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The loft in Snow's
Wavelength
(1967). By permission
of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
MacDonald:
What was their reaction?
Snow:
They thought it was good!
MacDonald:
It's still a remarkable film. And it still works as an effective subversion of conventional film expectations. If I want to make my students furious,
Wavelength
is the perfect film. The duration of
Wavelength
has been much talked about. What kind of thinking did you do about how long
Wavelength
would be, and how you would control the duration? It's a long film for that period, particularly given the fact that no one had much money.
Snow:
Well, it's hard to post facto these things. I knew I wanted to expand somethinga zoomthat normally happens fast, and to allow myself or the spectator to be sort of inside it for a long period. You'd get to know this device which normally just gets you from one space to another. I started to think about so-called film vocabulary before I made
Wavelength
with
Eye and Ear Control
. You know, what
are
all these devices and how can you get to
see
them, instead of just using them? So that was part of it.
And the other thing is that a lot of the work that I was doing, including the music, had to do with variations within systems. One of the pieces of classical music which I've always liked (I got one of Wanda Landowska's records of it in 1950) is J. S. Bach's
Goldberg Variations,