A film and a book: Wavelength, 1967/2003 and Cover to Cover, 1975. Two works, two masterpieces in the history of cinema and the artist's book, perfect synthesis of the visual thought of Michael Snow (Toronto, 1928-2023), recently disappeared, and of his ability to make the page as well as the photogram a space for verifying our perception.

Snow declared that Wavelength was an attempt to synthesize his nervous system, his religious beliefs and his aesthetic ideas in the form of pure space and time. The original version, immediately assumed as a paradigm of structuralist cinema, develops in a zoom with a fixed camera, shot over a day and a half and transformed into a 45-minute montage in which we start from the total vision of the interior of a loft to gradually get closer to the small photo of a marine surface hanging on the wall opposite the camera, between four large windows.

The impassive proceeding of the zoom is underlined by the crescendo of an electronic sound of a sine wave, while the use of different chromatic filters and some enigmatic apparitions of women and men who act in the loft without becoming narration interfere with the image: the events , even if dramatic, are reduced to marginal accidents compared to the aseptic progression of the machinic gaze.

In 2003 Snow decided to create a new contracted version, entitled WVLNT, present in the exhibition and in the VideotecaGAM collection, dividing the original work into three 15-minute time segments and superimposing them one on top of the other as if it were a matter of recognizing, in the apparent linearity of visual perception, the role of prefiguration and memory: the movement through space is made simultaneously of present vision, of memory of the perception just past and of anticipation of the space we are about to reach. Folding time back on itself allowed Snow to recognize an even higher complexity of that filmic form of pure space and time that he had imagined in '67.