Post 9: (nostalgia), Wavelength, desire

What interests me most about Frampton’s (nostalgia) is the disjuncture between the narration and the images. When each photograph appears, the narrator (who is Michael Snow, funnily enough—which gives the moment where Frampton wishes he could apologize to Snow about a poster’s typeface looking like an "invitation to a church social" a certain silliness) pauses for a moment, as if to give the viewer time to take it in. As the photograph burns, we hear narration about the photograph that will follow. The viewer is therefore both anticipating and remembering--studying each photo in terms of the remembered narration about it while also listening to the current narration looking forward to the upcoming photograph. 

The anticipatory aspect is especially relevant when thinking about this film in relation to Wavelength. As someone pointed out earlier on this blog, Wavelength creates a startling sense of desire in the viewer--one wants so desperately for the photograph of the waves, the apparent object of the zoom, to take up the screen, that it is actually disappointing when this desire is not allowed to be completely satisfied at the end. There is a similar sense of denied desire created in (nostalgia), and, at the end of the film when the narrator refers to something horrible captured through multiple reflections in the next photograph, which we are not given the opportunity to actually see.