Jennifer Duff from Pulp Fiction Books speaks about the 1967 avant-garde structural film Wavelength from Canadian experimental film director and artist Michael Snow. Wavelength is widely regarded to be one of the most important films of the genre and won the Grand Prix at the 1967 Knokke Experimental Film Festival.
It’s torutuous in a way but it’s really interesting. It’s kind of just like a 45 minute zoom into a wall but there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s lots of different filters and it’s very grainy. You can tell that there is narrative going on but it’s so tortuous because it doesn’t let you see it. You know that maybe a murder has taken place but the camera completely ignores the fact that there is a narrative and just zooms into the wall the whole time. Maybe to an extent you create that narrative yourself but I think that’s kind of interesting too. It makes you aware that we have to place a narrative upon everything. I just don’t think we need it; it’s annoying and limiting.
So there isn’t much of a narrative and there’s no gratification and you want to know what’s happening. You’re aware you want to see a murder, which is kind of perverse in itself. So the fact that you’re watching the film thinking ‘I want to know what’s happening, I want to see this murder’, maybe makes you question what you think about cinema and why you like it. I think that’s really interesting. It’s also got kind of like an alarm sound that goes the whole way through. Gasper Noé kind of does the same thing in some of his films, in those films the sound was designed to make people feel sick. And Snow does a similar thing in this film; it’s attacking people watching films for pleasure, forcing them to notice the film more.
The idea of structuralist or materialist films, kind of similar to formalist art where it’s all about the medium, it has to be very medium specific. They [makers] think its a bastardisation of film as a medium to use narrative because its from literature and theatre. I think film should be an art form; it can be but isn’t always, so for that reason I’m slightly against narrative film. Structuralist and materialist film is really interesting to me, in these kinds of films they expose the fact that it’s a film.
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