watched Wavelength (1967) with my partner and it is this experimental movie about a camera mostly zooming into something in a room but sometimes cutting away, filtering the image with different colors, and ignoring the human characters.
instead, the movie seems to be about how we concentrate on something through the lens of a camera. the droning sound that becomes a shrill aligns us with the slow and zooming camera. in other words, on how we spectate. this movie was difficult for us to watch, but i did try to engage it in its own terms.
the movie reminds me of the avant-garde music by john cage who asks us to listen to experimental music not as something with Meaning with a capital M but as “purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play”. cage strips his music away from melodies and other things that could quote-unquote “ground” his audience into some aesthetic meaning, instead forcing them to listen to sounds and silences as they are and letting us interpret them as they wish.
i understand cage’s ideal for avant-garde music, but i have a hard time getting Wavelength. maybe, i need to watch more structural films. i should be appreciating the difference in light quality and color, the way the camera compresses time and space, and the rhythm of the sine wave sounds. and i do that to a degree anyway, but the movie is also testing how we pay attention to the screen and how we focus on things.
in a way, i think the quality of our attention is the movie. this is one of the “purest” experiencing of a film i’ve had since there’s only visuals, a few cuts, and some audio. i can’t depend on the story. i have to instead concentrate on the screen’s qualities the same way i’ve trained my ear to get avant-garde music. i have to learn to appreciate the visual and aural qualities of a film as themselves and by themselves.
this is quite difficult for me, even if i get that for example the boredom is purposeful in exploring how we concentrate and focus in our watching of the movie. i feel time when watching a movie unlike when i look at a sculpture.
i spent the evening reading papers and reviews, trying to articulate what i think of the experiment. i know the movie needs something more than a “like” or “dislike” at least, so i’ve been searching for words and ideas to get at the heart of it. i doubt i will find an answer anytime soon since it’s the kind of movie that stays with you — you just have to go “huh?” and “huh.” once in a while.
the movie can be watched here:
i found these articles useful to understand the context of the movie and what the director is intending to do: