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16 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Perhaps the CITIZEN KANE of Avant-Garde 60's Cinema, 24 April 2005
7/10
Author: Joe Stemme (gortx) from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I've been wanting to see this film for over 20 years - Ever since my college days in Boston when a friend told me about this artsy experimental film he'd seen at The Massachusetts College of Art (or, as it was called, "Mass Art"). This week a co-operative effort between the Filmforum, the American Cinemateque and the Getty Museum brought director Michael Snow and several of his films to L.A..

Sometimes, perhaps OFTEN TIMES, hearing about a legendary "lost" or hard-to-find film is better than actually seeing it! Author William K. Everson has written about several "lost" films whose reputation sank once they were "found".

I wouldn't say that WAVELENGTH quite sinks upon viewing, but no film probably could withstand 20+ years of anticipation. Additionally, it doesn't help matters when the film is often described INCORRECTLY (as it was to me).

WAVELENGTH is NOT a 45 minute single-zoom shot.

In fact, it is a rather artfully orchestrated SERIES of individual pieces of film (and sometimes TWO layered upon one other). Cuts, flashbacks, repeated shots, different film stocks, assorted F-Stops, jump cuts, filters and lens are just some of the tools in Snow's bag of tricks to convey the illusion of a Single Shot broken up by alternate realities of perception. The Soundtrack as well, is a layered fusion of natural sound, synch dialogue, radio broadcasts and an overwhelming buzz creating by a crescendo sine-wave.

In some ways, I must confess, I "prefer" the purity of the film as it was described to me - a single shot. However, what Snow produced was an artistic depiction of space, time and movement all his own. The Sine-Wave is more annoying that edifying (though it does, at one propitious point, seemingly morph into an emergency vehicle siren). A unique experience that MUST be seen in a Movie Theater. I can see a home viewer grasping a remote control all too easily!

Snow was in attendance and did a Q & A. A couple of interesting notes. First, the Beatles' STRAWBERRY FIELDS was NOT the first song that he recorded off the radio (in appropriate 60's ethos, Snow said he originally intended to use "whatever happened to be on the radio" when they filmed it); Instead, it was Joan Baez' LITTLE DRUMMER BOY (which Snow called so dreadful he didn't use it!). Second, the final jump cut into the picture provoked more of a 'sexual connotation' in the minds of 60's viewers than it does today.

Hmm. What does THAT mean?! :)

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10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
we like the films, the films that go zoom...(SPOILERS), 15 May 2001
10/10
Author: Michael Sicinski from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The thing about WAVELENGTH is, the zoom is only the overall shape of the film, and lots of fascinating things happen within the 45-minutes it takes for the zoom lens to cross the room. If you only care about "plot" or "characters" or human-driven "action" in cinema, no amount of persuasion is going to make you warm up to WAVELENGTH. It is more of an intersection between cinema and painting. It doesn't offer plot, like most films, and it occurs across a fixed span of time, unlike paintings which you can walk away from more easily. So it demands a different kind of patience, but I think it rewards that patience in spades. Here, the attractions are qualities of light, textures of swirling film grain, the sheer fascination with how a blue or green filter can change to optical world before you. Yes, it's possible that a film could give you all that, *and* plot, but I submit to you, you wouldn't feel those formal, painterly aspects with as much force. That's minimalism for you. And WAVELENGTH has sensual pleasure to spare.

I think one of the aspects of Snow's cinema which is most disconcerting to many filmgoers is his resolute disinterest in the human world. What do we make of a film in which someone drops dead, but the camera moves right past them? The soundtrack is a demonstration of pure sound, a sine wave which is an orderly but impersonal shifting of air. Like the light waves entering the zoom lens, mathematics and particle physics overtake "merely" human events. Isn't it possible to find interest in the space of the room for itself? Isn't it fascinating to stare into a world which, in its dogged pursuit of its own agenda, barely knows you're there? I think so. As much as I love this film, I must defend it in pretty hard-nosed terms. WAVELENGTH is not here to entertain, affirm, or even please you, any more than sunlight exists to make you visible to your friends. Light and sound are objective forces, and WAVELENGTH gives them a place to play.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Avant-garde exploration of space and waves, 31 January 2003
Author: 0roymeo0 from Rochester, NY

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Most will find this movie tedious. It is a 45 minute incredibly slow zooming in across a loft-type space. Most of the action is barely visible truck tops visible through the windows at the opposite side of the room. There is the occasional "happening" with a person or two, and there are a lot of experimental film and color effects (flashes of pure monochromatic orange fill the screen, the image turns sepia or red, etc. negative, etc.). The sound track may induce headaches, as it contains both The Beatles "Strawberry Fields" and later a track of several sine-wave tones which creep, barely like the zoom, slowly higher in pitch.

As I sat in the theater watching this, toward the end, I believe I finally "got" it. This may not be a spoiler in the traditional sense, but I warn you that reading on may spoil the sort of joy I felt as I put it all together. Of course it may also be that the subject matter is so minimal and lacking that one's mind works extra hard to try to come up with something there, but I don't think so.

SPOILER: But this piece is also somewhat brilliant in it's subtle exploration of waves, as layers of film roll back and forth under/over the 'main' track. SPOILER: And the audio itself is a set of sine-wave sounds which are slowly rising and not completely in sync, so one hears the wave addition and interference as the wavelengths peak together at different intervals. SPOILER: At the climax, some of the soundwaves drop back and build back up to crash, like waves on the shore. SPOILER: This combination of various waves is more than worth the wait for 'something to happen'. :SPOILER

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12 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Structuralist purgatorio, 14 May 1999
Author: matthew wilder (picqueur@aol.com) from los angeles

The lodestar of contemporary avant cinema, Michael Snow's short purports to be a single zoom across a seedy office/warehouse space--a lens adjustment that takes forty-five minutes to complete. The truth of the matter--unmentioned even in Manny Farber's pioneering rave for the picture--is that the movie isn't all one shot. Snow fudges the "formalist rigor" for which he got his reputation: the movement from wide shot of the room to a pixel-enhancing closeup of a photograph of ocean waves is speckled with negative inserts, black, white and orange blank screens, and psychedelic rewinds of the scene that just came before.

Like Hollis Frampton's ZORNS LEMMA, WAVELENGTH is the kind of picture made to be written about, not really endured. The glowing descriptions of it in critics' prose are more provoking than the actual artifact itself. Two things remain striking and puzzling about it thirty-two years later. Why did Snow choose to make a near-hour-long demonstration of the zoom lens? Why would tracking have been any different--is the movie meant to be a statement on a subjective appearance of changed perspective, while the viewer really remains static? Or was Snow just infatuated with the gimmickry of the zoom? (Each calibration churning closer to the photograph has a home-movie clunkiness.)

The other is the oddly hippie-dippie tone of Snow's inserted gimcrackery. From the charwoman-looking extra playing "Strawberry Fields Forever" on a radio, then lumbering off like a bit player in an Ed Wood number, to the acid-flashback reruns of just-passed scenes, to the freak colorizations of arbitrary moments (as if we jumped to the POV of a UFO), the ambience is much more Big Brother and the Holding Company than Robert Bresson. It's the same playing-with-a-gizmo amateurism that mars the images using people in Stan Brakhage's DOG STAR MAN, and it makes Snow's academic astringency look like a pose.

(WAVELENGTH showed up again, ripped off in the unlikeliest place: the track into a photograph that forms the "Twilight Zone" epilogue to Kubrick's THE SHINING.)

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Concept over vision, 17 April 2008
5/10
Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This is one of the most famous conceptual films ever made, and yet it's surprising how little the descriptions of it actually fit. It is most commonly discussed as "a single zoom", partially because of Snow's own description of it, whereas it's obviously and significantly several cuts with various camera effects added in for good measure. It's discussed as having a strange mix of sounds in its soundtrack, but the sounds are actually pretty isolated and easy to distinguish, from the whistling sine wave increasing in pitch to the glass breaking, Strawberry Fields Forever, sirens only at the end, and a line of dialog. It's also discussed as minimalistic, but there's actually a lot going on. Finally, and most importantly, it's a lot easier to watch than most people make it out to be.

In a New York loft, Michael Snow sets up a camera in the corner and, over a series of hundreds of cuts over two days, slowly zooms in to a picture of waves on the wall while putting in color gels, fiddling with exposure, staging a narrative scene (almost in real time), and playing with cuts and super-impositions. In his own words, it's as long as it is because he didn't have any money to make it longer, and one aside to the whole "continuous zoom" theme is that the zoom is at absolutely no point in the movie continuous, but protracted (there's a significant difference).

It's interesting to people in the way it plays with expectations (what does an audience want from a film?), the way it plays with narrative (by the time we've zoomed all the way in, the actions on the set are really mysterious), in the way that memory plays with our experience of the film (some sections seem to go faster than others because less is going on... it is possible to sleep through segments of the film and not miss anything), and some even discuss it in terms of discomfort (the sine wave is annoying to people, I guess, and after all the anxiety involved in getting to the end, the picture is, in theory, a purposeful let-down). A lot of people discuss it in terms of filmic space, and how by the time the movie ends, the camera has opened up to an entirely different space than the loft.

The thing is, I knew about pretty much all of this before I had ever seen the film (this happens sometimes when you're a film student; I also had pretty much "seen" A bout de soufflé a dozen times before actually watching the movie), and as a concept film, it's the concept itself that matters over the actual experience of it. Whereas it is still an important film, it is a famous film, and it is a heavily discussed film, "seeing it" is not all that important, and since it's a rare film, it's also not really worth tracking down. I think it should be made available on DVD so that it can lose a bit of its romantic mystery, but since it's also the type of film that's a "film" and must be seen projected as film, putting it on DVD can offend the people who enjoy it as a "film". You see the problem we're dealing with, here?

Anyway, if you've heard of Wavelength, you probably already know all about it, and if you don't, you're not reading this. It is eternally for an audience of avant-garde enthusiasts and film theorists (and, well, let's face it, the occasional pretentious jerk, though Snow doesn't strike me as one himself), and will maintain that audience for decades to come.

--PolarisDiB

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7 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Seminal stuff, 4 March 2007
9/10
Author: CelineetJulie from United Kingdom

I watched Wavelength at film school and was mesmerised by it - I also got fed up with other noisy students who couldn't accept that beauty and truth can be found in the simplest ideas - ie a slow zoom across a loft studio.

If you only want narrative cinema then by all means, go out and get some lunch and come back, and hahaha, it's still zooming. How clever you are, seeing the Emperor's new clothes of avant-garde film. How f**king boring, what a dull, uninspiring attitude to life. Sure, it does seem preposterous at first, but ride that out and get into the merciless logic, and the slightly creepy human actions that occur, plus all of the fantastic colour filters and distortions that keep occurring and you'll find yourself hooked. The final 5 mins are fantastic, as the shot zooms into a picture on the wall of ocean waves and we have left the loft completely.

it's only 45 minutes, not 3 hours - anyone with an interest in experimental cinema should see it. Wish it was on DVD, but i guess it needs to be projected for full effect.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Hypnotic transport, 23 August 2008
5/10
Author: pstumpf from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A second-story room overlooking a busy New York Street. The camera is placed high in a corner of the room, looking toward the windows and the street. The room is sparsely furnished, with only a desk in front of the window, a wooden desk chair, a phone on the desk, and a yellow dinette-style chair next to the desk. Three photos are tacked on a narrow strip of wall between two windows, to the right of the desk. Two men enter, carrying an empty bookcase, which the woman with them directs to place against the wall to the left. They all depart. Traffic noise is heard, loudly, through an open window. A barely perceptible, incremental zoom begins. Two women enter: one goes to the left of the desk and turns on a radio or record player which plays "Strawberry Fields"; the other woman closes the window and sits by it for a while. After a while, mid-song, the radio or phonograph is turned off, and both women leave. The zoom continues. The ambient noise is replaced by a simultaneous low buzz and high-pitched whine, interrupted briefly by some clattering noises which may or may not contain a gunshot or shots. There are moments when the screen goes white for several seconds; it is not always evident if this indicates a cut, but often it seems to. The natural light changes, the street scene outside sometimes darkens, and there are optical changes in which the scene turns dark, or red, or green. The inexorable zoom narrows the visual field steadily, directed steadily toward the desk. A man enters from the bottom of the frame, seeming to walk normally, then clutches his chest and collapses on the floor. The slow zoom keeps him briefly in sight, then passes over him. A woman comes in and picks-up the phone, while staring toward the floor. She tells the man who answers that she is "here", but there's a dead man on the floor and she's frightened. She says she will wait downstairs, and leaves. In the film's most fascinating moments, her ghosted image reappears, superimposed several times on the present zoom.

Now the focal point of the zoom appears to be the three photos on the wall. However, it seems to me that at a certain point, the photo in the upper left changes, from what had appeared at a distance as some kind of photograph to two duplicate solid black pictures with a white silhouette of a woman. Perhaps I'm mistaken. But - if so, that, and the discontinuous zoom, throw into question, for me, the point of the film. If it's not an exercise in stillness in real time, what exactly is it? And why do avant-garde filmmakers of the 60's so often revert to B-movie genre tropes (like Godard, for example)?

The irritating soundtrack noise reaches a maddening crescendo as the image of the lower photo nearly fills the screen; a cut superimposes a ghosted larger image of the photo behind the actual photo on the wall. What had seemed, from a distance, to be photo of mountaintops amid swirling clouds turns out to be an almost abstract shot of oceanic waves. Finally, as the soundtrack is mercifully silenced, the entire screen is filled with the image of the waves. And the patient viewer is rewarded by suddenly being taken out of the present time, out of the time of the film, to an entirely different time and space.

Which, I suppose, is the point.

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5 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Worse than my five days suffering a kidney stone., 4 November 2007
1/10
Author: Brude_Storm from United States

Understand that I am a fan of avant-garde cinema. I have seen quite a lot of it - some very good, some very bad - but no film I have ever seen (avant-garde or otherwise) has ever been more excruciating to me than "Wavelength." Like the title of my post says, I know what excruciating means intimately and I do believe I'd rather suffer another five days with a kidney stone like I did a few years ago, than be forced to sit through this film for a third time (in film school I was forced to watch it twice for different teachers).

Stick to Maya Deren or Stan Brakhage or Bunuel or anybody to satisfy your avant-garde tastes. Experimenting with "Wavelength" might not be worth the pain.

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3 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating, 21 April 2006
1/10
Author: beckerthetrekker from Greensboro, NC United States

I found this film fascinating. It contains drama, suspense, mystery, and characters, although the whole thing takes place in one continuous shot, but with very subtle cuts, and some obvious changes in lighting effects and film stock. Some of the action takes place off screen, so the viewer can only hear what's happening and has to imagine it. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen, because I was wondering what would happen next. The camera moves forward, but so slowly your eye can barely catch it. This film does more without moving the camera, than many films do with dozens of shots. If you like avant garde or experimental film, this is definitely worth a look.

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15 out of 37 people found the following review useful:
Utterly pointless, 19 May 1999
2/10
Author: saffron from Helsinki, Finland

Do yourself a favor and instead of actually watching this film just read an analysis of it. Concept of the movie: stationary camera in an empty room zooms for 45 minutes. A few people visit the room, some of them play The Beatles for a while - for the rest of the movie, the soundtrack consists of a high-pitched whine. At three minutes, this would have been an amusing bit of '60s avantgarde nonsense. At 45 minutes, it's a dreadful experience. The movie provokes absolutely no emotional or intellectual response, and you can't even take a nap because of the soundtrack.

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