- published: 04 Apr 2013
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Wavelength is a 45-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."
"Wavelength is a 45-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.[6] In a 1969 review of the film published in Artforum, Manny Farber describes Wavelength as "a pure, tough 45 minutes that ...
by : Michael Snow durée : 00:45 mn 1967 Le film, réalisé sur plusieurs jours avec une caméra Bolex de location, consiste en un zoom avant très lent sur une durée de trois-quarts d'heure environ. Il s'ouvre sur un plan large de l'atelier-loft de l'artiste à New York et se resserre, par petites avancés progressives, sur un espace situé entre deux fenêtres au centre de l'image. Une photographie de vagues accrochée au mur à cet endroit finit par remplir totalement le cadre, faisant ainsi disparaître tout l'espace qui vient d'être traversé. Durant ce temps, différents évènements épars ont lieu dans la pièce : des hommes installent une étagère sous le conseil d'une femme, deux jeunes femmes viennent prendre le café en écoutant Strawberry Fields à la radio, un homme rentre et s'effondre au sol...
Full version HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBOzOVLxbCE
Mashup
Michael Snow - (2003) WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time) Short version of Michael Snow's film Wavelenght (1967) I do not own the copyright, I only upload it to share his work.
"Wavelength can be aligned with the tactic of unusually prolonged, redundant or repetitive attention that effectively blurred the boundaries between heightened acuity and absolute ignoring on the part of the viewer." p14 λ is a condensed version of Michael Snow's WVLNT (2003), which itself is a condensed version of Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967). People complained about the time (45mins) the original film took, so Snow cut the film into 3 equal sections of 15mins and merged them together, so each track was visible amongst the others. I cut WVLNT into 10 equal 1min 30sec sections and superimposed them on top of one another "creating the effect of rooms telescoped within the room." p15 The audio track is a sped up version of that from WVLNT, with the sine-wave's pitch starting from 50Hz ...
Michaels Snow is a reference to two very different kinds of seminal events in my life. The first has to with art experience. I saw Michael Snows Wavelength in 1967. In the film a camera zooms slowly—from the end of a room to a photograph of waves on the wall at the opposite end. The zoom is accompanied by a sine wave as it gradually progresses from its lowest note to its highest and passes through color filters, film stocks, positive and reverse exposure. I have never seen the film again but it has always remained with me—thus I know it was/is a seminal art experience. The second has to do with sadness and loss, relational in proportion to the people I love. When I made this film I thought it was about snow, now I know it is about the winters of my heart. For more information about Susan...
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