I am going to delete something from my list of the 100 greatest English-language films through 2005 to make room for this entry.
Canadian Michael Snow’s experimental Wavelength is legendary. Across a vast loft, sparsely populated with office things (chair, telephone, file cabinets), our eye travels to part of the far wall between two of the high, enormous windows. The agency of this journey is often described as a forward zoom, but throughout the filming Snow has minutely repositioned the camera, in effect creating the appearance of a single shot, including a jump-cut near the end that puts us into a photograph of ocean waves—this, one of a cluster of pictures that, unlike the other two, had been featureless, blacked-out. Enhancing our perceptual capacities, Wavelength is an eye-opening experience.
Urban street sounds are replaced a bit in by a sine sound that grows ever louder; sometimes, sound is layered. We hear an explosion. Gunshots? Construction? Drilling? Later, a young woman enters—intermittently folks enter and leave the room, evoking a sense of transience that complicates the forward journey—and she phones someone and speaks of a dead man outside. “What should I do?” she asks before leaving and waiting for an ambulance. Is our eye sharing the end-of-life journey that the dead man is making? Snow himself has stated that Wavelength expresses his “religious inklings.”
Snow’s pieced-together “road picture” through interior space marshals delightful visual artillery: shifts between black and white and monochrome (simulated color tinting: pink; orange/beige—colors suggesting “white” flesh), different film stocks and exposures, etc. The jump-cut relates less to Godard’s in A bout de souffle (1959) than to the woman’s opening eye in Marker’s La jetée (1962), a film otherwise consisting of stills. It’s revelatory. The waves filling the screen transform the mundane into epiphany. Much as the simulated zoom has exhausted the room’s length, these waves may signal something spiritual, momentous.
And now . . .
This entry was posted on January 1, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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WAVELENGTH (Michael Snow, 1966)
I am going to delete something from my list of the 100 greatest English-language films through 2005 to make room for this entry.
Canadian Michael Snow’s experimental Wavelength is legendary. Across a vast loft, sparsely populated with office things (chair, telephone, file cabinets), our eye travels to part of the far wall between two of the high, enormous windows. The agency of this journey is often described as a forward zoom, but throughout the filming Snow has minutely repositioned the camera, in effect creating the appearance of a single shot, including a jump-cut near the end that puts us into a photograph of ocean waves—this, one of a cluster of pictures that, unlike the other two, had been featureless, blacked-out. Enhancing our perceptual capacities, Wavelength is an eye-opening experience.
Urban street sounds are replaced a bit in by a sine sound that grows ever louder; sometimes, sound is layered. We hear an explosion. Gunshots? Construction? Drilling? Later, a young woman enters—intermittently folks enter and leave the room, evoking a sense of transience that complicates the forward journey—and she phones someone and speaks of a dead man outside. “What should I do?” she asks before leaving and waiting for an ambulance. Is our eye sharing the end-of-life journey that the dead man is making? Snow himself has stated that Wavelength expresses his “religious inklings.”
Snow’s pieced-together “road picture” through interior space marshals delightful visual artillery: shifts between black and white and monochrome (simulated color tinting: pink; orange/beige—colors suggesting “white” flesh), different film stocks and exposures, etc. The jump-cut relates less to Godard’s in A bout de souffle (1959) than to the woman’s opening eye in Marker’s La jetée (1962), a film otherwise consisting of stills. It’s revelatory. The waves filling the screen transform the mundane into epiphany. Much as the simulated zoom has exhausted the room’s length, these waves may signal something spiritual, momentous.
And now . . .
This entry was posted on January 1, 2008 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.