Wavelength

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.

"Wavelength" is and will always be one of the most controversial films of experimental cinema: the type of film that you either despise it or you consider it a masterpiece. From the ratings and reviews on IMDb, it is evidently the former is definitely common among most cinema goers, those who criticize it as being "boring"' "drudgery", "annoying", "unbearable", etc. Frankly, those claims cannot be directly pushed aside due to the truth that is in them: yes, to some forty-five minutes of a single scene would be the most intolerable thing on earth; indeed, for those with sensitive hearing, the sound would be enough for anyone to tear their hair out. But that does not mean it's bad. On the contrary, I believe Michael Snow was not a horrible, untalented filmmaker that tried and backfired to please audiences when he made "Wavelength", but deliberately attempted to be unconventional, boring and downright irritating. This was not the only film to fall in such a genre either; there were actually quite a number of unpleasant avant-garde films made around the sixties period, some even worse, that were intended to challenge the viewer in their difficult aspects.

The forty-five minute long work is a single scene of a room, experimented with using various color filters, slowly and gradually zooming in to a photo on the wall of the room. Very little occurs onscreen except for the zoom, and in many ways it is really a series of film variations on the only focal point. That's not to say there is no onscreen action though; traffic can be seen occasionally moving outside the windows of the room, several women enter early on whilst a Beatles song is played, and the climax is a series of loud banging noises--as though a burglary is happening offscreen--before the great experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton enters the shot and falls dead to the floor.

One other reviewer has interpreted that the film's goal is that to have almost nothing happen the viewer gets to appreciate more what does happen, and this is a very good point. In either case, it is a very interesting and abstract experimental work, as well as the ending which does a quite literal turn on the title, and an absolute must for fans of experimental cinema. It's boring only if you look at it as a scene of a room; it becomes interesting when you delight in the moments of action and I really liked it because it kept my interest despite the lack of events. I found that when watching it it was not a painfully boring watch like many say, because after a while you accept nothing big is going to happen and let the movie play out as it is. To be constantly bored at a movie for an entire forty-five minutes is quite unnatural, at least for me.

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.

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?

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 :)