Ankerman's D'Est and Michael Snow

One of our questions was to see how Michael Snow's work is reflected in D'Est, because Akerman listed him as an influence in her art. I decided to take that further and explain how Michael Snow's particular film Wavelength and D'Est are the same.

One I saw was the colorizations. One of my favorite parts of D'Est was the color scheme, and the same goes for Michale Snow's Wavelength. My favorite shot was a man in a red tank top sitting on a green bench against a wall of the same color. The bench and the background both were stripes, but they went at opposite angles, making them alike and yet disalike at the same time. It was like a photograph, but the character was moving. Wavelength used color in a similar way, but also different. The lone chair, I believe it was yellow, stood out from the background and it also looked like a photograph in it's own right. Yet, while Michael Snow used colored filters over his film and colored the entire film odd and alternating colors, D'Est stayed all one color scheme. It was all realistic colors, but it still seemed to flow together as one. The parts with the Russians standing in line or lying in the train station were a brownish, old-time feel and the scenes in the cook's room was all warm colors and warm ambient light.

Another aspect that was similar was the sense of stageplay in the film. In D'Est the characters seemed staged even though it was supposed to be real life. The one woman took forever to put on makeup and she also took very careful stock of her cooking. It also took her forever to turn on the record player, just standing there like she was completely frozen or such. In Wavelength, there is a murder portrayed, but it is also very fake. The death scene is incredibly staged. I think this is the point in both films, actually. Both are focused more on the art than the acting. The whole point is the colors and the staged aspect of "real" life.

I thought another aspect was similar, but it is more abstract. The camera usage was also, I felt a correlation between the films. In Wavelength the camera was a continuous zoom for 45 minutes to the other end of the room, ending on a photograph of water. The camera was jerky, however, and the film stock and filters changed often. This idea was also in D'Est. The camera was quite uniquely used as opposed to other films. It would be stable, then do a tracking shot for 5 minutes straight. There were never any very interesting or unique shot angles, but the closeups versus the long shots, the stable photograph- like shots versus the extremely long tracking shots, all made interesting use of a very basic idea...the tracking shot and the closeup. Wavelength did this also, by using a very basic idea of the zoom, yet using it artfully and in a new way that no one else had ever done.