Wavelength (Snow, 1967): ICA Cinema, 4pm
This film (showing along with 'So This Is' (1982), is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing.
ICA introduction:
A painter, sculptor, photographer and musician as well as a filmmaker,
Snow used techniques from across the disciplines to challenge
conventional cinematic notions of perception and representation. As part
of the structural film movement in which form was prioritised over
content, he saw framing, sound and duration as tools for reinventing the
language of the medium, saying that “to shape time seems to me to be
the quintessence of cinema”.
Objecting to commercial cinema’s explicit
attempts to prompt emotional responses, Snow didn’t try to predict the
effect his work would have on audiences. Instead he stressed the bodily
effect of viewership, emphasising that his films, while carefully
structured, were “real experiences”. Noting that his 1971 work La Région Centrale
had caused some viewers to faint, he said “I must be doing something
right”. His work's ability to prompt both instinctive and analytical
reactions has helped it endure across the decades. With thanks to Dream of Light, a London-based film project that champions experimental and underseen cinema.
Chicago Reader review:
Michael Snow’s notorious experimental classic (1967), consisting of a single, extended zoom (if anything moving at such a snaillike pace can properly be called a zoom) from one side of a loft space to the other. The aesthetic unfolding is engaging, also quite demanding, though I’m not convinced that letting your technical apparatus make the major decisions of your art is such a good formal idea. If nothing else, the film provides an inadvertent comment on the old classroom riddle of whether it’s possible to have a one-word poem; no, the classical answer goes, because it wouldn’t rhyme . . . and I’m not so sure that’s as stupid as it sounds.
Pat Graham
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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