Elizabeth Legge: Michael Snow: Wavelength (2009)

“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.”

Publisher Afterall Books, 2009
One Work series
ISBN 1846380561, 9781846380563
112 pages

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Tanya Leighton (ed.): Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (2008)

“The mutual fascination between art and cinema has had a great influence on contemporary culture. For the past fifty years, the love/hate affair between the two has triggered vital aesthetic, social and political responses that constantly renew the way we understand our age. This book traces the story from early spatial experiments with film and video technologies to the current widespread use of projected images in museums and galleries. Why has there been a turn to the cinematic in contemporary art? What happens to the moving image when it shifts from the black box to the white cube, when cinema is exhibited? How does this challenge the traditional mediums of film, painting and sculpture? Art and the Moving Image gathers together key texts including new, translated and previously unpublished essays by eminent writers and theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Beatriz Colomina, Serge Daney, Rosalind Krauss, Maurizio Lazzaratto, and Peter Wollen. It offers an essential introduction to the complex field of art and the projected image for both students and general readers.”

Publisher Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, London, 2008
ISBN 185437625X, 9781854376251
496 pages

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Peter Watkins: Notes on The Media Crisis (2010)

Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and the discourses of history, by means of the rupture of the illusion of representation through the blurring of the boundary that usually separates actors from the characters they play.

In Spring 2010, the MACBA presented a retrospective on Peter Watkins, which reviews his contribution to contemporary film and, in particular, his status as a pioneer of docudrama and false documentary.

Edited by Vida Urbonavicius
Publisher MACBA, Barcelona, 2010
Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) series
ISSN: 1886-5259
14 pages

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