Michael Snow - WVLNT (1967/2003)
Monday, March 24, 2008
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(Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have The Time Originally 45 minutes Now 15!! )
a new DVD by Michael Snow.
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 3 unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.
Art Metropole, Toronto, Canada.
“WAVELENGTH is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a “triumph of contemplative cinema”
Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press, 1968
Michael Snow
«Wavelength»
With his film «Wavelength,» Michael Snow revolutionized the international Avant-garde film scene like no other production. Viewed from its basic concept, this is a purely «formal» film: it consists of a single, 45-minute-long tracking shot through the length of a room, accompanied by slowly-increasing sine tones.[...] As the camera moves forward through the room’s space (when carefully studied the movement is not continuous, but made up of individual passages edited together), one registers the passing of several nights and days. The camera is ultimately moving toward a spot between two windows at the back of the room, where a photograph on the wall shows the unsettled surface of the sea; in the end, the camera comes so close to it that only the waves fill the screen.
The fascination of this film can be explained through the application of the formal principle of the tracking shot, which seems to determine the entire film, with stray elements of reality: people occasionally appear in the frame; the telephone rings; apparently someone is even murdered in this space. Even what one can recognize of the street through the windowpane constitutes a counter-element to a purely «abstract» form.
«Wavelength ranks among those films which force viewers, regardless of how they react, to carefully consider the essence of the medium and, just as unavoidably, reality,» wrote the critic Amos Vogel.
(Source: Ulrich Gregor, Geschichte des Films ab 1960, Reinbek, 1983.)
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at 3:51 PM