on the screen just like a proper particle. Now add a which-slit detector to the apparatus (to watch an electron going through the slits) and the electrons behave like particles. Impossible they say, but this is the electron’s lived experience. (“Diffracting” 173)

This appears to be a straightforward description of the double-slit experiment until Barad avers, “but this is the electron’s lived experience,” which seems a charming but extraneous flourish. We may be struck by the animacy afforded to the electron by her turn of phrase, but the wording also recalls how often marginalized peoples’ experiences are not given credence if they don’t conform to dominant patterns of what experiences are. The rhetorical appeal to someone’s lived experience is often used to translate, with sympathetic intent, a marginalized experience to an audience thinking only in dominant paradigms. In other words, this is not a neutral description that reasserts the nonhuman on par with the human, but a specific politics about whose experiences count or are intelligible, and who lives experiences.

The particle/wave dichotomy that the double-slit experiment describes thus brings us back to the question of superposition. The weirdness of superposition—where both states uncannily obtain—is lost by measuring the particle’s state in passing through the slit. Beyond that, superposition also affords a weird wrinkle in time at the quantum level.17 This temporal paradox is part of the reason Barad draws on superposition to undermine any sense of essence or singularity of being. She claims that “[s]uperpositions – here and there, now and then – are not a simple multiplicity, not a simple overlaying or a mere contradiction. Superpositions aren’t inherent; they are the effects of agential cuts, material enactments of differentiating/entangling” (“Diffracting” 176). What she means is that there is no thing, no quality, called superposition, but that it emerges as a feature of a particular arrangement of the experimental setup and presents complex effects or interconnections.18 The agential cut, which she also describes as a “cutting together-apart,” is one way to arrange the material. It may be visualized by Snow’s cinematic superpositions, which cut together along the z-axis shots we have seen separately; at the same time, it holds them apart because we can recognize them as separate shots. The temporal kick is that we see some of those shots later in the film, and we may recall others from our prior experience of this screening; the linearity of before/after is disrupted in this simultaneous display. Arriving as the film arrives at human height from its initial Archimedean vantage, the superpositions shift from a spatial perspective to a temporal one that nonetheless disorients our linear experience of time. The photon, like the loft, is out there doing what it does; the physicist or filmmaker registers it and produces the phenomenon. The eruptions of superpositions in Wavelength cut together-apart the very ordering of the zoom’s fiction to fascinate us with the loft’s intra-actions. Barad’s notion of the cut seems remarkably like film’s: a separation that also brings together. But where cinema’s cut produces montage (a shot interrelated with other shots to create meaning), Barad’s cutting together-apart produces an entanglement rather than bounded, autonomous entities. Where the cut in film enables the generative meanings that montage produces along the x-axis, the cutting-together-apart of quantum physics coimplicates the very things being separated: “Quantum entanglements are not the intertwining of two (or more) states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of twoness, and ultimately of one-ness as well. Duality, unity, multiplicity, being are undone” (Barad 178). This is why it is crucial to recognize the montage along the zaxis—heightened or amplified at the moment of superpositions, but structural to the film as a whole—in order to understand Wavelength‘s ontological disruption.

Barad holds that the key epistemological cuts we make at the macro level—such as the distinctions between animate and inanimate, between subject and object, and between matter and energy—have led us astray in thinking about difference, rendering it, harmfully, as polarity rather than relationality. By turning to diffraction, by thinking through the way diffraction invites a performative rather than substantive or essential sense of an entity, she opens up new paths for thinking relations as entangled phenomena, brought into existence in the moment of observation. For Barad, diffraction offers one way to cut-together apart, to combine without relying on notions of difference or identity. I juxtapose with her diffraction the phenomenon of fascination, to shift the nuance from the object (the photon as particle or wave entangled in diffraction) to observer (who is holding whom in this fascinated relation?).

What would fascination entail when understood via diffraction if subjects and objects are held together through its performative relation, if they are not preexisting subjects or objects in the classical metaphysical sense but provisional ends of a triangulated affective relation of one to an other, both animate? And not even opposed, or negated; as Barad says, “Subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed to one another; objectivity is not notsubjectivity” (“Diffracting” 175). Such ends would precipitate the subject and the other, but that subject could be the wave photograph’s fascination with us as it presses forward through its ever-changing field of the flat image. Entanglement, curiously, means that we can be the object of the photograph’s fascination because the two of us are co-constituted—cut together-apart—through Wavelength. As Barad works towards a sense of entanglement, she lays out a different kind of relationality beyond opposition or contradiction, a bringing together simultaneously with separating: “double movement, this play of in/determinacy, unsettles the self/other binary and the notion of the self as unity. The self is itself a multiplicity, a superposition of beings, becomings, here and there’s, now and then’s. Superpositions, not oppositions” (176). Shaviro’s reading of the body as a performed surface layered with meanings resonates with Barad’s and with Wavelength‘s superpositions, disorienting a sense of the distinctions primary/secondary, before/after. We see simultaneously the loft as we have already seen it and the loft as we have not yet seen it, a folding in time (and here not just Wavelength but also the radically recut WVLNT should come to mind, which is even more vividly entangled).19 Fascination is thus a particular mode of cutting together-apart. Fascination recognizes entanglement between subject and object that reorients their relation in a tension between stasis and movement, and defuses the ontological distinction between the two. In Barad’s queer quantum world and in the light of Wavelength, fascination gives us an experience that recognizes how provisional is our illusion of humanity—separateness, individualism, depth, object-domination—in a world of entangled surfaces. Fascination reveals to us our entanglement with the material world that undoes the boundaries of the subject/object relation and/or the perspectival relations of quattrocento habits of seeing. Fascination suspends our causal and linear interpretation of time, much as the quantum double-slit experiment does.

To further think through this question of subject/object relation—or subject/object/other relation—in fascination, let me shift also from its visual dimension (long central to fascination’s appeal and conceptualization) to its oral dimension. Steven Connor remarks on “a more general association between the optical and the oral, looking and consumption, in the history of fascination” (11). Along similar lines, Duncan suggests that “fascination traffics in the physiological suspension of stilled breath and interrupted movement” (91). Fascination may be seen as the stilled anticipation of the mouth breather, the stopped breath as blocked consumption, not taking it in, the movement of the flow of air interrupted from the nasal trajectory to the oral, mouth agape. In other words, fascination offers a trajectory across a face, across the facialized entity: the face as experienced, not as viewed. This view suggests a reading of Wavelength as oral consumption by room rather than phallic penetration of it. The orality of the loft space is its yawning grasp of us, assimilating the viewer to its self in the same way that the image of the sea is already assimilated to its surface, on its wall. Connor’s attention to orality recalls that classical apparatus theory has a curiously oral component to it. The baby at the breast is analogous to the spectator at the screen because both figure the same effect: “it expresses a state of complete satisfaction while repeating the original condition of the oral phase in which the body did not have limits of its own, but was extended undifferentiated from the breast” (Baudry 117).20 Baudry uses oral regression to figure “a more archaic mode of identification, which has to do with the lack of differentiation between the subject and his environment, a dream-scene model which we find in the baby/breast relationship” (120). While Baudry focuses on the simulation of the subject through the cinematic apparatus, the orality of apparatus theory hinges on the lack of distinction between the subject and its surroundings, a regression to the phase of development where one has no boundaries. Connor discerns a certain opposition between flatness and perspective that hinges on the shift to oral from visual, respectively: “the dream screen is the effect of a merging of identities centred specifically on the mouth, and on a substitution of orality for perspective, of eating for seeing” (15). His insights suggest that a shift to the oral works in conjunction with the move to surfaces, superpositions.

Barad’s model of entanglement offers a non-psychoanalytic way to think through the lack of differentiation that cinematic apparatus theory presents as a regression because of its investment in individualism. Rather than be inscribed within a psychoanalytic scene of regression, this particular lack of differentiation of the subject/environment can be realized in a diffracted configuration that delineates the entangled relation between (human) subject and environment, spectator and materiality; the former is only precipitated out of the latter through a process of observation that establishes the relations among, and even existence of, the phenomena. Barad’s queer quantum theory moves us away from thinking of this mode of differentiation/sameness as lack, or on a lack/loss paradigm. The oral provides a figure for apprehending the loss of bounded individuality as a gain or fullness of entangled relations. As it opens and closes, the mouth is another site for Barad’s cutting together-apart, mediating our relation with the external world, transforming the external into the internal, macerating our comestible material into particles that provide energy. The mouth is not only the boundary between the baby and breast, but also the site for regressing to the un-cutting that such a boundary enables. In cinematic apparatus theory’s view, this returns to the psychoanalytic claim that the oral phase is one of the paths for the development of sexuality, and thus of the desiring subject. If we give up on a model of regression, are we also giving up on this paradigm of desire?

Barad’s model also moves us beyond this subject-based desire, and although a fuller account of Barad and desire is beyond the scope of this essay, let me offer a short sketch of where this could go in conclusion. If cutting together-apart is one way to look at the way relations constitute entities (with perhaps a tacit underscoring of the “apart”), Barad imagines another model in a less cutting set of relations:

The notion of a field is a way to express the desires of each entity for the other. The attraction between a proton (a positively charged particle) and an electron (a particle with negative charge) can be expressed in terms of fields as follows: the proton emanates an electric field; the field travels outward in all directions at the speed of light. When the electric field of the proton reaches the electron, it feels the proton’s desire pulling it toward it. Likewise, the electron sends out its own field, which is felt by the proton. Sitting in each other’s fields, they feel a mutual tug in each other’s direction. (“Transmaterialities” 395)

Here attraction is not the familiar metaphor for eroticism. Instead, it offers an account that takes us out of the psychoanalytic model of desire that underpins cinematic apparatus theory. The desire at work in fascination might be better understood as such a field. In redirecting us from the humans, Wavelength stages this Baradian mode of desire, moving from a formation of attachment to particular individuals (whether out of curiosity or eroticism or identification) to the space, to the layers of the space, to the way the loft itself is cut together apart along the z-axis. The interplay of surfaces dispels our individualism and entangles us in a collective gathering of observers, loft walls, chairs, images, windows, etc. It cuts the observer together with the space and apart from it (those moments when we’re watching this film and are acutely aware of watching this film, maybe averting from watching this film). Even as we face the desire to flee the screening of Wavelength, that is when we are most held in place, fascinated, cut together into it.

Footnotes

The author thanks Lyn Goeringer, Ken Harrow, and the members of the Moving Image workshop at MSU for their insights on an earlier version of this essay.

1. Apparatus theory was a dominant film theory in the early 1970s accounting for the way that spectators view film from a position centered on the vanishing point of linear perspective (also known as quattrocento perspective because it emerged as a system of representation in late 14th century Italian art). Apparatus theory combined psychoanalytic theory of the subject with Marxist ideological critique to argue for the way film reproduces a sense of reality by centering the spectatorial subject, a centering at once ideological, psychological, and a feature of how camera lenses work to create an illusion of depth in a flat image. The theory accounts for the dream state of film spectatorship, the sense that everything unfolds for the spectator, who identifies primarily with the camera and then secondarily with the character(s). Jean Baudry is a key apparatus theorist.

2. Two centuries before quantum physics, Thomas Young developed an experiment that reveals an interference pattern that can only be accounted for if light is a wave: a beam of light passes through a barrier with two slits cut into it; on the other side of the barrier is a screen that registers any light that passes through the slits. The screen reveals an interference pattern in which the waves may combine together to produce a peak or cancel each other out to produce a trough. As Amir D. Aczel observes, “The Young experiment has been carried out with many entities we consider to be particles: electrons, since the 1950s; neutrons, since the 1970s; and atoms, since the 1980s. These findings demonstrated the de Broglie principle, according to which particles also exhibit wave phenomena” (21).

3. Michael Sicinski’s critical reading of the film’s criticism breaks this out in detail, as I will discuss shortly.

4. Sicinski describes Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, from “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” as

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 focussing 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. (76)

I cite Sicinski’s description rather than Heidegger’s because it renders the notion of dwelling in a way more aligned with this reading of Wavelength. Heidegger aims to show that dwelling is not a settled thing for humans but that we must continually search for it in our learning. His conception is centered on a human subject, Dasein, for whom dwelling is an ongoing practice, a relationality. While this notion does transform subject/object relations, it still centers human subject in a way that I argue fascination does not.

5. Quite a few readings of this film argue for our identification with the camera, which bolsters classical cinematic apparatus theory. See David Sterritt, as well as Langford and Michelson.

6. One answer, of course, is synecdoche. The camera stands in for the filmmaker in a way that gels or exposures cannot; these are the more inhuman aspects of the film.

7. There is a large literature on the film’s balance between human and machine, much of which tacitly tips the balance towards the human (which makes sense if you’re reading it on the cinematic apparatus level, but less so on the quantum apparatus level). For instance, David Sterritt recoups the human behind the camera:

the ‘imperfections’ are essential to the film, since they reveal the presence of the artist who operates the camera, transforming what might have seemed a detached mechanical exercise into a work with manifestly human meanings and sensibilities.(103)

Craig Sinclair finds the nonhuman in the soundtrack, arguing that

Wavelength proves itself an experiment in sound above vision. Indeed, one can only describe Wavelength phenomenologically, because the soundscape is presented in a raw mathematical form that is alien to the ear and that forces experiencers to think for themselves rather than be dictated to by the eye.(20)

Sinclair has a point, because the tensions among sine wave and ambient noise and human voices should be read in relation to the tensions among camera action and film event and mise-en-scène depictions.

8. As a structural film, which P. Adams Sitney defines as “a cinema of the mind rather than the eye” (370), Wavelength seems to offer the perfect illustration of apparatus theory.

9. The first superposition flashes briefly onto the screen at 19:48, but it’s only after the 30-minute mark that the frequency of double exposures picks up, shifting in its patterning from a flash of superposition within a single shot to the doubling of the image over a cut.

10. Such a view goes against a debate raging in the 1980s, when “Stephen Heath argued with Michelson, suggesting that the film’s implied narrative and linear perspective prevents [sic] it from questioning how the apparatus of cinema constitutes the subject in the first place” (Potempski 13n3). Both readings prevent them from questioning how the film questions cinematic theory.

11. Potempski further recalls Heath’s argument that Michelson’s reading “makes it complicit with a certain ideology of the (all-powerful) subject. Snow, for his part, claimed that neither narrative nor perspective were the true subjects of the film” (13n3).

12. Wees’s description situates the photograph as the subject of the verb actions, underscoring its agency:

the center of the projected image on the screen is occupied by the photograph of waves pinned on the far wall of the room. Throughout the zoom, the photograph holds its central position, and as it expands toward the borders of the projected image, everything around it gradually disappears. (156).

Sicinski corroborates this animacy of the loft and its collaborators:

Sight and sound are nothing more than reactions to light and air, material subatomic particles in motion. In Wavelength, it is not that everything is ‘alive,’ in some sort of fantastic realm. … it is that everything is active and in motion, including the viewer him/herself. (80)

13. In a slightly different approach from Mulvey’s well-known reading of the image of woman, Metz argues that the apparatus of cinema is itself the fetish:

As strictly defined, the fetish, like the apparatus of cinema, is a prop, the prop that disavows the lack and in doing so affirms it without wishing to. … The fetish is also the point of departure for specialized practices, and as is well known, desire in its modalities is all the more ‘technical’ the more perverse it is. (Imaginary 74)

14. Classically, this absence is lack, but as I have argued elsewhere, it is also loss.

15. “But what happens when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the matter of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance?” (Blanchot 75, qtd. in Shaviro 46).

16. Metz argues that the fetish is necessarily material, that “insofar as one can make up for it by the power of the symbolic alone one is precisely no longer a fetishist” (75). I am arguing that fascination offers a different material relation between spectator and film and filmed object.

17. John Wheeler refined the double slit experiment to give the experimenter the option of deciding whether or not to insert the beam splitter; even if the experimenter decides the position of the beam splitter (in or out of the setup) after the photon has done its travel, it still determines what route the photon will have taken. This quantum phenomenon seems to reverse time. Wheeler notes that

in a loose way of speaking, we decide what the photon shall have done after it has already done it. In actuality it is wrong to talk of the ‘route’ of the photon. For a proper way of speaking we recall once more that it makes no sense to talk of the phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification. (qtd. in Aczel 93)

18. Or as she puts it elsewhere, “properties are only determinate given the existence of particular material arrangements that give definition to the corresponding concept in question” (Meeting 261).

19. Snow recut the original film as a digital version in 2000 called Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have the Time or WVLNT. It is all superpositions, and turns the axis of montage from a horizontal linearity to a layered, z-axis orientation, making us realize that the space in the film is always already layered. Not just the images pinned to the wall, but the windows framing the street space and even the spaces within the opposite buildings seen through their windows manifest this layering. In this sense, the temporal superpositions of shots we have just seen over shots we are seeing now or shots we will see disrupt the illusion of linearity in the progress across the loft and call attention to the dynamics of this layering, that some moments in the film present highly compressed layers while others—seemingly unsuperimposed, a single shot—present. But these are all just different modes of planar division.

20. Legge also notes the Medusa-like image of the screen in this contemporaneous theory (54).

Works Cited

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