Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow
Thursday, April 4, 2024, 7:30 pm
Wavelength: Remembering Michael Snow
Presented in association with The Lab
Admission: $13 advance / $15 door / discounted for Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
I am not a professional. My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor… sometimes they all work together. Also many of my paintings have been done by a painter, sculpture by sculptor, films by a filmmaker, music by a musician.
— Michael Snow, 1967
An artist known for confounding intermedia work virtually every medium, Toronto-born Michael Snow’s (1928–2023) was a hugely influential filmmaker—his 1967 film Wavelength stands as a foundational work of avant-garde cinema, a temporal monument in film history, an epic consideration of film form. Widely discussed and historicized yet rarely screened in public, the film—succinctly summarized as a slowly-creeping camera zoom across a New York loft—”a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt”*—punctuated by (and ignoring) human events. Much more than mere minimalist gesture or provocative put-on, in-person viewings of Wavelength provide cinematic experiences variously and simultaneously meditative, kinetic and sonically visceral. In memory of Snow, Cinematheque inaugurates a monthly screening series at The Lab with a memorial presentation of this explorative monument to patience, anticipation, time and space. This evening’s presentation of Wavelength will be preceded by a lesser-known 1967 room film Standard Time and the sumptuously slow motion film/video hybrid See You Later/Au Revoir (1990). As a bonus, program opens with a spoiler: WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time) (2003), Snow’s ironic, abrreviational re-edit of the of the slow-moving and maddening masterpiece. (Steve Polta)
The cool kick of Michael Snow’s Wavelength was in seeing so many new actors—light and space, walls, soaring windows and an amazing number of color-shadow variations that live and die in the windowpanes—made into major esthetic components of movie experience. In Snow’s Standard Time, a waist-high camera shuttles back and forth, goes up and down, picking up small, elegantly lighted square effects around a living room very like its owner: ordered but not prissy. A joyous spiritual little film, it contains both his singular stoicism and the germinal ideas of his other films, each one like a thesis, proposing a particular relationship between image, time and space. The traits include rigorous editing, attention to waning light, fleeting human appearances (which suggest a forbidding, animistic statement about life: that the individual is a short-lived, negligible phenomenon and that it is the stability of the inanimate that keeps life from flying away), a rich-dry color so serene as to be almost holy, and a driving beat that is like updated Bach.[…] When the electronic sound in Wavelength reaches an ear-cracking shriek, the one-shot movie, a 45-minute zoom aimed at four splendid window rectangles, burns hot white, like the filaments in a light bulb. (Manny Farber. “Wavelength, Standard Time, ←→, and One Second in Montréal.” Artforum, January 1970. *Quotation above also from Manny Farber.)
SCREENING:
WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time) (2003) by Michael Snow; digital video
Standard Time (1967) by Michael Snow; 16mm
See You Later/Au Revoir (1990) by Michael Snow; 16mm
Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow; 16mm
WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time) (2003) by Michael Snow
Originally 45 minutes, now 15! Michael Snow’s film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of Avant Garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003, Snow created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.
Standard Time (1967) by Michael Snow
In Snow’s Standard Time a waist-high camera shuttles back and forth, goes up and down, picking up small, elegantly-lighted square effects around a living room very much like its owner: ordered but not prissy. A joyously spiritual little film, it contains both his singular stoicism and the germinal ideas of his other films, each one like a thesis, proposing a particular relationship between image, time and space. (Manny Farber, Art Forum)
See You Later/Au Revoir (1990) by Michael Snow
Actors: Michael Snow, Peggy Gale; Camera: Ira Cohen; Set design and lighting: Michael Snow. Plot: A man leaves an office. The image shows a staged, formally complete, common event. The real-time action, which took 30 seconds, was extended to become 17.5 minutes on the screen. The sync sound of the typewriter and two voices (He: “Goodbye;” She: “See you later”) was slowed down the same amount of time. (Michael Snow)
Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow
Wavelength was shot in one week in December ’66, preceded by a year of notes, thots, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May ’67. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for, a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of, trying to, make a definitive statement of pure film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera >from one end of an 80 foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street. This, the setting, and the action which takes place there are cosmically equivalent. The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by four human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine-wave, which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000) in 40 minutes. It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to offer. (Michael Snow, 1967. A Statement on Wavelength for the Experimental Film Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute.)