Wavelength (1967 film)
Wavelength is a 45-minute film by Canadian experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967, and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film", calling Snow "the dean of structural filmmakers." "Wavelength" is often listed as one of the greatest underground, art house and Canadian films ever made. It was named #85 in the 2001 "Village Voice" critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century. The film has been  designated and preserved as a masterwork by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. In a 1969 review of the film published in "Artforum", Manny Farber describes "Wavelength" as "a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become "The Birth of a Nation" in Underground films, is a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt. For all of the film's sophistication (and it is overpowering for its time-space-sound inventions) it is a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor... it is probably  the most rigorously composed movie in existence." Synopsis. "Wavelength" consists of "almost" no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the four "character" scenes. Snow's intent for the film was "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas". The 45-minute-long zoom–which nonetheless contains edits–that incorporates in its time frame four human events in the room, including a man's death and a woman calling emergency later on, is intended to be symbolic of his  intent. In the first scene, a woman in a fur coat enters the room accompanied by two men carrying a bookshelf or cabinet. The woman instructs the men where to place this piece of furniture and they all leave. Later, the same woman returns with a female friend. They drink the beverages they have brought, and turn on the radio, which is playing "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles. Long after they leave, what sounds like breaking glass is heard. At this point, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters and inexplicably, although in a way to indicate his  death, collapses on the floor. Later on, the woman in the fur coat reappears and makes an emergency phone call, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before. Around the end of the film, one can hear what sound like police sirens, but could just as well be a part of the musical score, a distinct piece of minimalist music that pairs tones at random. These tones shift in frequency (and in "wavelength"), becoming higher-pitched as the camera further analyzes the space of the anonymous apartment. What begins as a  view of the full apartment zooms (the zoom is not precisely continuous as the camera does change angle slightly, noticeably near the very end) and changes focus slowly across the forty-five minutes, only to stop and come into perfect focus on a photograph of the sea on the wall. The film ends with the camera going completely out of focus and fading to white, as the soundtrack finally raises to a pitch too high to be heard. Structural film. According to P. Adams Sitney, the trend in American avant-garde cinema during the late 1940s and 1950s (such as  the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage) was towards "increased complexity". Since the mid-1960s, filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Joyce Wieland produced works where simplicity was foregrounded. Sitney labeled this tendency "structural film." The four characteristics of structural film are "fixed camera position…the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen." Sitney describes Snow as the "dean of structural film-makers" who "utilizes the tension" of "Wavelength"'s use of a "fixed-frame and…the flexibility of the fixed tripod". Where Sitney describes structural film as a "working process," Stephen  Heath in "Questions of Cinema" finds "Wavelength" "seriously wanting" in that the "implied…narrative [makes "Wavelength"] in some ways a retrograde step in cinematic form". To Heath, the principal theme of "Wavelength" is the "question of the cinematic institution of the subject of film" rather than the apparatus of filmmaking itself. In 2003, Snow released "WVLNT (or Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time)", a shorter (1/3 of the original time) and significantly altered version by overlaying multiple forms of the original film upon itself. Critical reception. The screening of "Wavelength" in 1967 was, according to filmmaker Jonas  Mekas, "a landmark event in cinema." Considered a canonical avant-garde film along with Léger and Murphy's "Ballet mecanique" (1924), Buñuel and Dalí's "Un chien andalou" (1929), Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943), Stan Brakhage's "Mothlight" (1963) and Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising" (1964), "Wavelength"'s 45-minute running time nevertheless contributes to a reputation for being a difficult work: [G]iven the film's durational strategy, we feel every minute of the time it takes to traverse the space of the loft to get to the infinite space of the photograph of waves—and the  fade to white—at the film's end. The film inspires as much boredom and frustration as intrigue and epiphany... The film won the Grand Prix at the 1967 Knokke Experimental Film Festival, Knokke, Belgium. and in a 1968 "Film Quarterly" review, Jud Yalkut describes "Wavelength" as "at once one of the simplest and one of the most complex films ever conceived." In a 1968 "L.A. Free Press" review of the film, Gene Youngblood describes "Wavelength" as "without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject  and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a "triumph of contemplative cinema.'" "Wavelength" ranked 102nd in the 2012 "Sight & Sound" critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, and also received three directors' votes.