In 2019, Michael Snow world premiered a new audio performance called Waivelength at the Tate Modern in London. Later that year, for the film magazine Sight and Sound, ALT/KINO founder Ben Nicholson reflected on Snow’s various re-workings of his landmark film, Wavelength.
Slidelength (Michael Snow, 1969-71)
There is a sentiment, apocryphally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that art is never finished, merely abandoned. This may be why many artists revisit subjects, reinvent previous pieces, or work iteratively. In the cinematic mode, there are tinkerers like George Lucas, who was still updating Star Wars (1977) decades after its release. The advent of DVD gave the opportunity to revisit in new ways, like the option to watch Christopher Nolan’s non-linear thriller Memento (2000) in chronological order, or the wealth of directors’ cuts that claim to be an original vision that was lost to commerce or compromise. Some directors make belated sequels, while others even remake their own work – a tradition that stretches from Cecil B. DeMille via Ozu and Hitchcock to Michael Haneke and Sebastián Lelio, whose latest film Gloria Bell (2019) is a US-set remake of his Gloria (2013).
Sometimes filmmakers and artists reconstitute and remould their own work into new forms to engage with their past practice – something that has been done most famously, perhaps, by Godard or Straub-Huillet. Elsewhere, the revisiting of prior work is a reckoning with the project’s history. Last year Sandi Tan’s Shirkers used footage from a lost film shot 25 years ago to tell the story of its mysterious fate. At last month’s Sheffield Doc/Fest American filmmaker Zia Anger used her unreleased debut feature as the basis for a live performance-cum-desktop documentary reflecting on her experiences of the film’s creation and its subsequent limbo status as a work that had never actually received a premiere.
The Canadian artist Michael Snow has returned on no less than three occasions to his avant-garde landmark from 1967, Wavelength. Wavelength is possibly the most analysed experimental film ever made; in her book-length study of 2009, Elizabeth Legge referred to it as “a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played out.” The basic premise is simple: a camera progressively zooms in across an 80-foot New York loft for 45 minutes while on the audio track a sine wave shortens, becoming increasingly high pitched. However, the film is open to myriad readings; it might be about any number of things, from the representation of filmic space and time to the nature of human perception. In returning to the work, with Slidelength (1969-71), WVLNT (Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have Time) (2003) and now Waivelength (2019), Snow has sought to complement, emphasize and expand upon the multivalent ideas in play. Given the importance of space in the original film, it is interesting that each of the three subsequent works has a spatial relationship to their progenitor.
Slidelength, which came soon after Wavelength, takes the form of a slide-projector installation that includes stills from the original film and numerous photographs of the process of making it. These include images of gels that were utilised during filming; Snow’s hands regularly appear in the frame. He wanted to emphasise the physicality of his practice, in much the same way that the visible brushstrokes on a canvas connect the viewer to the physical practice of painting. Slidelength is a zoom out from Wavelength. Effectively a highbrow ‘making-of’ document, it allows the viewer to see not just through the camera’s lens, but outside the frame. The piece also adopts a sculptural quality, in that the projector stands proudly on a plinth which viewers can move around and walk behind; this further complicates the notions of projected space with which Wavelength is fascinated.
WVLNT (Wavelength for Those That Don’t Have Time) is a very different animal. Snow has cut the original film into three equal segments, then overlaid them. The result is a 15-minute version of the film that folds Wavelength on top of itself, creating a dense and entrancing palimpsest. The durational element of the zoom or the sine wave is eliminated, the spatial progression disrupted. While all three images concurrently tighten, the camera seems impossibly immobile. The film also further warps any vague sense of narrative, as events that happen sequentially in the original film – and which might point to an oblique murder mystery – are reordered.
If Slidelength steps back from the camera, and WVLNT folds events across one another, then Waivelength is like stepping through the looking glass. A live audio performance by Snow and the Toronto-based multimedia artist Mani Mazinani, it reinvents Wavelength’s sinewave, creating a binaural soundscape that utilises the pliability of a Dolby 7.1 sound system to broadcast different notes from different speakers. Accompanying the audio is a single shot of the ocean, a close-up of the waves as the sun goes down, in which the image gradually slows to a halt. The visuals seem to correlate directly to the photograph on the wall that Wavelength ultimately zooms in to: it is as if the audience has continued the zoom and passed through the photo to see the actual ocean. Waivelength juxtaposes the flatness of the cinema screen with the dimensionality of the auditorium: watching it, the viewer feels consumed by the building torrent of aural (sine) waves.
Ben Nicholson is a writer and curator specialising in non-fiction, experimental film, and artists’ moving image. He is the founder and editor/curator of ALT/KINO.
This piece is reproduced with the permission of Sight and Sound on the occasion Michael Snow’s passing.