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,
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which is a statement of theme, followed by a number of variations (I'm oversimplifying). That was the basis of a lot of my work, like
The Walking Woman
. I wanted to make this film a unified unfolding of a number of variations with the zoom as the container for the variations. The process had to have a certain length of time. It could be fifty minutes and it could be thirty minutesmaybe thirty would be too shortbut that's how I thought about it. I did want to make a temporal place "to stay in," as you've properly put it.
I'd noticed something like this happening in another way, in
Eye and Ear Control
. Sometimes when the music is at its most passionate or frenetic, there's a feeling of being in a space that's made by the continu-ity of the music and the picture. Other people might not feel this, but it gave me my first taste of a kind of temporal control I was able to elaborate in
Wavelength
.
MacDonald:
Another thing that's very important in
Wavelength
is the way it deals with narrative. It sets up its direction, and what would be considered the conventional narrative moves in and out from the edges. Hollis Frampton comes in and falls dead and the camera just continues on its way. One is tempted to say, "There's no plot," and yet there is a "plot," in a number of senses, including the mathematicaclass="underline" you plot straight ahead on an axis toward the far side of the loft. At any rate,
Wavelength
comments on conventional narrative, especially on mystery and suspense.
Snow:
Yeah, but you know, I had no background in that at all. I just wanted to set up a temporal container of different kinds of events. In the sections where you don't see anybody in the space, it becomes much more a two-dimensional picture. When it's peopled, it's a whole other thing. And the memory of the space seen one way affects our other views of it. The space and duration of the film allow for all kinds and classes of events. There is a life-and-death story, but on another level, the whole thing is sexual. And there are a lot of other considerations, like making a reference outside with the phone, having something come in from outside through the radio. There are all these different symbolic implications of the room. It can be the head, with the windows as eyes, and the senses feeding into the consciousness . . .
MacDonald:
Or a camera with the windows as apertures . . .
Snow:
All those things. I was aware of a lot of them, and there are things I can see now that I didn't know about then, that's for sure. But a lot of it
was
conscious. A lot of the color effects weren't preconceived because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Actually, Ken Jacobs was very, very helpful. He lent me the camera and he gave me some old rolls of stock. I used this stuff and didn't know what it would look like.
Page 65
MacDonald:
Over the years, the perception of
Wavelength
has changed. When I interviewed Anthony McCall, he mentioned that he was profoundly influenced by written descriptions of
Wavelength
when he made
Line Describing a Cone
[1973]. When he finally saw
Wavelength,
he discovered it was completely different from what had influenced him, and that he had developed a relationship to something that actually didn't exist.
Snow:
In your mind, the shape of the zoom is the same as the shape of a projector beam. I was thinking about that at the time, too. All the imagery issues from still photographs, frames that are amplified in one direction, while the zoom narrows your view in the opposite direction. Maybe that's part of what he was thinking of.
MacDonald:
What surprised him is that the zoom wasn't consistent, smooth, and even. In fact,
Wavelength
is a very rough film in many ways.
Snow:
The zoom was hand done. The imagery was shot out of order. Originally I thought I might make the film without editing. Later, I realized I'd need to edit. I shot reel three and that had to be at a particular place on the lens, which I'd marked out. Then I shot reel one, then reel five. And I moved the zoom lens by hand, so it's very uneven. And I really like that a lot. There are cuts in the film, too, to get from reel to reel, and sometimes there's editing where I took something out. It's not a continuous zoom by any means. There's a lot of nuance to the fact that it was hand done, not in the tactile sense of, say, Brakhage's films, but as a nice by-product of the process.
MacDonald:
There's a surprise at the end where viewers discover they're not going toward the photograph of the Walking Woman.
Snow:
Well, there are a couple of mistakes at the end of
Wavelength,
because I had to move the camera. Almost all of the film was shot from a platform. I put the camera up high because I figured that would provide a certain kind of view. But then to finish the zoom I had to move the camera down. I wanted to move it on the same horizontal line, but I made a mistake: it's a little off. This is toward the end where you've got the photographs sort of in the middle and an equal amount of space around them. Every time I see it, I think, Jesus, that's