Synopsis
In 1967, Michael Snow made Wavelength, a film that captured the attention of audiences and critics with its formality, its soundtrack and its long-drawn-out traversing of a space. It became a classic of avant-garde filmmaking. Thirty-six years later, Snow created a new work by digitizing the original material and proposing simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the first film: WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture, offering a completely new visual and aural experience.
A word from Tënk
In this remixed iteration of Michael Snow’s frequently referenced and widely celebrated Wavelength (1967), three superimpositions ripple and render the tension that activates the planes of otherwise animate indoor boundaries—doors, windows, cubicles, and walls. Fluctuating in their fixed states, Snow’s at once stationary and tense imagery is scored by a gradually resounding high-pitched shrill—not dissimilar from a whistling teapot, scorching, bubbling, screaming for air. Piercing deeper in lilt and register, Snow’s stilled frame bears painterly markings of daylight and sunset. Time slows down, then shutters, then flickers, in a vibrating frenzy, a flame-like luminescence burgeoning in the acute center of his frame. When the visible environs are tuned out, you realize you are consumed whole by the work’s demanding sensorium, its filmic dissolution, its decaying potency, all repetitiously evocative and ultimately unforgettable.
Aaditya Aggarwal
Programs & Collections Coordinator, CFMDC
