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Wavelength is a short, forty-five minute film that made the reputation of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. It was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967.[1] It was released in May 1967,[1] and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film."[2]
Outline
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 three "character" scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.
In the end, 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") as the camera 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.
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".[3] 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." [4] 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". [5] 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".[6] The principal theme of Wavelength to Heath is the "question of the cinematic institution of the subject of film" rather than the apparatus of filmmaking itself.[7]
Versions
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 the original film upon itself.
Honors
Wavelength is often listed as one of the greatest underground films and art house films ever made. It was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time. The film has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. [1] In 2004, the film was named one of Canada's all time greatest films by the Toronto International Film Festival[8].
Award
The film won the Grand Prix at the 1967 Knokke Experimental Film Festival.[9]
Distribution
References and notes
Bibliography
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