Wavelength by Michael Snow, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film (The Bartlett University syllabus) (click HERE for syllabus)

film index: 25

film: Wavelength
director:    Michael Snow
writers:     Michael Snow
production: Canada
release: 1967
playtime: 45 mins
visual: BnW/colour
Language: English
Subtitles:
Genre: experimental
Cast: Hollis Frampton, Roswell Rudd, Amy Taubin, Joyce Wieland, Amy Yadrin
size: 399 mb

reference: www.tipete.com, www.afterall.org, http://deeperintomovies.net

Description and download:

Wavelength is a forty-five minute film that made the reputation of Canadian experimental filmmaker and 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.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the four "character" scenes. Snow's intent for the film was "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas," he said of the 45-minute-long zoom that incorporates in its time frame four human events, including a man's death.[9] In the first scene two people enter a room, and leave. Later, coming back, they chat briefly, and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. Still later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

In the end, one can hear what sound like police sirens, but could just as well be a part of the musical score, a distinct piece of minimalist music that pairs tones at random. These tones shift in frequency (and in "wavelength") as the camera analyzes the space of the anonymous apartment. What begins as a view of the full apartment zooms (the zoom is not precisely continuous as the camera does change angle slightly, noticeably near the very end) and changes focus slowly across the forty-five minutes, only to stop and come into perfect focus on a photograph of the sea on the wall.

Structural Film

According to P. Adams Sitney, the trend in American avant-garde cinema during the late 1940s and 1950s (such as the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage) was towards "increased complexity". Since the mid-1960s, filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Joyce Wieland produced works where simplicity was foregrounded. Sitney labeled this tendency "structural film." The four characteristics of structural film are "fixed camera position…the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen." Sitney describes Snow as the "dean of structural film-makers" who "utilizes the tension" of Wavelength's use of a "fixed-frame and…the flexibility of the fixed tripod".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.

imbd link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0127354/
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength_%281967_film%29

screenshots:

 

 

WVLNT:

In 2003, Snow released WVLNT (or Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time), a shorter (1/3 of the original time) and significantly altered version by overlaying the original film upon itself. The director has cut the movie into three equal parts and superimposed them.

here is a sample of the WVLNT soundtract which is rather sore to here as was intended by the director




wavelength book:

In this critical study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of expertly managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and colour and recession into perspectival depth. Wavelength was crucial to critics' efforts to establish a vocabulary for the experimental film movement emerging a the time, and has functioned ever since as a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played.

Reviews:

review:1: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/wavelength.html
review: 2: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/perception/5/
review 3: and download torrent:  http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=373

Download:


Rapidshare links
links bundle:1

http://rapidshare.com/files/31384038/Michael_Snow_-_Wavelenght__1967_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/31384121/Michael_Snow_-_Wavelenght__1967_.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/31384510/Michael_Snow_-_Wavelenght__1967_.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/31384051/Michael_Snow_-_Wavelenght__1967_.part4.rar