Page 52
Taubin) directs two men who move a bookcase into the space; they leave and the woman reenters with another woman; later, a man (Hollis Frampton) staggers into the loft and falls dead in front of the camera; he is discovered by Amy near the end of the film. This series of events allows
Wavelength
to critique the cinema's traditional reliance on story. While a mysterious death in a film would normally be a lynchpin for melodrama, in
Wavelength
the death is enacted precisely so that it can be ignored during the remainder of the film. Not only does the camera fail to stop for the death, the film overwhelms whatever interest we might have in the fledgling narrative by providing the eye and ear with continued stimulation of a very different order: as we cross the space by means of the periodically adjusted zoom lens, Snow continually changes film stocks, filters, and the camera's aperture, so that the loft becomes a visual phantasmagoria. And after the opening passage during which we hear "Strawberry Fields Forever" ("Living is easy with eyes closed") on Amy's radio, the sound of a sine wave increasingly dominates the soundtrack, ironically building toward the "climax" of our recognition that
this
film relentlessly refuses to conform to the "rules" engendered by the tradition of narrative cinema.
In the years since
Wavelength,
Snow has continued to make films that defy conventional expectations (and he has continued to work in a variety of other media). In film after film, he has explored the capabilities of the camera and the screening space and has emphasized dimensions of the viewer's perceptual and conceptual experience with cinema by systematically articulating the gap between the experience of reality and the various ways in which a film artist can depict it.
In
Back and Forth
[
«
] (1969) the pan is the central organizational principle. The continual motion of the camera from right to left to right across the same classroom space (during the body of the film) becomes a grid within which Snow demonstrates the wide range of options panning offers.
One Second in Montreal
(1969) uses a set of still photographs of potential sculpture sites in Montreal as a silent grid within which Snow can focus on the viewer's sense of duration: we see each photograph in a single, continuous shot for a different period of timeat first for longer and longer, then shorter and shorter durations.
Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film
(1970) uses the repeated presentation of slides of early Snow paintings, filmed from the side of the auditorium in which they're projected, as a grid within which he can dramatize the "interference" created when artworks in one medium are reproduced in another medium.
La Région Centrale
(1971) extends Snow's interest in the moving camera. A complex machine designed by Snow enabled him to move the camera in any direction and at nearly any speed he could imagine as he filmed the wild, empty terrain north of Montreal: the resulting film