Genre Drama

Wavelength (1967)

Item: Wavelength
Rating: 0.5
Author: Ross McLaren

½ — Wavelength (1967)

Michael Snow's Wavelength sits at a particular crossroads in film history: the point where cinema stopped pretending to tell stories and started asking, with considerable seriousness, what it was actually doing. Made in 1967, the film arrived during a period of fierce experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic, when artists were pushing at the boundaries of what the medium could mean. Snow, a Canadian artist and musician already established in the visual arts before he turned to film, produced Wavelength in a New York loft over the course of roughly a week, and it became one of the most discussed and dissected works to emerge from the American avant-garde scene. If you have any interest in the history of experimental cinema, you will encounter this film sooner or later. It is, for better or worse, unavoidable.

The premise is almost aggressively simple. Over the course of 45 minutes, the camera performs a single continuous zoom across a large room toward a photograph of waves pinned on the far wall. Within that single movement, Snow layers shifting light, colour filters, and an escalating sine-wave tone on the soundtrack. A handful of figures pass through: among them filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who appears briefly and collapses, and Amy Taubin, who appears in a phone call sequence near the end. The film has no conventional narrative and no conventional characters, and it makes no apologies for either of those choices. Snow intended it as a rigorous investigation into space, time, and the act of watching, and critics working in structuralist and materialist traditions received it as exactly that. It regularly appears on lists of canonical experimental works, and its influence on what came after in avant-garde filmmaking is well documented. Whether influence and importance translate into something worth sitting through is, of course, a rather different question. For context on how other filmmakers of the same era were grappling with similarly unconventional ideas about cinema and perception, it's worth looking at Persona and Winter Light, both reviewed here, which push against narrative convention in very different but equally serious ways.

Snow himself described the film as "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas." That is a fairly large claim to hang on a zoom lens. The cast, such as it is, functions less as performers in any traditional sense and more as incidental presences caught inside a formal exercise. Frampton, himself a significant figure in experimental film, appears not as an actor but almost as a piece of found material, his brief and unexplained collapse swallowed by the film's indifferent forward motion. Taubin's phone call, relayed with an eerie matter-of-factness, has a similarly dislodged quality. The production details beyond Snow's solo direction remain largely undocumented, which feels appropriate for a work that positioned itself firmly outside the commercial filmmaking world. For another piece of Canadian filmmaking that operates on its own peculiar terms, my review of History of the World in Three Minutes Flat covers a very different kind of experiment from north of the border, and it is worth a read alongside this one.

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.

I think that frustration is the honest response, and I am not going to apologise for it. There is a certain pressure, when writing about a film like this, to reach for the language of appreciation even when the experience itself offered nothing to appreciate. I have sat through challenging films that rewarded patience, dramas that moved slowly but arrived somewhere, works that felt austere but never empty. Wavelength did not do that for me, and the gap between its reputation and what actually appears on screen is too wide to ignore. If you want films from this period that take risks and feel genuinely alive for it, my reviews of Viy and The Snow Woman cover two very different examples of late-1960s filmmaking that at least have a pulse. Wavelength has a zoom. Make of that what you will.

Rating: ½ | Year: 1967 | Watched: 2025-09-25

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