Wavelength

source: Wavelength

Most will find this movie tedious. It is a 45 minute incredibly slow zooming in across a loft-type space. Most of the action is barely visible truck tops visible through the windows at the opposite side of the room. There is the occasional "happening" with a person or two, and there are a lot of experimental film and color effects (flashes of pure monochromatic orange fill the screen, the image turns sepia or red, etc. negative, etc.). The sound track may induce headaches, as it contains both The Beatles "Strawberry Fields" and later a track of several sine-wave tones which creep, barely like the zoom, slowly higher in pitch. As I sat in the theater watching this, toward the end, I believe I finally "got" it. This may not be a spoiler in the traditional sense, but I warn you that reading on may spoil the sort of joy I felt as I put it all together. Of course it may also be that the subject matter is so minimal and lacking that one's mind works extra hard to try to come up with something there, but I don't think so. SPOILER: But this piece is also somewhat brilliant in it's subtle exploration of waves, as layers of film roll back and forth under/over the 'main' track. SPOILER: And the audio itself is a set of sine-wave sounds which are slowly rising and not completely in sync, so one hears the wave addition and interference as the wavelengths peak together at different intervals. SPOILER: At the climax, some of the soundwaves drop back and build back up to crash, like waves on the shore. SPOILER: This combination of various waves is more than worth the wait for 'something to happen'. :SPOILER

Eons ago this film was presented in my history of art class at university. What I really remember is my professor claiming it as a necessity of any art student to view it as a right of passage. While viewing the film, though only 45 minutes in length I managed to fall asleep. This was the only time I have ever fallen asleep in class. Even watching my early film class with D. W. Griffith's Intolerance in a very hot, stuffy room in the most uncomfortable seats ever did not make me visit the land of Nod. Yet it holds value to many others in its artistic nature. Sadly as I failed to consciously view most of it I can only give short and brief opinion on it as a good sleep aid.

This is one of the most famous conceptual films ever made, and yet it's surprising how little the descriptions of it actually fit. It is most commonly discussed as "a single zoom", partially because of Snow's own description of it, whereas it's obviously and significantly several cuts with various camera effects added in for good measure. It's discussed as having a strange mix of sounds in its soundtrack, but the sounds are actually pretty isolated and easy to distinguish, from the whistling sine wave increasing in pitch to the glass breaking, Strawberry Fields Forever, sirens only at the end, and a line of dialog. It's also discussed as minimalistic, but there's actually a lot going on. Finally, and most importantly, it's a lot easier to watch than most people make it out to be. In a New York loft, Michael Snow sets up a camera in the corner and, over a series of hundreds of cuts over two days, slowly zooms in to a picture of waves on the wall while putting in color gels, fiddling with exposure, staging a narrative scene (almost in real time), and playing with cuts and super-impositions. In his own words, it's as long as it is because he didn't have any money to make it longer, and one aside to the whole "continuous zoom" theme is that the zoom is at absolutely no point in the movie continuous, but protracted (there's a significant difference). It's interesting to people in the way it plays with expectations (what does an audience want from a film?), the way it plays with narrative (by the time we've zoomed all the way in, the actions on the set are really mysterious), in the way that memory plays with our experience of the film (some sections seem to go faster than others because less is going on... it is possible to sleep through segments of the film and not miss anything), and some even discuss it in terms of discomfort (the sine wave is annoying to people, I guess, and after all the anxiety involved in getting to the end, the picture is, in theory, a purposeful let-down). A lot of people discuss it in terms of filmic space, and how by the time the movie ends, the camera has opened up to an entirely different space than the loft. The thing is, I knew about pretty much all of this before I had ever seen the film (this happens sometimes when you're a film student; I also had pretty much "seen" A bout de soufflé a dozen times before actually watching the movie), and as a concept film, it's the concept itself that matters over the actual experience of it. Whereas it is still an important film, it is a famous film, and it is a heavily discussed film, "seeing it" is not all that important, and since it's a rare film, it's also not really worth tracking down. I think it should be made available on DVD so that it can lose a bit of its romantic mystery, but since it's also the type of film that's a "film" and must be seen projected as film, putting it on DVD can offend the people who enjoy it as a "film". You see the problem we're dealing with, here? Anyway, if you've heard of Wavelength, you probably already know all about it, and if you don't, you're not reading this. It is eternally for an audience of avant-garde enthusiasts and film theorists (and, well, let's face it, the occasional pretentious jerk, though Snow doesn't strike me as one himself), and will maintain that audience for decades to come. --PolarisDiB

5.9? Really? A rating that low? I know the reason. THE WRONG PEOPLE SAW THE FILM! Why did they? They probably weren't warned. "Wavelength" is about as far from mainstream you can go. An experimental film, zooming in on a window, over a week period. Of course, other things happen. A man(played by experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton) dies, probably murdered. Then, we continuously watch to see what happens. The screen changes color, and we just see what happens to this dead body! I, personally, find "Wavelength" to be a brilliant Avant-garde masterpiece. A film unlike almost any other, powerful and interesting! But, you may not, and that's okay. This is because ITS A MOVIE WHERE YOU LOOK AT A WINDOW FOR 40 MINUTES! That is certainly not going to be for everybody! So, I'd recommend this to people to enjoy experimental film, or at least have a strong interest in it. Everyone else, I don't really think so.

Michael Snow's masterpiece, or something like that, is a "structural picture" from 1967 called Wavelength. Though the film was incredibly painful to my ears, it for some reason has stuck with me. After a long thinking period, I have decided that I actually really liked it. At a little under 45 minutes long, Wavelength is not an easy film to get through. It features a non-moving camera set in a large room, and nothing else. The camera captured the action that goes on in the room to create what Snow calls "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas." On the surface it is merely a stiff frame of three walls, a floor and a ceiling with the occasional, but brief, interaction of a human variety. But once you look closer you will realize that your eyes have deceived you. Through the entire film, Snow has his camera zooming in at an extremely slow speed. After realizing this, your eyes will be fixated on the screen in a desperate attempt to convince yourself that you are not insane. I found the entire concept to be so emotionally exhausting and frustrating that once the film was over I could do nothing but watch it again. It was a pleasantly unpleasing experience that did nothing but expand my conception of conventional filmmaking. I have to admit that the soundtrack behind the film was a bit confusing for me. It was nonexistent for most of the film, but all of a sudden…WHAM! Imagine the most ear-piercing scream or squeal that you have ever heard. Now combine them to make the last half an hour of Wavelength. I honestly thought that I was going to disturb my neighbor's dog with the high pitched whistles and unexplainable wails that accompanied the actionless action. If you can handle the sounds you will be rewarded by the film. With Wavelength, Snow created the most aesthetically praised work in all of avant-garde. His technique ultimately forced me into a starring contest with the screen. It was me versus the structure of a single room. It was me versus the nonexistent, but ever present, movement of the camera's lenses. I waited arrogantly for the film to flinch. It never did. And then it ended.

The lodestar of contemporary avant cinema, Michael Snow's short purports to be a single zoom across a seedy office/warehouse space--a lens adjustment that takes forty-five minutes to complete. The truth of the matter--unmentioned even in Manny Farber's pioneering rave for the picture--is that the movie isn't all one shot. Snow fudges the "formalist rigor" for which he got his reputation: the movement from wide shot of the room to a pixel-enhancing closeup of a photograph of ocean waves is speckled with negative inserts, black, white and orange blank screens, and psychedelic rewinds of the scene that just came before. Like Hollis Frampton's ZORNS LEMMA, WAVELENGTH is the kind of picture made to be written about, not really endured. The glowing descriptions of it in critics' prose are more provoking than the actual artifact itself. Two things remain striking and puzzling about it thirty-two years later. Why did Snow choose to make a near-hour-long demonstration of the zoom lens? Why would tracking have been any different--is the movie meant to be a statement on a subjective appearance of changed perspective, while the viewer really remains static? Or was Snow just infatuated with the gimmickry of the zoom? (Each calibration churning closer to the photograph has a home-movie clunkiness.) The other is the oddly hippie-dippie tone of Snow's inserted gimcrackery. From the charwoman-looking extra playing "Strawberry Fields Forever" on a radio, then lumbering off like a bit player in an Ed Wood number, to the acid-flashback reruns of just-passed scenes, to the freak colorizations of arbitrary moments (as if we jumped to the POV of a UFO), the ambience is much more Big Brother and the Holding Company than Robert Bresson. It's the same playing-with-a-gizmo amateurism that mars the images using people in Stan Brakhage's DOG STAR MAN, and it makes Snow's academic astringency look like a pose. (WAVELENGTH showed up again, ripped off in the unlikeliest place: the track into a photograph that forms the "Twilight Zone" epilogue to Kubrick's THE SHINING.)

The thing about WAVELENGTH is, the zoom is only the overall shape of the film, and lots of fascinating things happen within the 45-minutes it takes for the zoom lens to cross the room. If you only care about "plot" or "characters" or human-driven "action" in cinema, no amount of persuasion is going to make you warm up to WAVELENGTH. It is more of an intersection between cinema and painting. It doesn't offer plot, like most films, and it occurs across a fixed span of time, unlike paintings which you can walk away from more easily. So it demands a different kind of patience, but I think it rewards that patience in spades. Here, the attractions are qualities of light, textures of swirling film grain, the sheer fascination with how a blue or green filter can change to optical world before you. Yes, it's possible that a film could give you all that, *and* plot, but I submit to you, you wouldn't feel those formal, painterly aspects with as much force. That's minimalism for you. And WAVELENGTH has sensual pleasure to spare. I think one of the aspects of Snow's cinema which is most disconcerting to many filmgoers is his resolute disinterest in the human world. What do we make of a film in which someone drops dead, but the camera moves right past them? The soundtrack is a demonstration of pure sound, a sine wave which is an orderly but impersonal shifting of air. Like the light waves entering the zoom lens, mathematics and particle physics overtake "merely" human events. Isn't it possible to find interest in the space of the room for itself? Isn't it fascinating to stare into a world which, in its dogged pursuit of its own agenda, barely knows you're there? I think so. As much as I love this film, I must defend it in pretty hard-nosed terms. WAVELENGTH is not here to entertain, affirm, or even please you, any more than sunlight exists to make you visible to your friends. Light and sound are objective forces, and WAVELENGTH gives them a place to play.

Understand that I am a fan of avant-garde cinema. I have seen quite a lot of it - some very good, some very bad - but no film I have ever seen (avant-garde or otherwise) has ever been more excruciating to me than "Wavelength." Like the title of my post says, I know what excruciating means intimately and I do believe I'd rather suffer another five days with a kidney stone like I did a few years ago, than be forced to sit through this film for a third time (in film school I was forced to watch it twice for different teachers). Stick to Maya Deren or Stan Brakhage or Bunuel or anybody to satisfy your avant-garde tastes. Experimenting with "Wavelength" might not be worth the pain.

Do yourself a favor and instead of actually watching this film just read an analysis of it. Concept of the movie: stationary camera in an empty room zooms for 45 minutes. A few people visit the room, some of them play The Beatles for a while - for the rest of the movie, the soundtrack consists of a high-pitched whine. At three minutes, this would have been an amusing bit of '60s avantgarde nonsense. At 45 minutes, it's a dreadful experience. The movie provokes absolutely no emotional or intellectual response, and you can't even take a nap because of the soundtrack.