A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

It was very important to me. I spent a year thinking about it and making notes before I started shooting. I've always oscillated between an incredible lack of confidence and conceit. I was going through a stage where, as usual, I was trying to clarify myself and get rid of some of what I had been doing before. I was trying to make something that would benefit from what I'd done, but to work

in time

in a new way. What came to be

Wavelength

did feel like some sort of do-or-die thing. That's the kind of mood I was in. I wanted to prove something to myself.

Wavelength

was an attempt to concentrate a lot of stuff in one piece. I had come to feel that some of

The Walking Woman Works

had stretched. Individual works were strong, but others were just part of the series; if you didn't see the series, they didn't have strength in themselves. I wanted

Wavelength

to be very strong.

I don't know where the money came from because those years were pretty poor. But everybody else involved in the film scene, which was really tiny then, was scraping together a couple of cents to do a film. So I felt I could do it, too.

MacDonald:

The idea of concentrating is interesting because a lot of the earlier work disperses outward.

Wavelength

is literally a narrowing in.

Snow:

Precisely. You start with a wide field and move into this specific point.

MacDonald:

How much did you envision the film in terms of its impact on an audience?

Snow:

At that time, I didn't think there was an audience other than at the Cinematheque. When

Wavelength

was finished, I had a little private screening, which I thought might be the

only

screening. There's a nice photograph of the people who were there.

MacDonald:

Who was there?

Snow:

Richard Foreman and Amy Taubin, who were married then; Jonas [Mekas], Shirley Clarke, Bob Cowan, Nam June Paik, Ken and Flo Jacobs, a few others.

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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,

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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 mathematical: you plot straight ahead on an axis toward the far side of the loft. At any rate,

Wavelength