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Reviews
Wavelength (1967)
Avant-garde exploration of space and waves
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
Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961)
Avant-garde
This 5 minute, silent movie is an ecstatic celebration of the moments of the birth of the directors child. But what is on the film (hand scratched, painted, abused, creatively developed) is more the emotional content of the event than a straight forward depiction of the literal event. Explicit.