Light events: interior and exterior space in Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967)

Suess's paper extends her previous architectural examination of Michael Snow's seminal film, "Wavelength" (1967), to provide a new layer of analysis focusing on the relationship between interior and exterior expressed through the film. In particular, Suess uses "Wavelength" to demonstrate that techniques found in artists' film practice, and particularly those in structural film, are especially suitable for communicating the expressly temporal aspects of the constantly shifting spatial relationships between interior and exterior. In the new analysis of this critical precedent, "Wavelength" is appropriated as a form of architectural drawing, in particular, an "architectural moving drawing", capable of "drawing" time, as well as space. This detailed consideration of the manifold complexity of the temporal relationships between interior and exterior, which are rarely represented through the conventional static media of spatial recording and production, develops the theoretical grounding for Suess's continuing research agenda to establish a hybrid moving image practice of the "architectural moving drawing". The paper extends the concept of "construction" which takes place through the reading of architectural drawing and structural film, as presented in Suess's other papers. It builds upon the previously identified parallels in the function of the active imagination of the viewer in both structural film and architectural representation, claiming that in the relationship between film, screening room, and active viewer a new spatial condition can be formed. Suess also uniquely argues that, in a similar way, the film/drawing of the "architectural moving drawing" can act propositionally, to construct architecture, through its filmic screening and active reading as architectural drawing.