Experimental cinema doesn't get more difficult or perplexing and yet all the same rewarding in some hard to define sense than Wavelength. I might feel like I'm less writing a review than I am writing some homework assignment for an art history class, but Michael Snow's film, which is all in one 42 minute shot, is something that can be said that is literally unlike any other film - one might want to compare it to Andy Warhol's stationary exercises, but that is just putting a camera down and not doing anything as far as doing motions or effects or audio treatment, it's more about the subjects in the frame doing things.
With Snow, there *is* a process, and it's something that could possibly make some of you sick. But first, here's what should be noted: this is not entirely an unbroken take. It is "unbroken" as far as the camera's set-up, since it isn't moving from its spot like on a dolly track and the zoom is moving at a pace a snail would go, 'catch up, man, Jesus!' But all cameras holding film need to change the reels, so every so often as Snow is zooming in on the inside of a room that has about four windows looking out over a city, with two chairs, and three pictures on the farthest wall, he does cut in with what could be called visual static. He also does some treatment to the image as far as super-imposed colors and strobes, or what may be the 1960s take on that, and then near the very end of the film (in the last two/three minutes) there is what one might call a dissolve. There may be more dissolves here, but I lost count by a certain point.
Wavelength is not frustrating to look at since every so often it'll throw in some people to look at - and sure, one of them, for no reason, drops dead (this is the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton making an appearance - I think, though I'm not sure, future film critic Amy Taubin shows up later on as the woman making a phone call telling someone that there's a dead man on the floor) - or even a song (the Beatles's 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is the one sliver of music to pipe in on a radio). But the audio of it is unique, and I'm not sure if it's in a way that is meant to make one curl up into a ball. It's borderline torture; think of when a tea kettle is ready and keeps on whistling - it's that, times a hundred. As the image in Snow's lens brings us inexorably, every so slowly but in that gradual way that you WILL focus on what he wants you to look at, the audio becomes ever so sharply loaded with noise. Compared to this, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music is easy listening.
I had a different experience watching this than maybe some of you; it's available online so I hooked up my hd TV and watched it on a big screen as as I could, but I also could turn down the volume. If I saw this on 35mm in a theater with good light and good sound, I wonder if I would be more put off. But this isn't a knock against Snow exactly; I realized that the sound wasn't going to go down, so I decided to go with it. If this is the artist's process, to bring one into... well, what? I hasten to call it an 'avant-garde masterpiece', or some pretentious disaster, because I feel like/know I would need more of a critical justification. What is this TRYING to do, and does it accomplish it? Simply put: everyone who comes to this will get something out of it (for me, one part that I found compelling is how my mind might wander while looking at this shot zooming closer, and ten SNAP back into Snow's aesthetic when he messed with the image, adding color and more ferocious noise).
Maybe all you need to make a movie isn't a girl and a gun, but a single room with an interesting look and ideas that push the boundaries of what one expects to see in a motion picture. Snow may be saying, 'look at this room, look at what's going on, listen to it, and there may be things going on you didn't expect - look closer.' Or it could be a fantastical trip to do drugs to. This does move, but in such a way that creeps up on you as it creeps along. And ultimately it is... unique.
