Wavelength

Experimental cinema doesn't get more difficult or perplexing and yet all the same rewarding in some hard to define sense than Wavelength. I might feel like I'm less writing a review than I am writing some homework assignment for an art history class, but Michael Snow's film, which is all in one 42 minute shot, is something that can be said that is literally unlike any other film - one might want to compare it to Andy Warhol's stationary exercises, but that is just putting a camera down and not doing anything as far as doing motions or effects or audio treatment, it's more about the subjects in the frame doing things.

With Snow, there *is* a process, and it's something that could possibly make some of you sick. But first, here's what should be noted: this is not entirely an unbroken take. It is "unbroken" as far as the camera's set-up, since it isn't moving from its spot like on a dolly track and the zoom is moving at a pace a snail would go, 'catch up, man, Jesus!' But all cameras holding film need to change the reels, so every so often as Snow is zooming in on the inside of a room that has about four windows looking out over a city, with two chairs, and three pictures on the farthest wall, he does cut in with what could be called visual static. He also does some treatment to the image as far as super-imposed colors and strobes, or what may be the 1960s take on that, and then near the very end of the film (in the last two/three minutes) there is what one might call a dissolve. There may be more dissolves here, but I lost count by a certain point.

Wavelength is not frustrating to look at since every so often it'll throw in some people to look at - and sure, one of them, for no reason, drops dead (this is the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton making an appearance - I think, though I'm not sure, future film critic Amy Taubin shows up later on as the woman making a phone call telling someone that there's a dead man on the floor) - or even a song (the Beatles's 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is the one sliver of music to pipe in on a radio). But the audio of it is unique, and I'm not sure if it's in a way that is meant to make one curl up into a ball. It's borderline torture; think of when a tea kettle is ready and keeps on whistling - it's that, times a hundred. As the image in Snow's lens brings us inexorably, every so slowly but in that gradual way that you WILL focus on what he wants you to look at, the audio becomes ever so sharply loaded with noise. Compared to this, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music is easy listening.

I had a different experience watching this than maybe some of you; it's available online so I hooked up my hd TV and watched it on a big screen as as I could, but I also could turn down the volume. If I saw this on 35mm in a theater with good light and good sound, I wonder if I would be more put off. But this isn't a knock against Snow exactly; I realized that the sound wasn't going to go down, so I decided to go with it. If this is the artist's process, to bring one into... well, what? I hasten to call it an 'avant-garde masterpiece', or some pretentious disaster, because I feel like/know I would need more of a critical justification. What is this TRYING to do, and does it accomplish it? Simply put: everyone who comes to this will get something out of it (for me, one part that I found compelling is how my mind might wander while looking at this shot zooming closer, and ten SNAP back into Snow's aesthetic when he messed with the image, adding color and more ferocious noise).

Maybe all you need to make a movie isn't a girl and a gun, but a single room with an interesting look and ideas that push the boundaries of what one expects to see in a motion picture. Snow may be saying, 'look at this room, look at what's going on, listen to it, and there may be things going on you didn't expect - look closer.' Or it could be a fantastical trip to do drugs to. This does move, but in such a way that creeps up on you as it creeps along. And ultimately it is... unique.

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.

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.)

An acceptable thing to watch, so long as you turn the sound off. Just suffered it in the cinema in the basement and whilst the ideas behind it may or may not be interesting, I didn't have a chance to think further because of the boiling kettle. So watch it somewhere you have control of the volume and play some Rage Against The Machine over it. This may go completely against what the director intended, but what's he going to do about it? Boil another kettle at you?

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.