One thing I've come to observe about experimental film is how different much of the work functions in a broader context that includes the presence of the maker in one way or another, vs. just a bare screening of the work. A related observation is that the physical variables of screenings matter a lot as well.
I note these things as Snow's passing leads me to recall screening Wavelength for my Experimental Film class. I did this from video, not celluloid, (yes I'm a heretic) in a nice auditorium with a big screen and a serious sound system. I didn't think I needed to see it again, and had other stuff to deal with, so I left the auditorium after starting the playback. When I returned, I found the students expressing great pain at having endured the piercing whine of the soundtrack at a very uncomfortable volume. Had I been there, I would have gotten up and turned down the volume. But even if the students had known where the control was, they wouldn't have changed it, as they told me they thought the sound was SUPPOSED to be irritating. This had never occurred to me, as I my initiation to wavelength had come from projection on a Pageant in a classroom, with the soundtrack coming from the smallish speaker of the projector, which, combined with the projector noise, was more meditative than assaulting. I regretted possibly accidentally allowing the students to develop a false and negative impression if Snow, but maybe the semiotic 'openness' of screening variables is just part of an artform (especially the "structural" variant) that tries (among other things) to get down to fundamental properties of the medium, and Snow would have been amused by the anecdote. I began to look for humor in Snow once I learned that he did the narration for 'nostalgia' and Frampton played the guy whose death the camera in Wavelength ignores, again a perspective an audience is unlikely to get on a 'naive' initial viewing... Of course, for all I know he might have been greatly annoyed by my faux pax. I kinda like not knowing, actually.
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