ABSTRACT
In 1897, Stèphane Mallarme threaded this phrase through his culminating work of modern poetry ‘Un Coup de Des’. Michael Snow, commenting on his 1967 film Wavelength, another radical work of modernist vision, invoked Mallarme’s phrase and sets us thinking about how the moving image recreates/explores/questions the nature of place. The radical role of the moving image in providing new modes of our experience of space has been neglected or simply presented as a deviant deconstruction of a dominant commercial narrative cinema. Taking seriously the way the moving image provides new tools for our understanding of our place in a technological world, I will discuss moments of camera movement and the mobile frame in cinema practice, both commercial and avant-garde, historical and contemporary.
