Parallax celebrates the supremacy of the machine over the human gaze, as did Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971) in a more complex way. By aestheticizing the mechanical gliding of her Super 16mm camera over ice-coated grass and the light blowing snow, Hansen produced a kind of automatic cinema in which familiar temporal processes no longer apply. The clouds move past much too quickly in the lower portion of the picture, a few blades of grass tremble in fast motion, and weak sunlight flickers briefly over the ground like a faulty electrical connection. Even the snow falling upward seems to stop when the camera comes to a halt, subject to a mysterious kind of manipulation. Parallax simulates a denatured world in which even the complex soundtrack soon leaves its distant confusion of voices behind to enter soundscapes that no one can access.(Stefan Grissemann)