A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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.

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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

bad

[laughter]. Sometimes I think it's good.

MacDonald:

Well, it's what it

is,

now.

Snow:

[Laughter] It certainly is.

MacDonald:

I'm always struck by the textural dimension of

Wavelength,

by the variation in grain. In fact, there's so much to look at in the film that I'm amazed when it's called a minimal film.

Snow:

Oh, I don't understand that at all. Every time I read that, I'm amazedthough it hasn't happened all that often. It's also described as a "conceptual" piece, sometimes. Certainly a lot of thinking went into it

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and I hope it provokes thinking, but that it's sometimes identified with the art style called "conceptual" seems peculiar, too.

MacDonald:

You were friends with Taubin and Frampton at the time when you made

Wavelength

. Was there a reason beyond just knowing them and their being available that they show up in the film? Was Frampton's appearance related to his being a particular kind of artist?

Snow:

No. They were friends and we had talked about what I was doing. I knew that Amy had acted, and I wanted an actress. She'd been in

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,