Wavelength
1967 · 45m · Canada
Directed by Michael Snow
Genres: experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
A 45-minute continuous zoom across a New York loft space gradually narrows from a wide shot to a close-up of a photograph of ocean waves pinned between windows, while an ascending sine wave tone builds on the soundtrack and sporadic human events unfold in the space.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 45-minute zoom across a loft with a rising sine wave — Snow making duration itself the subject. Either the most boring or the most radical thing you'll ever sit through, and that's exactly the point.
Snow's forty-five-minute zoom is the central text of structural cinema and a genuine perceptual experiment, though it asks more patience than most viewers will offer. Important, demanding, irreducible.
45 continuous minutes of zoom across a loft into a photograph of waves, with a rising sine tone — Snow's formal commitment makes time itself the subject. 2.3GB Archive.org HD file. Pure structural film, demanding but historical.
Reviews
A masterwork, a claim hardly to be seriously contended at this point in film history.
Wavelength proposes like few films before it a model of cinema as perceptual and philosophical investigation.
Festivals
- Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival 1967, Grand Prix