“Wavelength”, is Canadian film artist, Michal Snow’s avant-garde movie experiment. Snow, like all of his pears, attempts to incorporate existential interpretations, that are inherit in modern art, to cinema and film. These resultant works are mostly unwatchable, but the best ones have become extremely influential.
Snow’s seminal work, “Wavelength”, is a continuous 45-minute zoom across a New York City one room apartment. While making pretense as being one continuous shot from a stationary camera sitting atop of a tripod, the film is actually much more complex, as the zoom moves in, stops, and starts, and at different times of the day and night. There are three large windows that dominate the wall that the camera is filming. The shots shown are all of the same area but include superimpositions, reversals, and what feels like several different film stocks. There are also a few splintered spurts of action that include, two women listening to the Beatles on a radio on the table next to the wall, a man who drops dead just as he arrives at the bottom of the movie frame, and a women speaking on the phone about the dead body. The soundtrack is mostly a high pitched and annoying buzz. Near the end of its 45 minutes the camera ever so slowly zooms into a hanging picture of waves until the entire screen is enveloped by the waves.
While this is not a film I want or intend on seeing again, I must admit that it did give me a chilling feeling of foreboding that just increased as the film progressed. I even started to believe that the dead man’s spirit or ghost inhabited the space depicted, with his spirit slowly flowing toward the waves in the hanging picture.
Was this the intent of Snow? I have no idea, however I do believe that his experiment would allow other directors such as Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) and Daniel Myrick (Blair Witch) to develop their supernatural horror styles inherit in their movies. The best example would be Oren Peli’s, “Paranormal Activity”, which takes a lot of its style directly from Snows experimental film.
For this reason, “Wavelength”, is not a movie to be discounted. It is also a much too long, and better left for the cinema academia to watch.
1001 Movies before you die 