Wavelength is a 45-minute film by Canadian experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow, known for building his reputation upon publicity of the film. 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.
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías