- published: 21 Jan 2012
- views: 105629
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. It was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century. The film has been designated and preserved as a masterwork by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. In a 1969 review of the film published in Artforum, Manny Farber describes Wavelength as "a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become The Birth of a Nation in Underground films, is a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt. For all of the film's sophistication (and it is overpowering for its time-space-sound inventions) it is a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor... it is probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence."
The secrets of hers she swears nobody knows
She gets her happiness from her AM radio
The static in her smile,
Mile after mile
As she drives home
He's a lost cause, a cigarrette in hand
He left his family to be the singer in a band
The feedback in his eyes,
Should come as no surprise
To all of those in spell
I heard the call but I never started running
I took the hit and I never saw it coming
What a way to go
Drop to your knees and remember where you came from
This is the time to abandon hesitation
Watch your bombs fall down below
I stare at the ceiling fan as a whisper inside of me
Telling me just who I am and just how I ought to be
Descrepancies are vain,
And the memories I made
Are out to sea
So stand up and face the flag of the nation in your eyes
Lest the beating of the drum makes you forget to question why
Forget to question why,
Why we always die
To cover up the lie
I heard the call but I never started running
I took the hit and I never saw it coming
What a way to go
Drop to your knees and remember where you came from
This is the time to abandon hesitation
Watch your bombs fall down below, watch your bombs fall down below
I heard the call but I never started running
I took the hit and I never saw it coming
What a way to go
Drop to your knees and remember where you came from
This is the time to abandon hesitation
Watch your bombs fall down below, watch your bombs fall down below