I watched Michael Snow's film "Wavelength" at the weekend. This is something I've been anticipating for some twenty odd years, so there was a certain amount of excitement when I finally located it at Greylodge, a website dedicated to the occult and the avant garde - something that seems as confused as the Pet Shop/Art Gallery that used to be in Camberwell to me, but they host it as a Bittorrent, so good for them.

Let me piece together what I knew about the film before I saw it - I knew it was a long, 45 minute zoom, accompanied by a rising sine-wave note, and that despite it's "structural" simplicity there were also events (including a murder). I also knew of it's reputation as a masterpiece of experimental film - Donato Totaro even refers to it as "quite simply, the “Citizen Kane” of experimental cinema" which raised my expectations to fever pitch.
Then I finally caught a bit of it on YouTube- this 10 minute excerpt...



...which baffled me completely. Firstly it was in colour, all the stills I'd seen were in black and white, secondly there were white-outs and jerks. Even taking into consideration that the version on YouTube was a very very low-grade videotape copy of the film with appalling sound, it was hard for me to connect this scrap of oddness with the formalist grace of the version of "Wavelength" in my head. The film in my head was in black and white, the camera moved in with an almost imperceptable stateliness, the only interuptions being things that that happened to walk into the path of the camera, which continued to move inexorably forwards until the film's conclusion - a photograph pasted to the opposite wall of some waves, a postcard incidently, which later appeared in another minimalist format-



The version of "Wavelength" in my head was more like an even more minimalist version of the long tracking shots that are the trademark of directors like Tarkovsky, Gus Van Sant, and most notably Bela Tarr. It was beginning to look like I was going to be disappointed.

The film finally arrived on Sunday, and the first major disappointment was that it was obviously the source of the YouTube version. A timecode at the start, wandering lines of interference (extra "waves"!) and a wobbling murky quality that felt like I was watching it through a fishtank - my heart sank as I sat down to watch.

But in the end the experience was less grueling than I imagined - the sound quality was the worst aspect - the sine waves (which don't become audible till half way through) are horribly distorted and painful, but I settled into the neo-psychedelic quality of it, and realised that it had been subject to a lot of misinformation. As I say, the sine-wave is inaudible for a long time, and instead the soundtrack is of passing traffic, and bizarrely, the sound of The Beatles "Strawberry Fields"* played on a transistor radio by two actors who wander in and out. This suggestion of psychedelia (the film was made in 1966/7) goes some way towards explaining, or at least excusing, the sudden and jarring colour washes and switches to negative. The film is also, despite the many descriptions of it, not a long take. The take is interrupted continually by sudden white-outs and over exposures, towards the film's climax the screen goes blank for at least a minute before returning to the approaching waves.

What I found, as I settled into the film's groove, was that the film did become strangely gripping, as I tried to work out what was happening through the murk, to work out what the other pictures on the wall were...and was that really a police siren, or just an audio illusiion caused by the sine waves?

I'd like to see it again, ideally the "proper" film, projected onto a proper screen, but if not, surely a decent DVD copy should be made available? The example of the recent "By Brakhage" DVD has proved that these old experimental films can be digitally transferred to a quality that videotape couldn't dream of. Meanwhile, Snow's own attitude to the film seems ambiguous to say the least, he has released it on DVD, but only as a 15 minute long, remixed version called (almost with contempt) "WVLNT - Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time" which seems to acknowledge the views of the people on IMDB who loathe the film - "no film I have ever seen (avant-garde or otherwise) has ever been more excruciating to me than "Wavelength"", whilst destroying the structuralist beauty of the original concept, and depriving those of us who'd actually like to see it the opportunity to do so.

The film-maker and Resonance 104.4fm broadcaster William English, who actually does a show called "Wavelength", has mooted to me the possibility of hiring the film and showing it somewhere in London. Put your names down below if you're interested...no...don't all rush at once.

In the meantime, whilst some of the mysteries of "Wavelength" have been solved for me, and new ones have been created, there's another Michael Snow film for me to obsess about - the Three Hour long epic The Central Region, the short excerpt here is so tantalisingly beautiful I'm tempted to parade outside a cinema with a placard until it is shown.

*It's interesting how "Strawberry Fields" seems to have become a touchstone for avant gardists...I'm reminded of another composer with a fascination with sine-waves, Alvin Lucier and his piece Nothing is Real

If you ever want a perfect example of how the avant garde can be playful, fun, optimistic and joyous (as opposed to say...[insert name of avant-misery-guts of your choice here], then you could do worse than considering the example of Len Lye's film "Swinging The Lambeth Walk" (1940) in Dufaycolor....

Last night, in an unusually crowded, smokey and noisy Dog and Bell, Lucy, scopac, spoombung and myself enthused about the 1976 film "The Girl Chewing Gum" by John Smith, and how brilliant it is. I have to thank generalistjo for drawing it to my attention in the first place.

For the benefit of spoombung, and anybody else interested, here it is (a longish extract, rather than the whole thing sadly)

and there's also this, which may be complete, but won't work on my computer here.

I love this film for several reasons - apart from the central concept, (which I won't spoil, just watch it) I also like the dry humour, the absurdity and...the actual boring-ness of the footage itself. Presciently it seems to resemble footage from a surveillance camera, or even from the video cameras in electronics shop windows, where (when they were still a novelty) you could stand and watch yourself "on TV", - it could almost be "found footage".

Great stuff


On a related tip, here's Michael Snow's beautiful exploration of landscape (the complete opposite of Smith's urban scene) The Central Region, a film that left me reeling after I saw it 30 years ago. Exquisite ambient cinema*



There's a nice little essay about it here

And (what the hell) here's my own film, Garden Flight, which was kind of based on my memory of the Michael Snow Film, although instead of the elaborate 360 degrees in all directions machine, I sellotaped my camera to the end of a broom and waved it around.


*If somebody could explain this line from the notes to "The Central Region" - "During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings", I'd be most grateful