Wavelength

"Nothing is real..." (Strawberry Fields Forever – The Beatles)
Wavelength by multitalented artist & musician Michael Snow is considered a masterpiece of the experimental cinema and therefore cannot be missed in our Kratka Baza screening series. The influential magazine Artforum described Wavelength in 1969 as "a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become The Birth of a Nation in Underground films", and they were right. Snow's rigid exercise in narrowed down and concentrated vision made with a continuos zoom, soon became the official landmark of structural filmmaking and has been screened widely ever since.
Over the years the reviews stressed the difficulty of watching the film in its entirety. It inspired as much boredom and frustration as intrigue and epiphany. Artforum: "For all of the film's sophistication (and it is overpowering for its time-space-sound inventions) it is a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor... it is probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence". Wavelength is therefore most definitely a work for the cinema. And although it is available on YouTube as well, watching it there is undoubtedly not the same thing. Having more than 31.000 views makes you wonder how many people actually have sat through it completely behind their desks. In 2003 Michael Snow created WVLNT (or Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time) in a kind of witty mood: a considerable shorter and significantly altered version of Wavelength. It is available on YouTube as well but only made it to a surprisingly meagre 5000 views. But he did not make this one for us. We want the real stuff, and are in preparation for a screening of the original 45 minute masterpiece in the original 16mm format. To paraphrase Hollis Frampton: "Irritation, of the grain of sand in the oyster, produced the beautiful pearl, in the end".

Photo: Courtesy of Michael Snow and LUX, London