Strangeloves: From/De la region centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War

摘要

On September 14,1970, Michael Snow, Pierre Abbeloos, Joyce Wieland, and Bernard Goussard planted a custom-made, servomechanical mono-pod into an allegedly empty tract of eastern Canada. To the monopod they attached a 16 mm motion picture camera. They anchored the machines to the ground with a steel plate. They did so for the purpose of creating Snow's "gigantic landscape film" La region centrale (1971). The film is widely recognized as a canonical achievement in the history of avant-garde cinema. Snow chose the site for its remoteness, its "complete wilderness with nothing man-made visible." The film begins with the apparatus turning the camera in slow, smooth sweeps. A machinic vision scans the boulders, mottled scrub grass, and blue skies. As the film proceeds into its third hour, the apparatus turns in rapid somersaults and figure-eight patterns. Its movement crescendos, and the images blur. The scene is atomized into a flicker of brown and blue, brown and blue. At speed, the images mutate from indifferent record to pulsating abstraction. The frame itself turns from mimetic container to aggressive matter, attaining a kind of shimmering substance in projection. Snow wanted "the reality of these circular movements" to come into dynamic competition with the landscape and the psychophysio-logical stability of the viewer. He drafted (but did not submit) an application for a British provisional patent for the apparatus, which he named the "Camera Activating Machine." Considered apart and in tandem, the film and the Camera Activating Machine (CAM) offer an as yet uncon-sidered and complex case through which to understand the media cultures of the Cold War.