Michael Snow | Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time

Michael Snow

Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time

Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2003

DVD in CD case, 15 min

Edition size unknown

Wavelength is not only considered the greatest work of Michael Snow's long career, it is considered the greatest avant-garde film ever made. 

The 1967 landmark film was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century1 and the 102nd in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made. Artforum put the work on the cover and described it as "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."

A 1968 Film Quarterly review describes Wavelength as "at once one of the simplest and one of the most complex films ever conceived."

However, at 45 minutes in length it also has a reputation for being difficult and dull. 

Perhaps with this in mind, and - as a comment on dwindling attention spans - Snow produced a variation in 2003 called Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have The Time. Roula remembers him coming in to Art Metropole and describing it with a heh-heh laugh, asking if we would be interested in publishing it. 

Advertised as "Originally 45 minutes, Now 15!", the new version abbreviates the title to WVLNT, and superimposes the work onto itself as simultaneities instead of the sequential progressions. 

Snow told the Brooklyn Rail last year "Now that I’m “iconic,” audiences tend to stay respectfully through even my longest films, unlike the old days when some people lost patience after just a few minutes and exited abruptly, sometimes noisily."2

1. Only a couple of other non-feature films made the list, and Wavelength beats out Salo (Pier Paolo Pasolini), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau), Star Wars (George Lucas), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock) and many other classics. See the full list, here. 

2. Michael's wife Peggy Gale curated my film Timeline into the Montreal Biennale in 2014 and told me later that Michael stood and watched in its entirety, for all 75 minutes (or however long it was at the time - it's over two hours now). I can honestly think of no greater compliment.