Wavelength by Michael Snow (1967)



Image result for wavelength by michael snow




When I searched up this film, I was shocked by the length of it but I clicked on it anyways and started to watch. As it started, I noticed the the camera was not moving at all the it was adjusted to show the layout of this single room. I also noticed people walking around the room and talking. At this moment, I thought "Maybe I should skip ahead to see if anything changes". So i skipped 5 seconds, and nothing had changed that was obvious. The camera was positioned in the same corner, in the same room, directed at the same window. What I did realize after skipping ahead about 3 more times was the difference in pitch. There was this ringing sound playing in the back of the audio and it would slightly get higher and higher every single time I skipped into the future. I also became conscious to the fact that the camera was zooming in at what seemed to be the same rate that the pitch was raising. The pitch got so high, I began to constantly wonder if it was even possible to go any higher than that moment I was listening to. So I stopped skipping and the rise in pitch was nowhere near noticeable. But skip 5 seconds into the future, and there was a definite difference. With that realization I decided that the best idea was for me to just continue to constantly move through time and watch the film sped up. The actors continued to come in and out of the frame, but it was like they knew that the amount of space between both sides of my screen was getting smaller and so the action became confined to a couple feet between two windows and the wooden floor. The last thing I saw the actress doing was talking on the phone and looking rather upset and then walking out of the room, never to be seen again. At this point, it became apparent what the camera was focusing on. There was a small photograph of an ocean in the space on the wall between and the two windows and by the time the camera finished zooming, the screen was completely taken up by this photograph and the noise was extremely high and didn't seem to get any higher. And then all of a sudden, the sound just stopped and all you could here was the natural whispering form the room and silent air. To think that filmmakers could not manipulate footage like we can today and that Mr. Snow came up with this, is extremely impressive and kind of eerie. He knew that, when sped up, the sound would clearly be getting higher in pitch and the viewers would slowly be getting closer and closer to the picture on the wall. The watchers, though understanding that they were getting closer to this wall, would never know how quickly it was happening if they watched the complete film. I'm not sure if this counts as innovation, but it does make viewers think about how much attention they really do pay while watching any kind of movie, and ultimately, isn't the goal of any filmmaker to have the audience think and consider things differently afterwards?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBOzOVLxbCE

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Italian Neo Realism

Image
Italian Neo Realism and New Realism Italian Neo Realism was a new form of film starting in the 1940s that was made to rebel against the typical Hollywood "Blockbuster Movies". It brought about a new way of filming and character connection with the audience. In these New Realism films, the audience saw the world as it was, instead of a glorified, flashy version of life. Directors often took people off the street to act in these movies instead of real actors. In the film, Bicycle Thieves , the film was shot on real locations in Italy, not on a set in a studio. In that movie, we see life as it is for Italian people in the 1940s. The main conflict of the movie was a simple, relatable problem that made us feel for the main character; he needs a bike. That was it. And through that relatively small problem, much more problems are created. The main character in these films did not have to be good people. There didn't have to be a "good guy". The conflict co...
Read more

Inciting Incident - Arrival (2016)

Image
Arrival is a science fiction drama film about a linguist (Amy Adams) and a mathematician (Jeremy Renner) that attempt to communicate with alien life forms that have visited Earth for a mysterious reason. The two experts need to figure out what that reason is. The movie is set up in the beginning to convince the audience that the rest of the film is the a new chapter of the main character, Louise Banks', life, when in reality, it actually takes place in real, present time. The inciting incident of this movie is, of course, the arrival  of the beings from space. This causes extreme panic and tension around the globe and the nations of the world, so the U.S. government turns to Louise to help with understanding the aliens and their language. This is one of the most obvious inciting incidents that I've seen in a movie, it being an actual event affecting the world, instead of a thought or idea of a person that the audience has to dig emotionally into to understand.
Read more