One Dark Second

Watch any movie nowadays and you’re likely to see somewhere along the line a zoom.  The zooming technique in movies nowadays is as ubiquitous as any other camera trick, such as pans, fades or editing cuts.  Zooms weren’t always so prevalent, though.  In the annals of experimental cinema (that almost mythical species of film that the average cinema goers will have as much a shot of seeing in their lifetime as spotting a Sasquatch), a film made in 1967 by Canadian Michael Snow called “Wavelength” was the first overt and most single-minded zoom to date (i.e. "Wavelength" is a movie composed entirely of one long zoom).

A zoom is made by changing, smoothly, the focal length of the camera lenses while the film is running. The camera's subject appears to grow, or shrink, continuously in the frame.  Though the zoom was around for decades before “Wavelength” it had never been used as the focus of a film.  “Wavelength”, being an experimental film, has not much in the way of a story.  The setting is an apartment, empty for the most part.  The movie starts with the camera, which one might infer is on the one side of the apartment facing the other.  Over the 43 minutes of the film, the camera slowly zooms into a photograph on the other side of the wall until it fills the frame.  The photo is of rolling waves on a lake or sea.  Initially, Snow had wanted to use a picture of the room itself, a kind of repeating, fractal effect.  He didn’t, however, and the film stands as it is (with the exception of some tinting of the film stock, and the entry of a few people – some being other experimental filmmakers who play a snippet of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”). Overall, however, it is excruciatingly boring to watch.

That very boringness –prompts me to guess at the meaning of the film, and I feel considering the ‘openness’ of the text, that any reading is legitimate.  The time the film was made in was an era fixated on space travel.  The trip in this apartment from one side to another is akin -- to me -- of a spaceship traveling to, and landing, on the moon.  A wavelength is a measure of distance not a measure of time. Because the moon is one light second from our planet (or 300,000 m), I'm tempted to say it suggests a kind of base unit (since the speed of light is 300,000 m/s).  The moon's  presence is also referred to most obviously by the waves and tides (i.e. the photo at the end of the zoom) on our planet.

  

"Wavelength" is about sight, about the moon, but also about space travel  - that is, travel across one room or between two heavenly bodies.  While it may be  too conceptual to be enjoyed by the average person, the film does make for some interesting readings, nonetheless.