Wavelength (1967 film)

Wavelength is a 1967 experimental film by Canadian 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. 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 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
The loft has four mullioned windows and few furnishings—a desk, a yellow chair, and a radiator against the far wall, with a few photographs hanging above the chair. A woman in a red coat directs two men to place a bookcase against the left wall, and they leave. The woman returns with another woman. One turns on the radio, and the image takes a pinkish hue as the women drink beverages and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles before leaving abruptly. When the image cuts briefly to a solid red screen, a low-pitched hum begins, gradually increasing in pitch over the course of the film. The image of the loft returns, shifting in and out of its negative, monochrome colors, or a blank screen.

The sound of breaking glass is heard before a man staggers into the loft and dies, collapsing on the floor. As the zoom progresses, his corpse is cut out of the frame. After some time, a woman arrives and makes a phone call to a man named Richard. She tells him about the dead body she found and agrees to wait outside. Once she leaves, silent images of her previous actions are superimposed. The camera continues to zoom toward the photographs on the wall, two of which show graphics of a walking woman and another showing waves. The hum from the score, now very high-pitched, becomes unstable and resembles the sound of a siren. The picture of waves is enlarged until it fills the entire frame. The film ends when the photograph comes out of focus and the image fades to white.

Cast

 * Amy Taubin
 * Hollis Frampton
 * Joyce Wieland
 * Lynn Grossman
 * Naoto Nakagawa
 * Roswell Rudd

Pre-production
Snow's production notes before Wavelength show variations on the concept of an extended zoom from a wide shot to a close-up. The film emerged from an exercise playing with combinations of words, clustered around "room", "wave", "length", "Atlantic", "time", and "ocean". Snow's ideas for the final close-up included a photograph of "beautiful blond white nude girl", a window, a picture of Billie Holiday, a Tom Wesselmann painting, a photograph of a child, or a calendar featuring an autumn landscape. Snow settled on a photograph he had taken of the East River, part of a series made for his sculpture Atlantic. He selected the image for its calm and undramatic qualities.

Snow cast the film from his circle of friends. He selected Amy Taubin because of her previous acting experience in a Broadway adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. When he needed "somebody to die for me", Hollis Frampton volunteered.

Snow spent a year preparing notes and looking for a space to film. He took a picture of the East River to place on the far wall of the room. Above the picture, Snow placed a pair of photographs of walking women, along with two women's silhouettes. The silhouettes are a design that he created for his Walking Woman series and mark the end of the project.

Filming
Shooting happened in a loft on Canal Street, over the course of a week in December 1966. Snow borrowed the camera he used from filmmaker Ken Jacobs. He mounted it on a high platform from which it could capture more of the street scenes outside. The space from the camera to the opposite end of the room was around 80 ft long.

Because the 16 mm camera could only record 3 minutes of footage before needing to be reloaded, Snow divided the film's runtime into about 18 segments and marked the positions of the zoom lens for the start and end of each segment. The scenes were shot out of order, with Frampton's death scene recorded first to accommodate his schedule. For the final scenes showing the wave photograph, Snow had to physically move the camera from its original position, having reached the limitations of the zoom lens.

He shot on multiple types of film stock to produce changes in the light and grain in the image. These included Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Kodak color negative, Agfachrome color reversal, DuPont black-and-white reversal, and Ansco stocks. Snow experimented with expired film, as well as film intended for outdoor lighting.

Soundtrack
For the film's soundtrack, Snow initially considered using an extended crescendo. After deciding a glissando would be more suitable, he developed plans to record it on a trombone or violin and mix together multiple takes to fill the duration of the film. Ted Wolff, who worked at Bell Labs, was interested in the project and suggested using an audio oscillator. Wolff worked with Snow to build a motor that controlled the oscillator. Snow had intended to make use of whatever sync sound was recorded during filming but made an exception for the music on the radio. During the original shoot, Joan Baez's cover of "The Little Drummer Boy" was playing. Feeling it did not fit well in the film, Snow replaced it with "Strawberry Fields Forever", which had just been released when he was editing the film. Snow initially mixed the soundtrack such that the sync sound was on the film's optical soundtrack and the electronic glissando was on a separate reel-to-reel tape. This would give him the ability to adjust the tape playback based on the acoustics of each screening venue.

Release
Wavelength was first shown at a private screening at the Film-Maker's Cinematheque attended by Shirley Clarke, Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, and Amy Taubin. Mekas recommended submitting the film to the Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Belgium. However, Snow expected the separately recorded soundtrack to prove challenging for wider exhibition and decided it would be better to transfer the score to the film's optical track. Since Snow lacked funds to finish the film, Mekas secured the money to create the print.

Snow submitted Wavelength to the New York Film Festival but was rejected. Artist Richard Serra brought a copy of the film while traveling across Europe, exhibiting it a dozen times. When he screened it at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a group of enraged audience members knocked over the projector.

Snow did not release Wavelength for home media, preferring that it be screened on film in a cinema. In discussing the shortcomings of digital projection, Taubin emphasizes the importance of presenting the various film grains of Wavelength and the difference in "visual cues through which we read space". a restoration of the 16 mm print is being overseen by John Klacsmann, archivist at Anthology Film Archives.

Analysis
The primary structure of Wavelength is defined by its zoom. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows, making the far wall appear closer and closer. This experience cannot be recreated with the human eye and is unique to the mechanical eye. Annette Michelson proposed that Snow's use of the zoom "produces the formal correlative of the suspense film."

With Wavelength, Snow seeks to balance "fact" with "illusion". The soundtrack incorporates both representational sync sound and the abstract electronic sine. Images of movement are often balanced with changes in how the viewer perceives the room. The entry of the dying man is preceded by fluctuations in the color of the image. The scene of the woman making a phone call is shown twice, the second time through a superimposition over the continuing zoom.

In his 1969 article "Structural Film", film historian P. Adams Sitney identifies a shift within avant-garde cinema away from complex forms and toward "a cinema of structure wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film." Analyzing the emerging structural film movement, Sitney highlights Wavelength for its use of a fixed camera position in defining the shape of the work.

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.

Critical reception
The screening of Wavelength in 1967 was, according to filmmaker Jonas Mekas, "a landmark event in cinema." The film won the Grand Prix at the 1967 Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Knokke, Belgium. Film Culture magazine presented Snow its 1967 Independent Film Award. 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.'"

Legacy
Considered a canonical avant-garde film, 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...."

Wavelength is part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection. The film ranked 102nd in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, and also received three directors' votes. It was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century. The Toronto International Film Festival's experimental film section Wavelengths, created by programmer Susan Oxtoby in 2001, takes its name from the film.

Related works
Wavelength established a template for many of Snow's later films, which critic J. Hoberman characterizes as "anti-illusionist, reflexive, and often paradoxical investigations of cinema's unique, irreducible properties." Snow has grouped it with <---> and La Région Centrale as trilogy of "camera motion" films. His photographic slide installation Slidelength features images from Wavelength alongside objects used in its production and other related images. His 1976 Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) is a parody of Wavelength, in which a single tracking shot across a breakfast table shows the contents being physically displaced by the camera.

In 2003, Snow released WVLNT (or Wavelength for Those Who Don't Have the Time), a shorter and significantly altered version, on DVD. WVLNT transforms the original film by breaking it into three 15-minute segments that are superimposed. Snow's treatment is satirical, condensing the original "for the viewer who inevitably is in a hurry because all the world's info is pressing to be seen."

Wavelength was an early influence on minimalist composer Steve Reich, and his 1970 recording of Four Organs uses the film's closing photograph for its cover artwork. Anthony McCall has detailed how descriptions of Wavelength influenced the development of his 1973 work Line Describing a Cone, pointing to "the possibility that a single idea can define the essential outline of an entire film." James Benning's 1978 film Grand Opera makes explicit reference to Wavelength. The film opens with black leader accompanied by a reworking of Amy Taubin's phone call about discovering a dead body. In 2015 Benning created a remake of Wavelength from two stills of the original film. His version uses digital effects to create a perfectly smooth, continuous zoom between the start and end points. Yvonne Rainer used an excerpt of Wavelength in her 1985 film The Man Who Envied Women. In it, the loft serves as an example of the sort of spaces to which artists had access prior to the gentrification of New York.