Page 62
length,
which was shot in the same year: 1966, I finished it in January 1967.
MacDonald:
Her appearance in
Wavelength
reminds me of Koko the Clown's appearances in some early Betty Boop cartoons: he's a star in the silent Fleischer Brothers' animations, but in the early Betty Boop sound cartoons, he becomes a bit player and moves into the background.
Wavelength
has become a crucial film in people's writing about the history of avant-garde work. And yet, by the time you made it, you'd done a lot of work of a lot of different kinds, much of which is related to it. When you were making
Wavelength,
did it seem to you that it was pivotal, or was it just another of many comparable moments in your work?
Snow:
It was very important to me. I spent a year thinking about it and making notes before I started shooting. I've always oscillated between an incredible lack of confidence and conceit. I was going through a stage where, as usual, I was trying to clarify myself and get rid of some of what I had been doing before. I was trying to make something that would benefit from what I'd done, but to work
in time
in a new way. What came to be
Wavelength
did feel like some sort of do-or-die thing. That's the kind of mood I was in. I wanted to prove something to myself.
Wavelength
was an attempt to concentrate a lot of stuff in one piece. I had come to feel that some of
The Walking Woman Works
had stretched. Individual works were strong, but others were just part of the series; if you didn't see the series, they didn't have strength in themselves. I wanted
Wavelength
to be very strong.
I don't know where the money came from because those years were pretty poor. But everybody else involved in the film scene, which was really tiny then, was scraping together a couple of cents to do a film. So I felt I could do it, too.
MacDonald:
The idea of concentrating is interesting because a lot of the earlier work disperses outward.
Wavelength
is literally a narrowing in.
Snow:
Precisely. You start with a wide field and move into this specific point.
MacDonald:
How much did you envision the film in terms of its impact on an audience?
Snow:
At that time, I didn't think there was an audience other than at the Cinematheque. When
Wavelength
was finished, I had a little private screening, which I thought might be the
only
screening. There's a nice photograph of the people who were there.
MacDonald:
Who was there?
Snow:
Richard Foreman and Amy Taubin, who were married then; Jonas [Mekas], Shirley Clarke, Bob Cowan, Nam June Paik, Ken and Flo Jacobs, a few others.