Wavelength

I watched this film/installation from Michael Snow in MoMA recently and in a way I feel lucky to have seen it in the way I did, particularly in light of the comments here from those that also saw it. For me the good fortunate comes from seeing a version called WVLNT, which is also known as Wavelength for Those Short of Time, or words to that effect. Essentially this version was the original film broken down into three parts and then laid over one another. Maybe this loses something by doing this but for me I'm not sure what I would have gained from seeing the longer version.

Apparently the film is important in an artistic influence sense but I really think that whatever group appreciates this is not a group I will ever be able to join. I took nothing from it and wasn't able to find anything to really grasp onto as a starting point. Even in the context of having spent the morning in an art gallery trying to be open minded to things, I couldn't find space for this. I would love to sound intelligence and art-savvy but WVLNT really just seemed difficult and obscure for the sake of it.

I have never written a review of a movie on IMDb, and in all likelihood I never will again. But I feel an urgent need to reiterate that Snow's Wavelength is nothing more than an exercise in pomp and meaninglessness that earns its reputation by seducing a small class of over-educated people who feel a need to profess some sort of privileged access and understanding to something that the masses simply "don't get."

Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Good art requires that meaning be contained within the text. Events take place; people say things -- those should be the very basic requirements for art. The tools of cinema -- editing, camera placement and movement, and so forth -- are important, but alone, don't cut it. A mere, 'cool' concept doesn't suffice. So skip the earth-shattering, condescending, pretension of Wavelength -- and its musical analogue in the "compositions" (I use that phrase lightly) of John Cage -- and instead look elsewhere, in films and works that seek to communicate real ideas about human experience. If you do feel a need to profess a real knowledge of "art," watch Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," or Fellini's "8 1/2." Heck, rent "E.T." for goodness sake. But please don't be fooled by by this junk.

Man, this guy really knows how to zoom and make noise at the same time! Although Avant-Garde filmmakers (and other artists alike) may find this an interesting way of using the medium, it's really nothing more than a cheap way of trying to be unique while keeping your technique as simple as possible. I had time to go out and get lunch (and eat it, mind you) before this dude was finished zooming into the picture. I'd like to hear the DVD commentary :)

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.)

Like others who've seen this film, I watched in film school. It's a one-gag joke that may seem boring but yet the film is unforgettable: A long, slow zoom through a window into a room, eventually closing up onto a picture of a wave.

During the painfully slow zoom things happen in the room, though it's never busy or plot-driven. The highlight for me was when someone snapped on a radio and the Beatles "Strawberry Fields" played. Was that an underhanded way of saying that the film was a bad LSD trip?

Beyond the Beatles, the soundtrack consists of a long, annoying, screeching crescendo. It's awful, but try as I could, I was unable to catch a short nap during the film because of the soundtrack. For that it earns my praise. I mean, if Hollywood can't keep me awake with their drivel, then this film deserves some kind of award.