Wavelength (1967)
½ — Wavelength (1967)
Michael Snow was a Toronto-born visual artist and jazz musician who made Wavelength as his second structural film, shooting it over one week in a Manhattan loft on a minimal budget with friends and fellow filmmakers (including Hollis Frampton, himself a significant figure in American avant-garde cinema) filling the incidental roles. The film arrived at a pivotal moment for experimental cinema, the late 1960s saw a generation of artists pushing film beyond narrative altogether, influenced by minimalism in visual art and music, and Snow's work became one of the defining examples of what critics labelled "structural film", a mode championed by theorist P. Adams Sitney. Wavelength won the Grand Prize at the 1967 Knokke-le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Belgium, giving it a legitimacy and reach unusual for work of this kind.
Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow is not a film, it’s an endurance test disguised as high art. For 45 minutes, the camera slowly zooms across a New York loft toward a photograph of waves on the far wall. That’s it. No story, no characters worth noting, no dialogue to speak of, just a glacial zoom, shifting light, occasional sine waves, and a few people drifting in and out like afterthoughts. Supposedly, this is a profound meditation on perception, time, framing, and the nature of cinema itself. But let’s be real: calling this “artistic” feels like intellectual cosplay. Yes, I get that it challenges conventions. Yes, it influenced experimental film. But admiration doesn’t equal enjoyment, or even respect when the result is this soulless. It’s pretentious to the point of parody. You could set your phone on a tripod and achieve 80% of the same effect. The colour shifts? Boring. The pacing? Comatose. The infamous death scene being ignored while the zoom continues? Not bold. Not clever. Just nothing. People will say it’s about how we see, how attention works, how the medium shapes meaning. Fine. But if the experience is sitting through 45 minutes of visual monotony to arrive at a still photo you could’ve seen in a second… then the message might just be: this was a waste of time. A cold, smug exercise in self-importance. If this is avant-garde, then maybe the revolution needs better taste.
Rating: ½ | Year: 1967 | Watched: 2025-09-25
Related on Movies With Macca
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More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
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