(Ed. Note: This was originally published in The Matthew’s House Project.)
Wavelength has been a fixture in the canon of avant-garde filmmaking ever since its first appearance in 1967. As much performance art or installation art as filmmaking, it is just one 45-minute cut of an extended time-lapse zoom focused on a spot on the wall between two windows opposite the camera. A number of actions transpire within the rigid frame as it slowly crawls towards this indefinite point opposite the camera, narrative shadows leaving ghost image tracings on the time-lapse film. A few people enter and leave. A bit of music is played. A man enters the frame and appears to die. A woman arrives and seems to report the death over the telephone. Question marks do emerge from the pointedly simple script, but the riddles of this narrative arc seem insignificant compared to the puzzling interactions of time and space that Snow is intent on exploring.
The technological subtleties behind the film are akin to the early visual witchery of directors like Cocteau or Bunuel. Some of these exciting early experiments are characterized by the sense that the material limits of film are being pushed to their extremes, and our viewing expectations are actually evolving through this experience. With all the tools available to him, he decides to concoct an impossibly tedious gaze over a completely bland scene. And as we wait with the camera things like time and space begin to dawn on us like ideas. Certainly it is hypnotic, perhaps even cathartic, as the simplicity of the film reorients us to the basic potential of the medium itself. But from another perspective the film is completely preposterous, a bit scandalous even to the 21st century viewer. In 1967, the film was a flagship of the latest advances in camera technology, humming and crackling with a sense of evolution like one of the obelisks in Kubrick’s 2001. Snow even claimed this was his, “definitive statement of pure film space and time.” As if Wavelength were nothing more than a rehearsal of time by passing through space. If only everything were that simple.
But by the of the 45 minutes, the camera begins to zero in on the point we have been heading towards, and we eventually discover affixed to that wall an image of waves like the shifting seas at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. It would be easy to draw some analogies between the two sets of imagery, but it seems that Snow is trying to make his point on a much different “wavelength” than Tarkovsky’s rich depiction of consciousness. (What for Tarkovsky is a concluding abstraction of his look at person-hood and memory is for Snow a fitting destination for focal length. As an image, it alone extends the viewer’s sense of film space beyond the conclusion. I am sure there is some interesting commentary somewhere along these lines.) For 45 minutes this point has hung as a destination that lies across a strange space traversable only by the latest technology at Snow’s disposal, and when we get there all we find is a printed picture even simpler, more artificially naturalistic, than the one that Snow has created in this film. If the viewer’s question through the experience has been, “Can anything be quite so simply focused as this?” the answer is yes, and Snow shows us an image to prove it. I am not quite sure that it is possible to elaborate much on Snow’s conclusion, as in all ways, as film should be, it is an utter abstraction.